Abstract

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on.