Justifying Blame: why free will matters and why it does not

This book shows why we can justify blaming people for their wrong actions even if free will turns out not to exist. Contrary to most contemporary philosophizing about this issue, we do this not by denying that free will is relevant to considerations about personal desert. Instead we reconsider the preconditions of our ascriptions of responsibility to one another, before discussing the metaphysical consequences of its conditions. We argue that the kind of actions we generally blame one another for are quite ordinary wrong ones: actions we consider to be impolite, insensitive, anti-social, and so on. This blame, we argue, we can justify irrespective of whether we believe that free will exists. We should not make the mistake though, to extend this justification of our blame, to wrong actions that are much more difficult to understand, for example, "moral monster"-like ones.

This book shows why we can justify blaming people for their wrong actions even if free will turns out not to exist. Contrary to most contemporary thinking, we do this by focusing on the ordinary, everyday wrongs each of us commits, not on the extra-ordinary, "morally monstrous-like" crimes and weak-willed actions of some.