Abstract

In her Descartes Lectures, Cheshire Calhoun argues that responsible person is a cross-temporal, valuable status that is default in social life. Much theorizing about moral responsibility, she claims, have focused too much on one particular aspect of this status: accountability responsibility. In addition, we should recognize as part of the default status that one is compliance responsible, or disposed to live up to minimal normative expectations, as well as a responsibility taker, capable of taking the initiative to do good things that one is not morally required to do. My presentation, in preparation of a commentary on one of Calhoun’s three lectures, focuses on what we should say about the nature of responsibility taking and its relation to (i) the status of being a responsible person, (ii) negative reactive attitudes as well as positive attitudes of praise and gratitude, and (iii) normative expectations and demands.