Responsibility and the Demands of Morality Collected Papers

Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White's view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also investigates the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and identifies a limited for self-prediction in practical reasoning that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action.

1 - Standing Up For Neutrality
2 - Responsibility and the Demands of Morality
3 - The Centrality of One's Own Life
4 - On the Moral Objection to Coercion
5 - The Relevance of Formative Circumstances to Blameworthiness
6 - Responsibility, Justice, and Solidarity
7 - The Problem of Self-Torture: What's Being Done?
8 - Transmission Failures
9 - Intention and Prediction in Means-End Reasoning
10 - Self-Prediction in Practical Reasoning: Its Role and Limits
11 - Collective Obligations and the Ethics of Participation
12 - Practical Commitment and Knowledge of Intentional Action: An Argument against Inferentialism
13 - Action and Production
14 - Unproductive Reasons
15 - Against Voluntarism about Doxastic Responsibility
16 - How Can Beliefs Wrong?-A Strawsonian Epistemology
17 - Disagreement and Alienation

Stephen John White (1983-2021) received his BA from Pomona College in 2005 and his PhD from UCLA in 2012. He taught in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University from 2012 until his untimely death in 2021. He was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values in 2018-2019. His articles were published in Ethics,Philosophy and Public Affairs,Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, andNoûs, among other venues. In 2017 and in 2023, his papers (chapters 4 and 17 of this volume) were selected for inclusion in The Philosopher's Annual, a collection of the ten best philosophy articles of the year. Kyla Ebels-Duggan is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at Northwestern University. She works in moral and political philosophy and their history and has written on love, political liberalism, Kant's moral and political philosophy and his philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. She currently is working on two book projects, the first concerning valuing attitudes and the second on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Berislav Marušic is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to Edinburgh, he taught at Brandeis University for thirteen years. He has written on agency, the emotions, skepticism, and interpersonal epistemology, and he is currently writing a book about Sartre's existentialism.