WiP - Margaret Shea / Blameworthy required acts
WiP - Margaret Shea / Blameworthy required acts
Wednesday November 13, the Work-in-Progress meeting has Margaret Shea, Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, presenting recent work on "Blameworthy required acts."
I argue that required acts can be blameworthy and develop a new theory of what it takes for a required act to be so. Some acts have a bizarre deontic status: they are required-but-wrong. My theory, Deontic Status Tracing, holds that an agent is blameworthy for performing such an act if and only if she is blameworthy for the fact that this act has that bizarre deontic status. I show how Deontic Status Tracing allocates blame in three kinds of cases – Alone/Together dilemmas, Single-Agent Dilemmas, and Actualist “Professor Procrastinate” Cases – and argue that it is extensionally and explanatorily superior to a widely endorsed rival theory, Act Tracing, according to which an agent is blameworthy for performing a required-but-wrong act if and only if she is blameworthy for something in the causal history of her performance of this act.