Luckily, We Are Only Responsible for What We Could Have Avoided

Abstract

The view that moral responsibility requires making a difference faces challenges from both cases of causal overdetermination and cases of causal preemption (such as Frankfurt-style Cases). In some such cases it seems that an agent is responsible for something that they could not have avoided. To deal with these cases, I enlist help from a plausible approach to moral luck. Following John Martin Fischer (1986) and Michael Zimmerman (2002), I defend the view that one’s degree of responsibility is immune to moral luck but the scope of events for which one is responsible is subject to moral luck. I then argue that this view leads to a plausible error theory for our responsibility intuitions concerning cases of causal overdetermination and preemption. This error theory allows us to avoid counterexamples to the claim that responsibility requires making a difference.