Ethics and Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

This text presents the result of the work of our research group carried out in 2019–2020. The research has focused on the debate on moral responsibility in analytical philosophy in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The full results of the study are presented in the collective work “Prolegomena to moral responsibility” (see: Loginov E.V., Gavrilov M.V., Mertsalov A.V., Iunusov A.T. “Prolegomeny k moral’noi otvetstvennosti” [Prolegomena to Moral Responsibility], Finikovyi kompot [Date Palm Compote], 2020, No. 15, pp. 3–100. (In Russian)). Although Prolegomena was conceived primarily as a survey work, it also presents its authors’ own ideas, mostly of a metatheoretical ones. In this paper these ideas are summarised briefly in the following order: a) the problem statement in general terms, b) a discussion of ethics and metaphysics of moral responsibility, and c) a consideration of an important question having to do with the nature of the relation of “appropriateness” of moral reactions.