Responsibility Gaps

Abstract

Responsibility gaps arise when there is a mismatch between the amount of responsibility that can be attributed to any person or collection of persons on leading accounts of moral responsibility and the amount that robust intuitions suggest should be allocated to someone in a case. Claimed responsibility gaps arise in numerous philosophical debates, including those concerning government, corporate, and other forms of group agency and new technologies and those concerning theoretical issues in the philosophy of responsibility. This work is an opinionated introduction to and overview of recent work on responsibility gaps. It outlines and evaluates paradigmatic responsibility gap cases and ways of understanding the phenomenon as well as the existence conditions and moral status of and possible responses to responsibility gaps. It thereby contributes to ongoing work in the philosophy of responsibility and several applied domains.