Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 8

Abstract

Abstract This is the eighth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (OSAR), and the sixth drawn from papers presented at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR, held in March 2022). The OSAR series is devoted to publishing cutting edge, interdisciplinary work on the wide array of topics falling under the general rubric of “agency and responsibility.” This volume dramatically illustrates that aim, as it brings together work in free will, ethics, metaethics, feminist theory, disability studies, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The theme for both the workshop and these papers was “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility,” and in these essays, our authors take a number of different and creative angles on this theme. Roughly half of the essays fall under the rubric of non-ideal agency. They discuss ways in which our agency is impacted by inherent psychological limitations, by the social contexts in which we act, or by different ways in which our abilities can break down. The other half fall under the rubric of non-ideal responsibility. They discuss both the modes by which we assess imperfect exercises of our agency and the ways in which common forms of assessment are themselves imperfect. In what follows, we give a brief overview of the essays, as well as how they hang together under the general theme of the volume.