Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account

Abstract

In his recent article “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” David Shoemaker argues that our actual moral practices embody three distinct conceptions of responsibility and that some recent accounts of moral responsibility that draw their inspiration from the work of T. M. Scanlon fail to capture these distinct conceptions. My aim in this essay is to argue that our moral practices do not, in fact, embody three different conceptions of moral responsibility and that what Shoemaker aptly calls “responsibility as answerability” is indeed the only kind of moral responsibility there is.