ABSTRACT
In this Introduction, the author starts from a key idea behind moral responsibility: to be morally responsible means to be eligible for some form of moral assessment. It is normally an assessment of whether one has met specific moral standards or norms, and it presupposes that the conduct or action in question was the result of exercising certain agential capacities. After elaborating on this core idea, the introduction states that the topic of moral responsibility is both extremely old and distinctively new. It is extremely old, the author argues, because the various concepts closely related to moral responsibility, such as human agency, freedom, and the practices of blaming and praising, have been discussed by philosophers since antiquity. But moral responsibility is also a distinctively new, or at least genuinely modern, topic because central paradigms in the debate on responsibility have shifted since early modernity and thereby reframed the scholarship on responsibility up to this day. The author illustrates these claims with specific examples from the history of philosophy as well as contemporary scholarship, and concludes with an overview of the Handbook’s chapters.
