There is moral luck, but its impact varies depending on the agent’s mindset. While a would-be killer who aims and shoots is equally blameworthy regardless of whether she hits her target, a driver who texts behind the wheel deserves different degrees of blame depending on whether she actually harms someone. By choosing to text behind the wheel, a driver exposes herself to the risk of ending up more blameworthy if she happens to harm someone. If this risk does not materialize, the driver, who neither intended nor caused any harm, is morally lucky, i.e. deserving of less blame than she would be had she hit a pedestrian. This, however, doesn’t apply to the would-be killer who misses her target. She is unlucky in the everyday sense (because she misses her victim contrary to her intention). Fate interfering with one’s own plans cannot benefit one’s moral responsibility in the same way as when fate goes along with one’s own plans. My argument suggests that moral luck’s impact operates along a continuum, with its influence diminishing as the quality of will worsens. This new perspective on moral luck better aligns with both our considered judgments and legal practice.

In epistemology, the project of Vice Epistemology promises to reveal crucial information about our concept of knowledge, and more generally about the ethics of belief, by attending to the characteristic ways in which negative aretaic character traits impede successful inquiry. These character traits are the titular epistemic vices. This paper proposes and partially develops a parallel project for the concept of moral responsibility.

According to this project, certain character traits may impede successful resolution of conflict within our responsibility-practices in characterstic ways. And we can learn important information about the functioning of these practices, as well as the concept of moral responsibility, by attending to such `hypological vices'. I focus, in particular, on the undertheorised practice of taking responsibility. Within this practice, resolution of conflict is systematically impeded by the following bundle of dispositions (vices), which together comprise an inability to take responsibility for one's actions:

(i) a disposition to misrepresent legitimate moral address as abuse, (ii) a disposition to represent the putative transgression as an outcome of external circumstances, (iii) a disposition to trivialise the normative fallout of the transgression, and (iv) a lack of proper motivation concerning ones compensatory duties and a merely instrumental motivation to offer apologies.

While T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualism is widely regarded as a plausible moral theory, it is threatened by the so-called ‘ideal world objection.’ What this objection draws attention to is that contractualism’s appeal to principles that are generally accepted causes the view to overlook whenever acting in the relevant way would be very bad under more realistic circumstances with lower acceptance levels. In response to this worry, it has been suggested in the more recent literature that contractualists should give up on the notion of principles and shift their evaluative focal point to actions or maxims instead. As I will argue in this talk, however, adopting this maneuver would bring serious problems of a different kind for contractualist theory. Instead of shifting their evaluative focal point, I therefore suggest that contractualists should respond to the ideal world objection by showing responsiveness to the different degrees to which it is likely for the relevant principles to be accepted in the world we live in.

Kantian constructivism in moral theory has the difficulty, especially salient in Korsgaard (1996), that the move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, or from individual rationality to morality, is not properly justified. Even if one grants that rational action is action according to universal principles or laws, it is not clear why the universality of the laws guiding a person’s actions should take the specific form of the person conceiving of themselves as a legislator for all rational beings, rather than limiting the universality to the internal coherence of their own actions. Korsgaard’s attempts at solving this problem are unconvincing as they stand. Their appropriate foundation is provided by a transition to Fichtean or Hegelian constructivism (Darwall 2006, Samuel 2022), following the idea that reflective self-consciousness, and therefore reasons for action, essentially depend on the subject’s recognition as reasonable, reflective, and self-conscious by others. Reasons for action are by their very nature implicitly oriented toward others as potential justifications. In this orientation, one acknowledges the authority of others. This has substantial consequences for morality, but is still compatible with different moral codes.