Helping It

There is a long-standing debate1 in the literature on moral responsibility about the general idea that there is some sort of control condition on our assignment of blameworthiness2 to agents. On the one hand, it is asked how it could possibly be fair to blame an agent for something manifestly not under his control? Surely what is beyond our control is also not our fault? On the other hand, it is pointed out that there do seem to be numerous sorts of case in which we do in fact regard as blameworthy for certain things, agents who appear to lack the requisite kind of control. I may, for example, be excessively and disproportionately angry at some state of affairs, and since anger is generally involuntary, it might appear not to be the sort of state for which I could be expected to take the blame, if some sort of control principle is true. And yet we do often blame those who are excessively and disproportionately angry (see, e.g., Adams 1985), even where they are entirely successful in controlling the expression of their anger in behavior. We blame the unreasonable state of mind itself, where we know that it exists. We also blame those who forget things, who are careless and negligent, who become distracted, make foolish cognitive errors through lack of concentration, and so on, even though none of these kinds of behavior is normally willed or chosen by the agent.