
Contents
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1. You and Your Situations: Three Pictures 1. You and Your Situations: Three Pictures
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2. What Is the Threat? 2. What Is the Threat?
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2.1 Determinism 2.1 Determinism
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2.2 Coercion or Manipulation 2.2 Coercion or Manipulation
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2.3 Luck 2.3 Luck
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3. Situationism and Reasons-Responsiveness 3. Situationism and Reasons-Responsiveness
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3.1 Reasons-Responsiveness: The Basics 3.1 Reasons-Responsiveness: The Basics
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3.2 The Threat to Reasons-Responsiveness 3.2 The Threat to Reasons-Responsiveness
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4. Responding to the Situationist Threat 4. Responding to the Situationist Threat
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4.1 The Modal Strategy 4.1 The Modal Strategy
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4.2 Pessimistic Realism 4.2 Pessimistic Realism
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5. Objections to the Modal Strategy 5. Objections to the Modal Strategy
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6. Concluding Remarks 6. Concluding Remarks
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References References
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23 Responsibility and Situationism
Get accessBrandon Warmke (PhD Arizona) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He works in ethics, social philosophy, moral psychology, and political philosophy. He is the author of several essays on public discourse, moral responsibility, and forgiveness. With Justin Tosi, he is the author of Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press 2020). His work has been featured in The Atlantic, HuffPost, Scientific American, The Guardian, Slate, and Vox.
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Published:14 February 2022
Cite
Abstract
This chapter explores the relationship between an agent’s moral responsibility for their actions and the situations in which an agent acts. Decades of research in psychology are sometimes thought to support situationism, the view that features of an agent’s situation greatly influence their behavior in powerful and surprising ways. Such situational features might therefore be thought to threaten agents’ abilities to act freely and responsibly. This chapter begins by discussing some relevant empirical literature on situationism. It then surveys several ways of construing the situationist threat to moral responsibility as reducible to worries about determinism, manipulation, or luck. It is then argued that the best way to understand the situationist challenge is as a threat to reasons-responsiveness. A common strategy for responding to the situationist threat to reasons-responsiveness—the so-called modal response—is discussed. The chapter then defends a view called pessimistic realism: While the situationist literature puts human agency in an unflattering light, it does not show that agents’ reasons-responsiveness capacities are generally undermined by situational features. Several objections both to the modal strategy and to pessimistic realism are discussed. The chapter concludes with three thoughts concerning future directions.
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