Cavell’s notion of an “elaborative utterance” (explicitly introduced only in The Claim of Reason) provides a clue to the thematic unity of Must We Mean What We Say? Elaboratives are called for when the very description of what one has done is at issue, and so calls for being acknowledged (confessed, admitted to) or denied. Cavell takes up from Austin’s “Excuses” to emphasize the importance of finding, inventing, and projecting appropriate descriptions of actions as part of the very possibility of action – and indeed human passion, human response, as such. Moral arguments can always break down: this is due to the indispensability of elaboratives, the embedding of actions with words in life in ways that always allow us to “go on,” refuse to go on, or to divert our attention. The fact that there are always elaborations to be made shows the impossibility of building a “best case” of moral knowledge or action immune to dispute or recasting. But Cavell’s work does not show that there is no knowledge at all of morality: he resists a skeptical conclusion. Instead, he sharpens our sense of the importance of our ability to settle on limits of responsibility in a human world.

In explaining why an instance of negligence is a case of culpable wrongdoing, it is natural and common to cite missing features of the agent’s behavior or mental state. “She failed to notice the stop sign,” “He did not check the water temperature before putting the baby in the bath.” In general, it can seem puzzling to ground judgments of wrongdoing and culpability not in the qualities that the agent’s mind and behavior possess but, instead, in the qualities they lack. After all, the class of people lacking the relevant feature is much larger than the class who are guilty of the culpable wrongdoing to which we are responding in cases of negligence. The passenger in the car, as well as the driver, failed to notice the stop sign. The houseguest also did not check the temperature of the baby’s bath. Why are they not guilty of culpable wrongdoing if these respective failures are what supports the charge in the case of the driver and the father? This chapter argues, first, that an account of why cases of negligence are ever cases of culpable wrongdoing must solve this problem by providing an explanation for why some absences are instances of culpable wrongdoing and others are not. Several quick efforts to solve the problem are shown to be inadequate. The chapter then goes on to offer a general theory of culpability that explains why absences – failures to notice or to attend, failures to take precautions – can be instances of culpable wrongdoing, and also why such absences sometimes fail to ground claims of culpable wrongdoing. Along the way, the chapter also draws a distinction between moral and criminal culpability and demonstrates that there can be instances of criminally culpable negligence in the absence of moral culpability.

Harms brought about through negligence are typically morally blameworthy despite being unintended and often unforeseen. How is this best understood? A natural approach parallels a common approach to blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing, i.e., acts performed in ignorance of their wrongness: blameworthiness for the act or harm in question is taken to be derivative from more straightforward blameworthiness for relevant earlier failures. I have argued elsewhere for a derivative blameworthiness approach to unwitting wrongdoing that appeals to reasonable expectations about available steps the agent could have taken to avoid or remedy the ignorance in question; and contra Gideon Rosen and Neil Levy, such claims about reasonable expectations do not depend on there being episodes of clear-eyed akrasia in the agent’s past management of her beliefs, so that the account allows for blame in a much wider range of cases. My aim here is to extend this approach to a variety of forms of negligence, defending a similarly broad reasonable expectations version of a derivative blameworthiness view. In particular, I will distinguish and explore cases involving (i) self-conscious negligence, (ii) negligence involving false beliefs about relevant norms of due care, (iii) thoughtless negligence, and (iv) harms due to pure forgetting – though I will argue that the latter often turn out not to be cases of negligence at all, at least for purposes of moral 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.

In the final chapter, I turn to the question of how psychopaths should be treated in the criminal law. I begin by sketching the distinctive problem that psychopathy presents for the criminal law, and some broad observations on how it is dealt with currently. I engage first with an argument by Paul Litton which states that the criminal law is an expression of democratic norms, and therefore that any attempt to excuse psychopaths based on their psychopathy should be rejected because it would not command the respect of the public. I then turn to the question of whether psychopaths deserve punishment. I review the various ways in which judgments of criminal responsibility are instantiated in legal tests, and the conditions of responsibility that are implicit in these. Ultimately, I conclude that psychopaths lack capacities which ought to be considered a condition of criminal responsibility, essentially the ability to respond to moral reasons, and not just the ability to know that their actions are legally proscribed.

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.

Contractual obligations are excused when unaddressed post-contracting events occur, but the excuse depends on how the parties divided the risk of post-contracting events.