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Mapping Responsibility
Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture
Written for philosophers as well as general readers interested in social and moral issues, Mapping Responsibility is a thoughtful exploration of the ambiguous terrain of moral responsibility. As a philosophical idea, responsibility poses vexing questions: What does it mean to be a responsible person—that is, one who is justly held accountable and possibly punishable for an action? In exploring this and other important questions, author Herbert Fingarette employs an interdisciplinary range of ideas. He uses the theoretical standpoints of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and psychoanalytic psychology and also taps into legal scholarship on criminal justice to discuss retribution, punishment, and the state.
"Mapping Responsibility brings together Fingarette's central themes—identity, self-deception, responsibility, and suffering—in thirteen chapters written over five decades. . . . What Fingarette does better than any of his philosophical contemporaries, perhaps better than anyone in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, is to read the classics of pre-modern and non-western traditions. His close reading of how Confucius's Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Job deal with suffering and distress, humility and action, illuminate the inevitable frustration of the modern western insistence on self-assertion."
—G. Scott Davis, Lewis T. Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics, The University of Richmond, and author of Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue
"Herbert Fingarette has long been one of the most original and provocative philosophers in America. . . . This is a wonderful book, bringing together some of the best thoughts of a bold and distinguished thinker."
—From the Foreword by Robert C. Solomon, author of From Rationalism to Existentialism and Living with Nietzsche