The fundamental nature of responsibility itself—that thing our blaming and punishing practices purport to reflect—has recently been the subject of considerable attention by theorists of criminal law and moral theory. Both legal and moral theorists have increasingly found a broadly “communicative” understanding of responsibility to be especially appealing. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility and its character by appeal to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative.

The present essay considers a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including (1) the independence of such accounts from notions of free will and agential capacity, (2) the underlying theory of exemptions and powers required for responsible agency, and (3) whether there are alternative ways of understanding or extending the communicative idea at the core of such accounts.

This essay argues that communicative accounts, and the conversational model in particular, focus our attention on important and under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices. However, we do well to adopt an even more social conception of responsibility, albeit in the vein of conversational theories.