Conversation and Responsibility

Michael McKenna is Professor of Philosophy and Keith Lehrer Chair, University of Arizona.

Preface
Introduction: Moral Responsibility, Conversation & Meaning

Chapter 1: Responsibility: A Conceptual Map
1. Kinds of Responsibility
2. Morally Responsible Agency
3. Moral Responsibility for Conduct
4. Holding Morally Responsible
5. Moral Responsibility, Entailment, and the Concept of Moral Responsibility
Chapter 2: Reorienting Strawson's Theory of Moral Responsibility
1. Variations on Strawson's Theory
2. Embracing and Developing Wallace's Principle (N)
3. A Normative Interpretation versus an Extreme Metaphysical Interpretation
4. Two Distinctions
5. Resisting a Strawsonian Theme: The Explanatory Role of Holding Responsible
6. A Modest Metaphysical Interpretation
Chapter 3: Moral Responsibility & Quality of Will
1. A Strawsonian Quality of Will Thesis
2. The Morally Reactive Attitudes and their Attendant Practices
3. Pleas: Reasons to Modify the Reactive Attitudes
3.1 Excuses and Justifications
3.2 Exemptions
Chapter 4: Conversation & Responsibility
1. The Intimate Link between Being and Holding Responsible
2. Introducing a Conversational Theory of Moral Responsibility
3. Agent Meaning and Morally Responsible Agency
4. Agent Meaning and Action Meaning
5. What Kind of Meaning is Agent Meaning?
6. The Place of Meaning in Other Theories of Responsibility
Chapter 5: Genuine Responsibility: Defending a Conversational Theory
1. A Robinson-Crusoe-type Objection
2. Why Affect?
3. Moral Responsibility without Desert?
4. Moral Responsibility with Desert?
4.1 Basic Desert
4.2 Ultimate Responsibility & What is Deserved
4.3 Axiological, Deontological, or Both?
Chapter 6: Conversation & Deserved Blame
1. In Search of Desert Thesis
2. What's the Harm in Blaming?
3. Articulating a Desert Thesis for Blame
4. A Challenge for the Moral Responsibility Skeptic
Chapter 7: Blame's Warrant
1. The Challenge of Proper Warrant
2. Justifying Blame in the Absence of Desert
3. Justifying Blame by Way of Non-Basic Desert
4. Why not Basic Desert?
5. Accounting for Blame's Warrant
Chapter 8: Conversation and the Scope of Moral Responsibility
1. Blaming in the Absence of the Blamed
2. A Restrictive View of Moral Responsibility's Scope
3. Blameworthiness for Bad Acts?
4. Blameworthiness for the Nonvoluntary?
5. Conversation & a Unified Account of Moral Responsibility's Scope
Chapter 9: Conclusion