Browsing by Subject "Moral responsibility"
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Item Departing From Frankfurt: moral responsibility and alternative possibilities(2009-12) Palmer, David William; Deigh, John; Kane, Robert, 1938-; Fischer, John; Ginet, Carl; White, Stephen; Woodruff, PaulOne of the most significant questions in ethics is this: under what conditions are people morally responsible for what they do? Assuming that people can only be praised or blamed for actions they perform of their own free will, the particular question that interests me is how we should understand the nature of this freedom – with what kind of freedom must people act, if they are to be morally responsible for what they do? A natural answer to this question – and the one I think is correct – is to point to the freedom to do otherwise. This is encapsulated in the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. PAP has led many to believe that the freedom required for moral responsibility must be incompatible with determinism or the existence of God because it is plausible to argue that if determinism is true or if God exists, then people would lack genuine freedom of choice and hence could not be morally responsible for their behavior. In the light of two important articles by Harry Frankfurt almost four decades ago, which challenged the claim that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise, compatibilism – the opposing view that the freedom for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism – has experienced a resurgence. Inspired by Frankfurt’s work, those wanting to reject PAP – typically compatibilists – attack the principle on two main grounds: directly and indirectly. First, they have argued directly that PAP is false by developing alleged counterexamples to it. Second, they have challenged PAP indirectly by arguing that there are alternative conceptions of freedom from freedom of choice that, it is claimed, are not reliant on alternative possibilities but are sufficient to capture the freedom required for moral responsibility. My dissertation evaluates these two lines of attack on PAP. In particular, I attempt to defend the truth of PAP against both kinds of challenge.Item Moral responsibilities between parent and children though lifespan(2011-12) Li, Ying, M. Ed.; Falbo, Toni; Schallert, DianeThe Chinese parent-child relationship is remarkably close throughout the lifespan. Parents get involved in planning their child’s career, social activities, and even marriage. For their point, when adult children attain financial stabilities, they support aging parents in various ways. This report reviews this strong bond as a moral responsibility between parents and children that parents sacrifice for their children unconditionally. In return, children pay back their moral debts to parents by fulfilling filial piety, including doing well in school, respecting family members and supporting parents. However, the traditional parent-child relationship may have changed after the one-child policy due to the shift in family structure, and new roles of only children in the family. Thus, moral responsibilities continue to capture the attention of experts interested in family structure in general and Chinese society in past.Item Why no one truly deserves to suffer(2016-05) Andrew, James Preston; Strawson, Galen; Montague, MichelleSuffering, as I understand it, is an intrinsically awful state in which to be. Yet, it is widely thought that suffering can be intrinsically good when experienced by someone who is guilty because the guilty deserve to suffer. In these pages, I attempt to show that commonsense morality misleads us insofar as it inclines us to think that suffering can ever be deserved independently of consequentialist considerations. I argue that the kind of responsibility required to ground one's deserving to suffer is "ultimate moral responsibility". Ultimate moral responsibility, I contend, should be understood as responsibility of such a kind that if one bears it for one's actions, then one is the ultimate cause of the way that one is mentally, at least in certain respects. Employing Galen Strawson's Basic Argument for the impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility, I defend the claim that no possible being could truly deserve to suffer. I close by defending the Basic Argument against what I take to be three of the stronger objections that have been raised against it.