Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame

This book challenges a basic assumption held by many responsibility theorists: that agents must be morally responsible in the retrospective sense for anything in virtue of which they deserve praise or blame (the primacy assumption). Anton sets out to defeat this assumption by showing that accepting it as well as the much more intuitive causality assumption renders us incapable of making sense of cases whereby agents seem to deserve praise and blame. She argues that retrospective moral respo...