10. 6. 2026
16.45 - 18.15
Seminarraum VI (Theologie) | Karl-Rahner-Platz 3, 1. Stock
I argue that there is a contractualist justification for a principle allowing blame, even if, due to our lack of free will, no one is blameworthy – and I situate this argument in the context of the longstanding debate concerning whether moral responsibility is consistent with determinism. I call the resulting view “Innocent Incompatibilism”. The ultimate idea is that what we owe to one another, if no one is a fitting target of the “reactive attitudes” (resentment, indignation), is not to abandon these reactive attitudes; what we owe to one another is to agree that this fact can be properly ignored. Given our human natures, I claim, the burden of suppressing the reactive attitudes is smaller than the burden of being subject to those very attitudes.
Patrick Todd is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of California-Riverside in 2011, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Innsbruck from 2011–2013, after which he moved to Edinburgh. He works in the areas of free will, moral responsibility, and associated areas in metaphysics, language, and ethics. He is author of The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (OUP, 2021), and his book Innocent Incompatibilism: A Contractualist Defense of Unfitting Blame is under contract with OUP.