Responsibility: the State of the Question Fault Lines in the Foundations

In this article, I discuss five major fault lines in the foundations of responsibility theory—a relatively new field—fault lines traceable to P. F. Strawson's groundbreaking “Freedom and Resentment.” They are about the proper methods and content of responsibility theory, and disputes over these foundational issues have led to a messy and wildly divergent set of theories and approaches in the field. My aim is simply to identify and sort out these fault lines so that we can at least agree on the source of our disagreements, and so that we may also perhaps realize the pressing need to address these fault lines first, in order to help resolve some of our downstream disputes and nurture responsibility theory into a more unified and theoretically sophisticated philosophical enterprise.