Responsibility and Desert

In Responsibility & Desert, Michael McKenna defends a theory of moral responsibility that explains the relationship between a wrongdoer and those who blame or punish on analogy with a conversation between speakers of a shared language. In central cases, blame functions like a conversational reply to another whose act bears a meaning revealing the morally objectionable quality of her will. But such blaming responses can be harmful. McKenna defends the thesis that they can nevertheless be justified in terms of desert, and he resists several criticisms of desert-based justifications for blame and punishment.