Agency and Answerability Selected Essays

by Watson, Gary

• ISBN13: 9780199272280
• ISBN10: 019927228X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-16
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of highly influential essays on human action. Agency and Answerability collects eleven of these papers, concerned mainly with two intersecting questions. First, what makes us agents: individuals whose lives are attributable to them as something they (in part) conduct, not just as something that occurs? And second, what makes us responsible to one another for how we carry out our lives? Watson's answer to both questions appeals to a single notion: the capacity for critical evaluation, or 'normative competence'. We are agents because (and insofar as) we shape our lives by the exercise of normative intelligence; we are answerable to interpersonal norms of criticism because our lives are (in part) reflections of this capacity. The essays are therefore preoccupied with possible sources of normative incapacitation. Some challenges to our responsible agency emerge only from abstract philosophical reflection -- for example, on the possibility that human activity is subject to causal explanation. Others are forced upon us in daily life by our encounters with such phenomena as addiction, manipulation, and childhood deprivation. The essays explore, in particular, how freedom and responsibility might be diminished by our own desires, as in weakness of will or compulsion. This possibility raises questions about the role of the will in responsibility. Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Gary Watson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(12)
PART I FREEDOM, WILL, AND AGENCY
Free Agency	13	(20)
Skepticism about Weakness of Will	33	(26)
Disordered Appetites: Addiction, Compulsion, and Dependence	59	(29)
Volitional Necessities	88	(35)
The Work of the Will	123	(38)
PART II AGENCY AND NECESSITY
Free Action and Free Will	161	(36)
Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism	197	(22)
PART III RESPONSIBILITY AND ANSWERABILITY
Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme	219	(41)
Two Faces of Responsibility	260	(29)
Reasons and Responsibility	289	(29)
Excusing Addiction	318	(33)
Bibliography	351	(16)
Index	367