Moral Responsibility beyond Our Fingertips

We are responsible not only for what we think and feel but for what others do and for what we would have done. This book expands and updates the original attributionist theory of responsibility and applies it to pressing contemporary issues such as collective responsibility, leaders’ responsibility for their followers’ acts, and addiction.

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Is Trump responsible for the January 6 insurrection? Are “white people” responsible for slavery? In Collective Responsibility, Leadership, and Attributionism: Responsibility beyond our Control, Eugene Schlossberger expands, updates, and argues for the attributionist account of moral responsibility and agency and applies it to several pressing contemporary concerns: leaders’ responsibility for the acts of their followers (and ordinary persons’ responsibility for their influence on others), collective responsibility, addiction, and responsibility for what we would have done. Moral agents are continuing worldviews in operation who are ultimately responsible for their worldviews and occasion-responsible for acts, events, and circumstances that occasion a judgment of responsibility. Agents can be responsible for many things beyond their fingertips—such as the behavior of others that they enabled—that reveal something about their worldviews. The wide-ranging discussion addresses the responsibility of psychopaths; the nature of beliefs and desires; social convergence theory; twelve forms of subjectability, such as blame and owing an apology; queerness and moral internalism; the beneficiary pays principle; and much more. The result is a comprehensive picture of agency and responsibility.