Dr Lubomira Radoilska from the Department of Philosophy has been awarded a British Academy Research Grant of £10,000 for a two-year project on ‘Reassessing Responsibility: Why Knowing What One is Doing Matters’ starting on 1 September 2015.
A central assumption in the literature on responsibility is that an action can only be responsible to the extent that its agent knows what she/he is doing. The underlying knowledge condition of responsibility is closely related to another one, the control condition, stating that a person can be held responsible only for things that are up to her/him. Both conditions seem compelling, if we focus on discrete intentional actions as primary objects of responsibility. Yet, as recent work on the practice of holding one another responsible shows, habitual behaviours and attitudes, some of which are unconsciously held, should be acknowledged as important in assessing responsibility as intentional actions. Such behaviours and attitudes do not typically satisfy the knowledge condition and, as a result, often fail to satisfy the control condition too. The proposed research will aim to address the apparent paradox that arises from widening the scope of legitimate objects of responsibility while maintaining the two standard conditions, with particular emphasis on the knowledge condition.
The British Academy provides a range of grants and fellowships to support research across the humanities and social sciences. In this case the research activities will include the organisation of a workshop and a conference, the preparation of three research papers and an edited volume on Reassessing Responsibility.
Full details of the British Academy/Leverhulme Small research grants can be found here: www.britac.ac.uk/funding/guide/srg.cfm