| 1. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility
- 2017
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Ingår i: Responsibility. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198779667 - 9780191824715 ; , s. 146-162
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter combines the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will with an independently motivated account of responsibility as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility. The resulting “explanatory quality of will condition” on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, excuses, and undermined control in cases where agents are fully aware of what they are doing. Having been independently motivated, the explanatory quality of will condition is then applied to cases involving lack of awareness. Though this condition involves no explicit epistemic condition on responsibility, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse.
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| 2. |
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Motivational Internalism
- 2015
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- Motivational internalism—the thesis that there is an intrinsic or necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation—is a central thesis in a number of metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, it has provided a challenge for cognitivist theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality, and versions of internalism have been seen as having implications for moral absolutism, realism, non-naturalism, and rationalism. Being a constraint on theories of moral motivation and moral judgment, it is also directly relevant to wider issues in moral psychology. But internalism is a controversial thesis, and the apparent possibility of amoralists and the rejection of strong forms of internalism have also been seen as a problem for non-cognitivists. This volume is meant to help people appreciate the state of the art of research on internalism, to see connections between various aspects of the debate, and to deepen the discussion of a number of central aspects. The introductory chapter provides a structured overview of the debate with a focus on the last two decades or so, distinguishing several important threads and trends in recent developments. The 13 chapters of original research are divided into three parts. The essays in the first part focus on what evidence there is for or against various versions of internalism, those in the second on the relevance of versions of internalism for wider metaethical issues, and those in the third develop different ways of accommodating both internalist and externalist aspects of moral practice.
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| 3. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Normative responsibilities : structure and sources
- 2017
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Ingår i: Parental responsibility in the context of neuroscience and genetics. - Cham : Springer. - 9783319428321 - 9783319428345 ; , s. 13-33
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Normative responsibilities have a central role in everyday moral thinking, largely because they are taken to ground requirements to act and react in certain ways. If parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, for example, this might mean that they are morally required to feed them, attend to their emotional needs, or make sure that someone else does. But normative responsibilities are not well understood as lists of requirements to act or react, for such requirements will depend on what options and information the agent has available. In the first part of the paper, we instead propose to understand normative responsibilities as requirements to care about what one is responsible for: about the wellbeing of one’s child, about performing a certain action, or about playing the sort of role that one’s profession requires. Such requirements, we argue, are just the sort of things that will give rise to requirements to act and react given the right context. In the second part, we survey and discuss a variety of considerations that might give rise to normative responsibilities: capacities and costs; retrospective and causal responsibility; benefits; promises, contracts and agreements; laws and norms; and roles and special relationships.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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A unified empirical account of responsibility judgments
- 2013
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Ingår i: Philosophy and phenomenological research. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 0031-8205 .- 1933-1592. ; 87:3, s. 611-639
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.
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| 6. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the Specification Problem
- 2014
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Ingår i: Mind. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0026-4423 .- 1460-2113. ; 123:489, s. 1-38
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan's disapproval of her team's performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the moral attitudes. This may appear to be a lethal objection to non-cognitivism, but a similar recipe challenges attempts by non-cognitivism's competitors to specify the conditions underwriting the contrast between genuine and merely apparent moral disagreement. Because of its generality, this specification problem requires a systematic response, which, we argue, is most easily available for the non-cognitivist. Building on premisses congenial to the non-cognitivist tradition, we make the following claims: (1) In paradigmatic cases, wrongness-judgements constitute a certain complex but functionally unified state, and paradigmatic wrongness-judgements form a functional kind, preserved by homeostatic mechanisms. (2) Because of the practical function of such judgements, we should expect judges' intuitive understanding of agreement and disagreement to be accommodating, treating states departing from the paradigm in various ways as wrongness-judgements. (3) This explains the intuitive judgements required by the counterexample-generating recipe, and more generally why various kinds of amoralists are seen as making genuine wrongness-judgements.
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| 7. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Corporate Crocodile Tears? : On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporations
- 2017
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Ingår i: Philosophy and phenomenological research. - : Wiley. - 0031-8205 .- 1933-1592. ; 94:2, s. 273-298
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own (analogs of) beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “corporate” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what the agent has done. But just as an entity needs to have its own beliefs, desires, and intentions to qualify as a bona fide agent, the required capacity for reactive attitudes is a capacity to have one’s own reactive attitudes. If fully-fledged moral agency requires reactive attitudes, the corporate agent must itself be capable of (analogs of) guilt and indignation. In this paper, we argue that at least certain corporate agents are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if there are bona fide corporate agents, these agents can have the capacities that are both associated with guilt and indignation and plausibly required for moral agency; in particular certain epistemic and motivational capacities.
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| 8. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Enoch’s Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Moral Philosophy. - : Brill. - 1740-4681 .- 1745-5243. ; 13:1, s. 101-112
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch's book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch's position and outlining the argumentative strategy of the book, we engage in a critical discussion of what we take to be particularly problematic central passages. We focus on Enoch's two original positive arguments for non-naturalist realism, one argument building on first order moral implications of different meta-ethical positions, the other attending to the rational commitment to normative facts inherent in practical deliberation. We also pay special attention to Enoch's handling of two types of objections to non-naturalist realism, objections having to do with the possibility of moral knowledge and with moral disagreement.
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| 9. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Outsourcing the deep self : Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments
- 2016
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Ingår i: Philosophical Psychology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0951-5089 .- 1465-394X. ; 29:5, s. 637-653
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- According to manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, manipulation might undermine an agent's responsibility even when the agent satisfies plausible compatibilist conditions on responsibility. According to Sripada (2012), however, empirical data suggest that people take manipulation to undermine responsibility largely because they think that the manipulated act is in discord with the agent's “deep self”, thus violating the plausible compatibilist condition of deep self concordance. This paper defends Sripada's methodological approach but presents data from an experiment that corrects for crucial weaknesses in his study. These data strongly suggest that, contrary to Sripada’s contention, most of the effect of manipulation on attributions of moral responsibility is unmediated by worries about inadequate information or deep self discordance. Instead, it depends largely on worries that the action is ultimately explained by factors outside the agent’s control, just as proponents of manipulation arguments have proposed. More generally, data suggest that judgments of deep self discordance are themselves explained by worries about responsibility, and that the everyday notion of what an agent wants or is “deep down” is sensitive not only to the agent’s internal psychological structure, but also its source. This casts doubt on recent claims about the explanatory role of deep self judgments.
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| 10. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Diagreement, correctness, and the evidence for metaethical absolutism
- 2015
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Ingår i: Oxford Studies in Metaethics. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198738701
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. Two related premises underpin the argument for absolutism: (1) that moral thinking and discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains; and (2) that the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct. This chapter defends the prospect of a non-absolutist explanation of these “absolutist” features, thus calling into question the second premise. The chapter proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness, and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all “absolutist” features and why these non-absolutist domains display some, and thus provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation.
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