Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-19-2022
Publication Title
American Journal of Political Science
Volume
68
Issue
3
Pages
988-1001
Publisher Name
Wiley Periodicals LLC
Abstract
Can those dominated and oppressed by racialized power structures be held responsible for their actions? On some plausible accounts of moral responsibility, the answer is “no”: domination exempts the oppressed from moral obligations because they are structurally deprived of the freedom to make choices for which one might be blameworthy. In this article, I use the work of Frederick Douglass to offer a different understanding of moral responsibility. Attending to specific arguments that Douglass makes regarding the moral responsibility of slaves, and the tensions it raises with other parts of his corpus, I argue that one's ability to act as a moral agent is deeply tied to the environmental resources at their disposal. Drawing on distributed theories of cognition, I offer a Douglassonian conception of “distributed moral agency,” contending that Douglass's writings draw our attention to various environmental factors that can scaffold moral responsibility, even among the enslaved.
Recommended Citation
Singer, Abraham. Can the Unfree Be Held Morally Responsible? A Douglassonian Conception of Freedom and Distributed Moral Agency. American Journal of Political Science, 68, 3: 988-1001, 2022. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12760
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s), 2022.
Comments
Author Posting © The Author(s), 2022. This article is posted here by permission of Wiley Periodicals LLC for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in American Journal of Political Science, VOL. 68, ISS. 3, (July 2024), https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12760.