Fair Opportunity and Responsibility

Author: David O. Brink
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198961949

Published In: February 2025
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9780198859468

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Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a prior and independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. As a result, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent's capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing.

This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities - normative competence - and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference - situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion.

Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

1:Prolegomena

2:The Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility

3:The Fair Opportunity Conception of Responsibility

4:Fair Opportunity, Capacities, and Possibilities

5:Fair Opportunity and History

6:Blame, Punishment, and Predominant Retributivism

7:The Nature and Significance of Culpability

8:Affirmative Defenses: Principles and Puzzles

9:Structural Injustice and Fair Opportunity

10:Situationism and Fair Opportunity

11:Incompetence, Psychopathy, and Fair Opportunity

12:Immaturity and Fair Opportunity