The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About

Key data of the project

• Project fund: FWF
• Funding amount: € 385.928
• Head of the project: Leonhard Menges
• Duration of the project: 10/2021–08/2025
• Project team members: Leonie Eichhorn, Maria Seim
• Project site:  

Description of the project

At the heart of  the project is a thesis called responsibility skepticism. It holds that there is good reason to doubt that in our world people are morally responsible for their actions. This position is taken to support the normative position that certain aspects of our blame practices are unjust. The goal of the project is to clarify what the discussion of responsibility skepticism should be about: What should skeptics mean when they speak of responsibility or unjust blame? And how should one understand the property of being morally responsible when trying to refute skeptical arguments? The central hypothesis of the project is that the notion of moral claim forfeiture should play an important role in the discussion of responsibility skepticism: skeptics should be understood as saying that, according to them, no person in our world forfeits moral claims simply because he or she willfully and knowingly commits an offense. Defenders of moral responsibility should deny exactly this position––this is the proposal to be elaborated in the project.