The idea of moral responsibility is central to a wide range of our moral, social, and legal practices. It underpins our basic notion of culpability. Yet the idea of moral responsibility is regarded with considerable skepticism by researchers and scholars in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the law. So, it is a social practice in want of justification.

This article defends the picture of moral responsibility first presented in BUILDING BETTER BEINGS: A THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY (Oxford University Press, 2013). On that account, the normative basis for moral responsibility depends on the effects that participation in the practice has upon us. Roughly, responsibility practices help to make us better people. One advantage of this picture is that moral responsibility does not require a “spooky” or mysterious picture of human agency. That is, responsible agency is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of the place of humans in nature, even one where psychology and neuroscience give us reason for thinking that we do not have the kind of free will that figures in (metaphysical, not political) libertarian theories.

This article goes on to consider a variety of objections to this account, centered on concerns about moral desert and whether and how we can justify practices of holding one another to account.