A Study of the Concept of Moral Responsibility

The nature, scope, and conditions of moral responsibility are among the highly controversial issues in ethical studies. A significant portion of these controversies appears to arise from the ambiguity surrounding concepts like moral responsibility and free will. This research utilizes the descriptive-analytic method to analyze the concept of moral responsibility. The diverse semantic scope of the concept of moral responsibility prompts the following question: What notion of moral responsibility has led to so many disputes between compatibilists and incompatibilists? Have we not encountered the challenge where one party argues for the compatibility of causal necessity with responsibility based on the agent’s role and duty, while the other attempts to demonstrate the inconsistency and conflict between any causal predetermination and responsibility as accountability? While the initial focus of moral philosophers on issues of moral responsibility sometimes centers on three types of responsibility related to causation, duty, and moral requirement, recent works highlight two notions of responsibility concerning blameworthiness and accountability. It appears that the most precise concept of human moral responsibility towards moral requirements is "accountability."