Moral responsibility and affective phenomena

PhD project by Cécile Rosat

The project investigates the intersection between moral responsibility and affective phenomena by exploring several questions: Are we responsible for our emotions? Is there a feeling of responsibility simpliciter other than Strawsonian reactive attitudes, such as blame, resentment, or guilt? If so, what is its nature? An emotion? A disposition? Finally, can affects primarily constitute the self we hold responsible? More specifically, this research is concerned with the role that affective phenomena play in attributing responsibility in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Given the overlap between theories of moral responsibility and those of metaethics, the project aims to systematically study moral responsibility from various sentimentalist views. About second-order questions, metaethics investigates what we do when we use moral concepts such as good, guilty, and owe to. According to different versions of sentimentalism, the affective states play a role in using the evaluative property. For example, a simple version of sentimentalism assumes that a person P is admirable according to judging subject S if and only if S feels admiration towards P ; an idealist view instead considers that P is admirable if and only if P arouses admiration in an ideal observer ; a reductive neo-sentimentalist position argues that P is admirable if and only if the admiration towards P is fitting, whereas a non-reductive view considers that P is admirable if and only if admiration is a fitting response to P & admiration is fitting in response to P because P is admirable.

In moral responsibility, existing studies seem to have a reductive neo-sentimentalist approach. According to this constructivist or subjectivist view, one is responsible if and only if one is held responsible. As such, “being responsible” is reduced to the social practice of holding others responsible or to reactive attitudes. Although this approach, in terms of fitting attitudes, is dominant and appealing, one aspect of this project is to question it and explore the possibility of a theory of moral responsibility in non-reductive or idealistic terms.