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This chapter argues against the claim that morally ignorant wrongdoers are open to blame only if they are culpable for their ignorance, and argues against a version of skepticism about moral responsibility that depends on this claim being true. On the view defended, the attitudes involved in blame are typically responses to the features of an action that make it objectionable or unjustifiable from
I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by fa
Invited discussion of G. Sher, Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness
In April of 2004, about a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke in the American media about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.1 From the beginning, editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.2 Zimbardo’s experiment is part of a bod
The largest dune fields in Sweden and Norway are small in international comparison but still form distinct parts of this previously glaciated landscape. The dunes formed c.10.5-9 ka ago, shortly after the last deglaciation, when winds close to the ice sheet were strong and vegetation was largely absent [1-4]. Since then they have been more or less stable and today they are covered by forest. Most
The process of cutting is treated as a fracture mechanical process. For an elliptic rigid wedge pressed into an elastic material, fracture may occur as an autonomous process if the tip of the wedge is sufficiently blunt or is affected by the geometry of the wedge if the tip is sharp. The conditions leading to the former or the latter case is obtained as a relation between the wedge tip radius, the
On the Seven Islands, north of Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, decreasing snow cover has made previously inaccessible stratigraphic sections in coastal cliffs possible to investigate. Sections on two of the islands, Phippsøya and Parryøya, reveal mainly raised marine deposits, representing one or more coarsening upward sequences (emergence cycles) at each site, which in turn imply preceding regional gla
