Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays
- Book Reviews,
by Gary Watson
Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays FROM THE PUBLISHER Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of highly influential essays on human action. Agency and Answerability collects eleven of these papers, concerned mainly with two intersecting questions. First, what makes us agents: individuals whose lives are attributable to them as something they (in part) conduct, not just as something that occurs? And second, what makes us responsible to one another for how we carry out our lives? Watson's answer to both questions appeals to a single notion: the capacity for critical evaluation, or 'normative competence'. We are agents because (and insofar as) we shape our lives by the exercise of normative intelligence; we are answerable to interpersonal norms of criticism because our lives are (in part) reflections of this capacity. The essays are therefore preoccupied with possible sources of normative incapacitation. Some challenges to our responsible agency emerge only from abstract philosophical reflection -- for example, on the possibility that human activity is subject to causal explanation. Others are forced upon us in daily life by our encounters with such phenomena as addiction, manipulation, and childhood deprivation. The essays explore, in particular, how freedom and responsibility might be diminished by our own desires, as in weakness of will or compulsion. This possibility raises questions about the role of the will in responsibility. Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.
Buy from Barnes & Noble
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
