Pushing the Margins of Responsibility: Lessons from Parks’ Somnambulistic Killing

TY - JOUR

T1 - Pushing the Margins of Responsibility

T2 - Lessons from Parks’ Somnambulistic Killing

AU - Santoni de Sio, Filippo

AU - Di Nucci, Ezio

PY - 2018/4/1

Y1 - 2018/4/1

N2 - David Shoemaker has claimed that a binary approach to moral responsibility leaves out something important, namely instances of marginal agency, cases where agents seem to be eligible for some responsibility responses but not others. In this paper we endorse and extend Shoemaker’s approach by presenting and discussing one more case of marginal agency not yet covered by Shoemaker or in the other literature on moral responsibility. Our case is that of Kenneth Parks, a Canadian man who drove a long way to his mother-in-law’s and killed her in a state of somnambulism. We support our claim about Parks’ marginal responsibility in three steps: we first deny that Parks acts involuntarily as traditionally claimed in the legal literature; we then propose to extend Shoemaker’s analysis of marginal responsibility based on quality of will so as to include two other dimensions: the moral status of the agent and the actual causal effects of their actions; finally, we distinguish Parks’ marginal responsibility from four other existing concepts: “tracing” (drunken cases), diminished responsibility (minor mental disorders), causal responsibility (Williams’ unlucky lorry driver), and moral disapproval without responsibility (bad actions by small children, animals, or machines).

AB - David Shoemaker has claimed that a binary approach to moral responsibility leaves out something important, namely instances of marginal agency, cases where agents seem to be eligible for some responsibility responses but not others. In this paper we endorse and extend Shoemaker’s approach by presenting and discussing one more case of marginal agency not yet covered by Shoemaker or in the other literature on moral responsibility. Our case is that of Kenneth Parks, a Canadian man who drove a long way to his mother-in-law’s and killed her in a state of somnambulism. We support our claim about Parks’ marginal responsibility in three steps: we first deny that Parks acts involuntarily as traditionally claimed in the legal literature; we then propose to extend Shoemaker’s analysis of marginal responsibility based on quality of will so as to include two other dimensions: the moral status of the agent and the actual causal effects of their actions; finally, we distinguish Parks’ marginal responsibility from four other existing concepts: “tracing” (drunken cases), diminished responsibility (minor mental disorders), causal responsibility (Williams’ unlucky lorry driver), and moral disapproval without responsibility (bad actions by small children, animals, or machines).

KW - Consciousness and moral responsibility

KW - David Shoemaker

KW - Marginal agency

KW - Marginal responsibility

KW - Reactive attitudes

KW - Strawsonian theory of responsibility

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85015954486&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s12152-017-9311-1

DO - 10.1007/s12152-017-9311-1

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85015954486

SN - 1874-5490

VL - 11

SP - 35

EP - 46

JO - Neuroethics

JF - Neuroethics

IS - 1

ER -