Susan Wolf (2015), “Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise”, Inquiry 58(2):127–142 — DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2015.986852. Given as the Routledge Lecture in Philosophy, Cambridge, 21 February 2013; read in the author’s typescript.
Key takeaways
- Two distinctions, not one (p. 2). The familiar contrast between causal and moral responsibility “seems to me to blend two apparently independent distinctions together”: merely causal vs deep, and moral vs nonmoral. Quality-of-will accounts are right about moral blame but have “nothing to say” about deep responsibility for nonmoral traits (p. 3).
- Self-disclosure (pp. 5–6). One is deeply responsible when the result “expresses or reflects” one’s “(inner) self”; she takes Watson’s name, “the self-disclosure view”. Love for an artist “qua artist” is as reactive as resentment and gratitude (p. 9), and asking whether James could have done otherwise than write The Portrait of a Lady “seems utterly bizarre” (p. 10).
- Not two levels (pp. 13–19). Watson’s two-level view puts attributability first and accountability, which adds control, on top. Wolf thinks it “mistaken” (p. 15). Accountability needs only that “(1) he acts as he ought not to, (2) he was in a position to know that he ought not to so act, and (3) it was up to him whether to act in that way or not” (p. 17). Her stipulated psychopath “may be accountable for his psychopathic behavior without his psychopathic character being attributable to him at all” (p. 18), and it is “not obvious” that the ability to choose involved “requires anything metaphysically robust” (p. 19).
- The hunch (pp. 21–23). The self that is “a fit object of reactive attitudes is an ‘intelligent’ self”, one with “the same (or better) powers of perception, reason, and imagination that we do”. The psychopath “can’t get it”, so the objective attitude fits him. If depth survives, it lies in “an intelligent self’s unimpeded response to the world” (p. 23).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as the lawful Wolf text beside Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685), which stays Deferred. It is not a substitute for that book: the lecture does not use “Reason View”, “the True and the Good” or “sanity”, and it argues a different question. The account it supports is THEORY-147.
It bears on THEORY-122, the Reason View as the record reports it at second hand. This lecture splits what THEORY-122 treats as one condition. Fitness for the reactive attitudes needs an intelligent self; accountability, on Wolf’s own stipulated case, does not. Any resemblance between the intelligent self and the earlier sanity condition is the record’s observation, not a claim the lecture makes.
For the owner’s essay, it bears on §8, which opens with Wolf’s JoJo. §8.1 distinguishes responsiveness to information from responsiveness to reasons, and Wolf’s intelligent self is a condition on perceiving and understanding the world, not only on obeying a rule.