Studies show that feelings of misrecognition can explain much of the support for populism. The chapter draws on this insight but takes issue with the literature suggesting that feelings of misrecognition and resentment are blind emotions unconnected to facts and principles. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, Peter Strawson’s discussion of resentment, and John Rawls’s idea of principle-dependent-feelings, it argues that we should interpret the populist politics of resentment as a struggle for recognition based on moral experiences that are intimately connected to factual and normative beliefs. Resentment is based on the feeling that one is regarded and treated wrongly, and it is an incipient demand to be regarded and treated differently. Thus, the chapter provides an approach to populism and the politics of resentment that does not reduce them to ordinary citizens’ unthinking or automatic emotional reactions or political entrepreneurs’ manipulations of people. The proposed approach entails that we adopt a participant attitude and take people’s demands for recognition seriously. Democratic respect requires that we assess the validity of the claims people make, rather than regarding them with an observer attitude as pathological cases in need of treatment.

Military service members may perform an action – such as killing – that they realize is the best thing to do in some situation, but that nevertheless strikes them as being morally wrong or even unthinkable. Such unavoidable moral failure may involve feelings of extreme distress and self-destructive behavior, together constituting a ‘moral injury.’ Service members (or veterans) often feel an anguished sense of responsibility in these cases, while other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. I defend this mismatch of reactions against the claim that servicemembers cannot be responsible for actions that were unavoidable, arguing that this denies something important that their distress reveals. Their tendency to hold themselves responsible may be a fitting response that correctly represents how it matters subjectively to them that their own action was unthinkable. However, others cannot hold them responsible because they have not violated fair, shared, normative expectations.

There is a tension in military culture between the growing acceptance of moral injury and an idealized view of Stoicism that leaves little room for the guilt and shame, mercy and forgiveness characteristic of moral injury and repair. Does that emotion-lean view do justice to ancient Stoic doctrine? I argue that it does not. The emotions of the Stoic moral aspirant, such as shame and moral distress, bear striking similarities to the negative self-reactive attitudes that P.F. Strawson famously discusses. Notions of mercy and forgiveness speak to the positive reactive attitudes. I develop my argument by turning to Seneca’s essay, On Mercy and his play, the Trojan Woman. Mercy, Seneca insists, makes good on the gentler side of Stoicism. Learning from the mercy others show us, and that we would show them, is one way that soldiers can begin to show mercy towards themselves.

According to the argument from gratuitous evil, if God were to exist, then gratuitous evil wouldn’t; but gratuitous evil does exist, so God doesn’t. We can evaluate different views of divine providence with respect to the resources they are able to bring to bear when encountering this argument. By these lights, theological determinism is often seen as especially problematic: the determinist is seen as having an impoverished set of resources to draw from in her attempts to respond to the argument from gratuitous evil. In particular, there is an important resource – an appeal to free will – that many have claimed is unavailable to the determinist. I argue that the determinist does not in fact suffer from this particular resource deficit. I do so by examining some recent work on determinist responses to the problem of evil, analyzing some of the ways in which they fall short, and proposing a new response that is informed by those shortcomings. This new response is built on an appeal to the reactive attitudes.

The limited nature of self-control gives rise to awkward questions. Are people who get into trouble due to poor self-control really to blame, or simply the innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control? This long and pivotal chapter addresses what the limited nature of self-control means for moral responsibility. On the one hand, poor self-control might at times be a valid excuse, but on the other, we would not want a world in which everyone can claim to be nothing but the innocent victims of their endowments from birth and their social background. These considerations lead straight to one of the most vexing problems in philosophy: How is moral responsibility possible in a universe in which everything is caused by what came before? My strategy for tackling this question is to introduce three distinct epistemological standpoints to look at the problem and to consult two bodies of knowledge: the vast literature on free will and the scholarship on folk intuitions regarding criminal sentencing. Together, these three standpoints and two bodies of knowledge furnish the building blocks for guidelines to decide on matters of poor self-control and moral responsibility.

What is self-blame, and what is its role in an adequate theory of moral responsibility? Moreover, what of guilt? In this chapter, I will examine the role of both self-blame and guilt within the context of a conversational theory of moral responsibility. Some philosophers have recently placed guilt and self-blame at the heart of moral responsibility’s nature. They also have in turn made the deservingness of both the most fundamental normative consideration in justifying the harms of blaming. Doing so appears to threaten conversational and other communicative theories of moral responsibility. In response, I will argue that guilt and self-blame cannot play the fundamental grounding role in a theory of moral responsibility. As a result, conversational and other communicative theories are not in jeopardy. Rather, what is required is a proper appreciation of the aim and norms of our blaming practices wherein guilt and also self-blame are meant to fit as responses to the blame of others as well as oneself. Along the way, I will also argue that self-blame and guilt are distinct things. While it is natural to think that to experience guilt just is to blame oneself, this is not so. Although the two are tightly connected, the relationship is nevertheless contingent; one can blame oneself without experiencing guilt, and one can experience guilt without blaming oneself.

In Chapter 1, I attempt to explicate the problem of blame by making use of an analogy with another more familiar problem relevant to permissibility and harm – the problem of punishment. I argue that this comparison serves to highlight two clear desiderata for a normatively adequate account of blame, one concerning the value of blame and another concerning desert. In this chapter, I also argue that the problem of blame concerns the reactive varieties of blame in particular, offer some principled strategies for distinguishing between reactive and nonreactive varieties of blame, and discuss the role that the negative reactive attitudes play in characterizing the former.

In Chapter 3, I focus on the nature of reactive blame itself. In order to see fully how the fittingness account of basic desert might help to resolve the problem of blame, we are in need of a clearer picture of the reactive attitudes whose conditions of appropriateness this solution will ultimately depend on. I canvass three prominent views of reactive blame (P. F. Strawson’s, R. J. Wallace’s, and David Shoemaker’s) that I take to be most helpful in further explicating what meeting the desert-based desideratum for normative adequacy might look like. Here I argue for a cognitivist view of the reactive attitudes, and that we ought to restrict the scope of the relevant class of reactive attitudes at issue quite narrowly. With a sharper view of the reactive attitudes in hand, I then return to the fittingness account of basic desert and offer a first pass at an account of the right kind of reasons to reactively blame.

In this chapter I apply the view of psychopathy developed in Chapter 2, to the account of moral responsibility as responsiveness to reasons developed in Chapter 1. I begin by considering the question of what reactive attitudes, if any, we should hold towards psychopaths, engaging with arguments by Piers Benn and Patricia Greenspan. I then turn to the question of whether psychopaths are responsive to reasons. I argue that evidence of psychopaths’ reasoning impairments, including those suggested by the famous ‘moral/conventional distinction’ experiments carried out by James Blair, may be enough to call into question the reasons-responsiveness of some psychopaths, but that other, even ‘hard-core’ psychopaths, may not exhibit such deficiencies. However, I argue that these psychopaths, though not oblivious to reasons, may be impervious to them, that is, unable to recognise them as reasons which bear on their own choices. I then argue that the specific reasons to which these psychopaths are impervious are reasons stemming from the rights, interests and concerns of other people, and that they are impervious to them because they are unable to see other people as sources of value.

The aim of the chapter is to develop an understanding of what moral responsibility is, so that this can, in later chapters, be applied to the case of the psychopath. I begin by distinguishing moral responsibility from other senses of responsibility, including causal, virtue, and obligation responsibility, and elucidate the various connections between these senses. I then consider the relationship between moral responsibility, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and the range of phenomena for which it is possible to be morally responsible. Next, I proceed to consider two major theories of moral responsibility: the Strawsonian ‘reactive attitudes’ account and the ‘reasons-responsiveness’ account. I consider the advantages and disadvantages of these, and their ability to account for a range of cases. Finally, I argue for an account adapted from R. Jay Wallace’s version of reasons-responsiveness.

What is the proper aim of socially punitive responses to wrongdoing? The usual contenders in the debates about the justification of criminal punishment – retributivist, utilitarian, expressivist, and communicative theories – all encounter problems as accounts of social punishment. This chapter argues that the general justifying aim of social punishment is to pressure wrongdoers to make amends for their own transgressions. The view combines both desert and instrumental conditions for punishment but develops distinctive accounts of each.