The Shared-World View of the Self and Reactive Attitudes

In “Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise,” Susan Wolf faces a dilemma concerning moral appraisal and the actions of psychopaths (i.e. persons lacking the capacity for empathy). On the one hand, Wolf endorses a view of responsibility according to which one is an appropriate object of reactive attitudes (e.g. resentment and gratitude) if one’s action expresses one’s “self,” i.e. one’s values and point of view. Given this account, however, psychopaths are seemingly appropriate objects of reactive attitudes. On the other hand, however, Wolf holds that psychopaths are, in fact, not appropriate objects of reactive attitudes. In order to avoid this dilemma, Wolf proposes an alternate view of the self. In this paper, I will present what I take to be the most plausible objection to Wolf’s revised view of the self and then argue that this objection is unsatisfactory.

Fried On Expected Vs Actual Conseqeunces

In a number of recent articles, Barbara Fried argues that there is a “fundamental error on which much of nonconsequentialist thought rests,” namely that in order to act morally, one must not just try to do what is right, one must actually succeed in doing what is right.[1] [2] In other words, right and wrong is a matter of what actually happens (e.g. the consequences that actually flow from an act) and not merely what it was ex ante reasonable to believe would happen (e.g. what consquences it was reasonable to expect to flow from a particular action).  This distinction is illustrated by the following example: