Responsibility and Causation
Carolina Sartorio
Abstract
Abstract This chapter discusses the various connections that exist between moral responsibility and causation. It focuses on the role played by causation in different forms of responsibility, including basic responsibility and derivative (or inherited) responsibility, responsibility for actions and for omissions, and responsibility as blameworthiness and as praiseworthiness. It also examines the phenomenon of causal overdetermination and the role played in those cases by the individual and/or collective contributions of morally responsible agents. Finally, it discusses the role played by causation in certain views of responsibility that are inspired by Harry Frankfurt’s attack on the classical model of free will and responsibility based on alternative possibilities (and, in particular, in the corresponding “Frankfurt-style” scenarios). These are views according to which the free will of agents is exclusively a function of the actual causes of their behavior, or of the factors that actually explain how they acted.