It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense, we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly intractable global social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly both answers the question of what should we do, and shows that it's the wrong question to ask. To ask the right question, we need to ground our normative theory of global justice in the lived experience of injustice. Using a feminist critical methodology, she argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice, regardless of our causal responsibility and extent of our knowledge of the injustice. Furthermore, it is a matter that needs to be guided by principles of human rights. As she argues, while many understand human rights as political goals or entitlements, they can also guide political strategy. Her aims are twofold: to present a theory of what it means to take responsibility for injustice and for ensuring human rights, as well as to develop a guide for how to take responsibility in ways that support local and global movements for transformative politics. In order to illustrate her theory and guide for action, Ackerly draws on fieldwork on the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, the food crisis of 2008, and strategies from 125 activist organizations working on women's and labor rights across 26 countries. Just Responsibility integrates these ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.

The first book-length treatment of a central concept in Hegel's practical philosophy - the theory of responsibility. This theory is both original and radical in its emphasis on the role and importance of social and historical conditions as a context for our actions.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Moral Responsibility in Twenty-First-Century Warfare explores the complex relationship between just war theory and the ethics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). One of the challenges facing ethicists of war, particularly just war theorists, is that AWS is an applicative concept that seems, in many ways, to lie beyond the human(ist) scope of the just war theory tradition. The book examines the various ethical gaps between just war theory and the legal and moral status of AWS, addresses the limits of both traditional and revisionist just war theory, and proposes ways of bridging some of these gaps. It adopts a dualistic notion of moral responsibility—or differing, related notions of moral responsibility and legitimate authority—to study the conflicts and contradictions of legitimizing the autonomous weapons that are designed to secure peace and neutralize the effects of violence. Focusing on the changing conditions and dynamics of accountability, responsibility, autonomy, and rights in twenty-first-century warfare, the volume sheds light on the effects of violence and the future ethics of modern warfare.

When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model. She develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live. With a foreward by Martha C. Nussbaum, this last statement by a revered and highly influential thinker will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers, ethicists, and feminist and political philosophers.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Responsibility—which once meant the moral duty to help and support others—has come to be equated with an obligation to be self-sufficient. This has guided recent reforms of the welfare state, making key entitlements conditional on good behavior. Drawing on political theory and moral philosophy, Yascha Mounk shows why this re-imagining of personal responsibility is pernicious—and suggests how it might be overcome. “This important book prompts us to reconsider the role of luck and choice in debates about welfare, and to rethink our mutual responsibilities as citizens.” —Michael J. Sandel, author of Justice “A smart and engaging book... Do we so value holding people accountable that we are willing to jeopardize our own welfare for a proper comeuppance?” —New York Times Book Review “An important new book... [Mounk] mounts a compelling case that political rhetoric...has shifted over the last half century toward a markedly punitive vision of social welfare.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A terrific book. The insight at its heart—that the conception of responsibility now at work in much public rhetoric and policy is both punitive and ill-conceived—is very important and should be widely heeded.” —Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene

Unlike most other discussions of responsibility, which focus on the idea that to be responsible, agents must in some sense act voluntarily, this book focuses on the relatively neglected idea that they must in some sense know what they are doing. Because it integrates first-and-third personal elements, this account is well suited to capture the complexity of responsible agents, who at once have their own private perspectives and live in a public world.

A vigorous attack on moral responsibility in all its forms argues that the abolition of moral responsibility will be liberating and beneficial. In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms—including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts—is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want—natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities—would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition.

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the blameworthy artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements.

This book contains essays in honour of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined.

David Shoemaker develops a novel pluralistic theory of responsibility, motivated by our ambivalence to cases of marginal agency--such as those caused by clinical depression or autism, for instance. He identifies three distinct types of responsibility, each with its own set of required capacities: attributability, answerability, and accountability.