Value is commonly divided into the intrinsic – what is good (or bad) “in itself” – and the instrumental, what is valuable as a means. This chapter describes two kinds of “value in itself.” The first comprises experiences of certain rewarding kinds; the second comprises objects of experience having intrinsic properties in virtue of which these objects can be central in intrinsically valuable experiences. This threefold conception – of intrinsic, inherent, and instrumental values – is explained, illustrated, and enhanced by accommodating contributory value, yielding a multi-dimensional value theory. Hedonism is shown to be more plausible than generally realized but also too narrow. In showing this, the valuational pluralism of the chapter is extended to include intrinsic moral value as a distinct kind, and the organic character of value, inherent as well as intrinsic, is illustrated and clarified; and the organicity of inherent value is shown also to apply to reasons for action.

Ethics has tended to concentrate on (1) what we should do, (2) virtues of character, or (3) the importance of motivation in appraising actions. All three are ethically important. But there is a dimension of moral responsibility that should have a place beside obligations to act, virtues of character, and appraisals of actions in relation to their motivation. It is the manner of actions. This can be right or wrong, an object of intention, and behavior for a reason. Interpersonal relations are not a behavioral grid with fixed points representing only act-types. This chapter explores manners of action. The result is a wider conception of acting rightly than the common understanding on which (despite the adverb) it is simply doing the right thing; a partial account of how acting rightly figures in the content of intention; and a sketch of the moral dimensions of the manners in which we act.

The right thing can be done for the wrong reason. An action might meet an obligation such as paying a debt when the agent’s doing of that, the act-token, is motivated purely by fear of reprisal and thereby fails to be morally creditworthy. The action might, in Kant’s parlance, lack moral worth. Much that we do is based on more than one motive, as where self-interest aligns with moral obligation. Can we, at will, control which of the aligned motives will determine why we do the thing in question? Does morality require that we try to see that moral motivation – or at least some unselfish motive – determines our actions toward others? And if we act for both a moral reason and a prudential one, to what extent, if at all, is the action morally creditworthy? This chapter explores these problems and sketches answers to these and related questions.

Military service members may perform an action – such as killing – that they realize is the best thing to do in some situation, but that nevertheless strikes them as being morally wrong or even unthinkable. Such unavoidable moral failure may involve feelings of extreme distress and self-destructive behavior, together constituting a ‘moral injury.’ Service members (or veterans) often feel an anguished sense of responsibility in these cases, while other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. I defend this mismatch of reactions against the claim that servicemembers cannot be responsible for actions that were unavoidable, arguing that this denies something important that their distress reveals. Their tendency to hold themselves responsible may be a fitting response that correctly represents how it matters subjectively to them that their own action was unthinkable. However, others cannot hold them responsible because they have not violated fair, shared, normative expectations.

The literature on moral responsibility is ripe with accounts of what it takes for an agent to become blameworthy. By contrast, very little has been written about what it takes for an agent’s blameworthiness to cease or diminish. It seems that there are certain things a wrongdoer can feel or do that might make her less blameworthy than she would otherwise have been. She might experience guilt, atone, apologize, and make reparations. In this chapter, I will argue that prominent accounts of blameworthiness are unable to explain how such actions and emotions can influence one’s blameworthiness. I will then present an alternative account. If we understand blameworthiness in terms of deserved guilt rather than fitting resentment, we can give a plausible account of how blameworthiness can change over time. The fact that a wrongdoer has already experienced guilt, atoned, or apologized will make her less deserving of guilt, and therefore less blameworthy.

The Strawsonian approach to responsibility tries to explain what it is to be morally responsible for one’s actions in terms of being an appropriate object of the reactive attitudes. How informative such explanations can be depends in part on whether an adequate characterization of these attitudes can be given without appeal to the concept of responsibility itself. Guilt is the most promising candidate for a Strawsonian account of the first-personal case of holding oneself morally responsible. The question is whether guilt can be captured without appeal to responsibility or any similar concept. We argue that it can. This chapter offers a theory of guilt as a motivational state involving a goal and specific action tendencies that constitute direct and urgent means of meeting that goal. Despite its greater cognitive complexity, guilt is like simpler emotions such as anger and fear in how its goals and action tendencies are discontinuous with practical reasoning. The motivational theory of guilt provides an important tool for theorizing first-personal responsibility practices in Strawsonian terms. We go on to argue that, contrary to some influential scholarship, the appropriateness to which Strawsonians appeal should be the concept of fittingness rather than fairness or desert.

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide a comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms.

Let F be a fact in virtue of which an agent, s, is blameworthy for performing an act of A-ing. We argue for the following three theses (with slight qualification of the first):

• (Reason) F is (at some time) a reason for s to feel guilty (to some extent) for A-ing;

• (Desert) s’s having this reason suffices for s’s deserving to feel guilty for A-ing; and

• (Ground) what grounds s’s deserving to feel guilty for A-ing is simply what grounds that feeling’s being a fitting response by s to her A-ing.

In light of these theses, we address several claims that have been made regarding responsibility and desert. We take issue with the divorce of desert from responsibility. We find acceptable a claim regarding blameworthiness and reason to induce guilt, and we defend the idea that it is non-instrumentally good that one who is blameworthy be subject to a fitting feeling of guilt. Finally, we argue against a view on which desert of blame has a teleological dimension.

In Chapter 2, I turn my focus to the desert-based desideratum for a normatively adequate account of reactive blame. I begin with an issue that often plays a central role in obscuring whether the problem of blame can be resolved, namely how we ought to understand the concept of basic desert. Adjacent to the problem of blame, debates about free will and moral responsibility often seem to bottom out in appeals to whether or not the account on offer can deliver basic desert of blame. However, little progress has been made in explicating precisely what basic desert of blame amounts to. I argue that once we have restricted our focus to reactive blame in particular, a clearer picture of basic desert emerges. I go on to offer an analysis of basic desert of reactive blame which I call the fittingness account, and argue that it can provide the first step in resolving the problem of blame.

British Sentimentalists such as Smith and Sidgwick observe that our desert claims are grounded in sentiments such as gratitude and resentment. But as Feinberg and others have noted, desert claims involve more than mere positive or negative attitudes toward a person, as we urge positive or negative treatment of them. Rather, in making a desert claim we suppose that our sentiments are appropriate ones. But what makes them appropriate? Seemingly, they are appropriate because there is a proportionality, or "fittingness," between the proposed treatment and the trait or action of the person that serves as a desert basis. The received wisdom－which Ross makes explicit－is that there is intrinsic value in this fittingness obtaining between treatment and desert basis. There have been some recent attempts by moral philosophers to offer accounts of desert that do not require implicit claims about value; but these attempts fail. So there is surely value of some kind in fitting treatment, with the received wisdom again suggesting that noninstrumental value exists in fittingness itself obtaining between treatment and desert basis.