engleski

Deflating Self-authorship: Luck, Selfhood, Justice and the Lack of Ultimate Responsibility

It has been argued that one is ultimately responsible for an action if that action stems from his own will which has, at some point, been formed by the person herself. The basic argument tries to show that no one can constitute his own nature and thus no one is ever going to be ultimately responsible for his actions (Strawson 1994). Various attempts, in line with the compatibilistic approach in the free will debate, have been suggested in order to replace the notion of ultimate responsibility with less demanding ones (Frankfurt 1988, Fischer and Ravizza 1998, Wolf 1990 for example). These have been criticized on the grounds that they are unable to provide a sufficiently robust notion of the self that will grant that action is up-to- the-agent and thus, that the action flowing from such a self will not be a product of an agent’s will but rather an occurrence arising from circumstances over which the agent has no control. Having the desires or beliefs one has is something one cannot control and consequently is a matter of luck. Ultimately, praising or blaming someone therefore represents an unjust act even though there are some cases involving anti-social behavior that require such a compatibilistic approach to justice (Smilansky 2000). Others, by using an event-causal libertarian account have tried to argue that such a request can be met (Kane 1996). By dismantling Kane’s argumentation I’ll try to show where the real problem for the event- causal libertarian and the compatibilist lies. Through an analysis of the notions of luck and selfhood that play a pivotal role in the argumentation evolving around the concept of ultimate responsibility I’ll try to show what is wrong with the latter concept.

Ultimate responsibility, event-causal libertarianism, luck, selfhood

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