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LIT-691: Moral Responsibility

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-548); worth reading as the record's map of moral responsibility apart from the free-will question, and as its most exact second-hand source for two accounts the record cannot read first-hand: Fischer and Ravizza's guidance control (§2.3, with page references to the 1998 book) and Wolf's critique of Real Self views and her moral-competence condition, including the JoJo case (§§3.1.1, 3.2). It reports Wolf's praise/blame asymmetry only in one sentence of its preamble.
Tagsethics, free-will, agency, moral-psychology
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-548 — Moral Responsibility
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-119 — An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false, THEORY-121 — Moral responsibility requires guidance control, moderate reasons-responsiveness of the agent's own actual-sequence mechanism, and not regulative control over alternative possibilities, so responsibility is compatible with causal determinism, THEORY-122 — Moral responsibility requires the normative competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good, which identification with one's own motives does not supply

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Matthew Talbert, “Moral Responsibility”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds.), first published 16 October 2019, substantive revision 3 June 2024; archived as https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2026/entries/moral-responsibility/.

Key takeaways

  • Guidance control, page by page (§2.3). Fischer and Ravizza take Frankfurt cases to show alternatives are unnecessary, and require instead guidance control (1998, 29–34). Because the agent in a Frankfurt case would act the same whatever the reasons, responsiveness is located in the actual mechanism, “the process that leads to the relevant upshot” (38), and an agent “exhibits guidance control of an action insofar as the mechanism that actually issues in the action is his own, reasons-responsive mechanism” (39). The responsiveness required is moderate (69–85): “an understandable pattern of (actual and hypothetical) reasons-receptivity” (71), a “pattern of regular receptivity” that includes moral considerations (77). Ownership needs history, supplied by “taking responsibility” (207–239; §3.9).
  • Wolf against Real Self views (§3.1.1). Real Self views explain why the hypnotised and compulsive are not responsible, but are silent on how the agent’s real self came about. Wolf (1990, 41, quoted) holds that blame and praise judge “the moral quality of the individual herself”, which requires not only being able to form one’s actions on one’s values but being “able to form her values on the basis of what is True and Good” (75). Watson’s reply turned this into the distinction between attributability and accountability.
  • The moral competence condition (§3.2). In Wolf’s story, JoJo becomes the sadistic tyrant his father was and “is happy to be the sort of person that he is”, so he meets structural conditions; yet his upbringing left him “unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior”, and it is the impaired moral competence that excuses. Many join Wolf, Fischer and Ravizza 1998 among them.
  • The asymmetry is only flagged. The preamble says the assumption that praise and blame need the same capacities “has also been questioned (Nelkin 2008, 2011; Wolf 1980, 1990)”. The entry does not state Wolf’s asymmetry further.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request for Fischer and Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness, as the best lawful report of it and of Wolf’s Reason View alongside McKenna and Coates’s Compatibilism (LIT-291). It is moral philosophy with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it.

Active: worth reading as the record’s survey of responsibility as a question of its own, apart from free will. It quotes the Fischer and Ravizza book with page numbers, which LIT-291 mostly does not, and it is the only source the record holds for the JoJo case and for Wolf’s critique of Real Self views. It is a survey. It reports positions and the main objections, and takes no side.

How it sits beside the record’s other surveys. LIT-291 organises the field by compatibilism and the manipulation problem. This entry organises it by what responsibility is and what conditions it has, and gives the manipulation problem one section (§3.9). Robb’s PAP entry (LIT-294) is the detailed source for Frankfurt cases; this entry’s §1 gives the Black and Jones case in a paragraph, with the dilemma objection and Frankfurt’s later remark that “making an action unavoidable is not the same thing as bringing it about that the action is performed” (2006, 340, quoted).

Wolf and Fischer and Ravizza. The entry treats them as members of one family. §2.3 lists Wolf (1990) among the reasons-responsiveness views, and §3.2 lists Fischer and Ravizza among those who join Wolf on moral competence. It does not compare them on alternatives. Only its preamble notes that Wolf’s view treats praise and blame asymmetrically.

How it bears on THEORY-040. §3.9 reports the Beth/Ann case, Pereboom’s four-case argument and McKenna’s hard line, and that Fischer and Ravizza’s taking responsibility was developed to keep manipulated agents out. It names critics (Levy 2011, Pereboom 2001) without stating their arguments, so it adds nothing to THEORY-040’s second half beyond what LIT-291 reports.

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