Responsibility and the Demands of Morality : Collected Papers

This volume contains the collected papers of Stephen J. White (1983-2021), in which he develops a comprehensive view of responsibility. White argues for a view of what it is to be responsible and deploys this conception to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, and practical reasoning.

Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White''s view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also investigates the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and identifies a limited for self-prediction in practical reasoning that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action.