When an unexpected catastrophe strikes or a grievous wrong is committed, human societies do not merely search for the physical chain of cause and effect; they demand to know who answered for the deed. The process of holding someone answerable is not a passive recording of natural phenomena, but an active normative determination governed by social, moral, and legal rules. Ascriptive responsibility stands at the heart of this inquiry, representing the intellectual, linguistic, and institutional mechanism through which actions, outcomes, and duties are authoritatively attributed to human agents.
Ascriptive Responsibility
1. Concise Definition
Ascriptive responsibility is the normative and linguistic imputation of an action, omission, result, or fault to an agent, establishing that the individual or collective is answerable, blameworthy, or legally liable for that conduct under a prevailing framework of rules. Unlike purely factual descriptions of physical movement or mechanical causality, ascription alters the normative status of an agent by assigning accountability, liability, or credit.
At its core, ascriptive responsibility operates through what legal philosophers term defeasibility: an action is provisionally ascribed to an actor once basic prima facie conditions are met, but that attribution remains subject to being reduced, qualified, or entirely dismissed in the presence of recognized excusing, mitigating, or justifying conditions. Consequently, to say that an agent is ascriptively responsible is not merely to report an empirical fact about what transpired, but to render a normative judgment that binds the actor to the normative consequences of their conduct.
This construct bridges moral philosophy, analytical jurisprudence, and cognitive psychology, serving as the conceptual fulcrum that separates mere physical happenings from genuine human actions subject to praise, blame, punishment, or restitution.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term derives from the Latin verb ascribere (often rendered as adscribere), formed from the prefix ad- (meaning “to” or “toward”) and scribere (meaning “to write”). In ancient Roman public and civil law, adscriptio denoted an addition in writing, the formal enrollment of a citizen into a register, or the legal assignment of an obligation or status to a specific individual. Over centuries of ecclesiastical and civil usage, the word evolved into the philosophical notion of imputation (imputatio)—the reckoning of an action to an agent's moral balance sheet.
The modern philosophical concept was formally introduced to contemporary analytical thought by the Oxford legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in his foundational 1949 paper, “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights.” Hart observed that legal language performs a performative and constitutive function rather than a purely descriptive one. Drawing on Latin legal traditions and ordinary language philosophy, Hart adopted the term “ascriptive” to characterize sentences such as “Smith did it,” contrasting them with descriptive propositions like “The water boiled.” Meanwhile, “responsibility” traces back to the Latin respondere (“to answer, promise in return”), formalizing the idea that an ascription calls upon the designated party to answer before a moral community or legal tribunal.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
Pronunciation: In International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the term is pronounced /əˈskrɪptɪv rɪˌspɒnsəˈbɪləti/ in British English and /əˈskrɪptɪv rɪˌspɑːnsəˈbɪləti/ in General American English.
Grammatical Form: Ascriptive responsibility is a compound noun phrase consisting of the classifying adjective ascriptive modifying the abstract uncountable noun responsibility.
Derived and Related Forms: The verbal root appears as to ascribe (“the court ascribed negligence to the operator”); the nominalization of the act of attributing is ascription; the philosophical doctrine defending this linguistic model is known as ascriptivism; and an agent capable of bearing such attributions is described as an ascriptive subject or morally responsible agent.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
To fully grasp ascriptive responsibility, one must distinguish between two radically different ways of viewing human behavior: the descriptive perspective of natural science and the normative perspective of social practices. When a neuroscientist records motor cortex excitation, or a physicist measures the kinetic transfer between an arm, a club, and a broken window, they are engaged in descriptive observation. They map physical causality. However, when an onlooker, a police officer, or a judge declares, “Jones assaulted Smith,” something fundamentally different occurs. The speaker is not merely detailing mechanical trajectories; they are ascribing an act to Jones, framing Jones as the author of the event, and subjecting him to the normative strictures of the community.
Ascriptive responsibility is therefore constitutive and social. In Hart's classical formulation, to ascribe an action to someone is structurally comparable to conferring a property right (“This watch is hers”) or issuing an umpire's ruling (“The runner is out”). It is an institutional judgment that attaches legal or moral liabilities to the actor. In ordinary discourse, statements attributing actions are rarely flat assertions of mechanical fact; rather, they serve to claim, accuse, demand compensation, or pass sentence. Thus, human agency itself, viewed through the lens of ascription, is not an isolated metaphysical essence hidden inside the brain, but a recognized social status defined by interpersonal rules.
A second foundational characteristic of ascriptive responsibility is its reliance on defeasible reasoning. In formal deductive logic, if premises are true, the conclusion must follow irrevocably. In normative ascriptions, however, claims are inherently open to challenge. A prosecutor or accuser puts forward a prima facie case: “Jones struck Smith.” This appears sufficient to ascribe battery. Yet the ascription remains vulnerable to a battery of distinct, non-exhaustive defeating claims: Jones may demonstrate an accident (he was shoved from behind), a mistake of fact (he believed he was striking a theatrical prop), self-defense (Smith was lunging with a knife), or incapacity (Jones suffered an epileptic seizure). Defeasibility means that responsibility is not established by checking off an exhaustive list of positive mental conditions, but by affirming prima facie agency and verifying the absence of valid defenses.
Furthermore, ascriptive responsibility operates across varying degrees of proximity. It encompasses not only direct agency—where an actor personally executes a physical deed—but also systemic, institutional, and vicarious ascriptions. Parents may be held ascriptively responsible for certain harms caused by their minor children; corporations are ascribed criminal and tort liability for the actions of their executive officers; and military commanders are ascribed liability for atrocities committed by their subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility. In every instance, the unifying thread is not direct physical causation, but a recognized normative standard that justifies attaching the deed to the designated party.
5. Historical Development
The philosophical origins of ascriptive responsibility trace back to classical antiquity. In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle laid the cornerstone for all subsequent theories of responsibility by distinguishing between voluntary (hekousion) and involuntary (akousion) actions. Aristotle identified compulsion (external force, bia) and ignorance (agnoia) as factors that defeat an attribution of blameworthiness. While Aristotle lacked the modern vocabulary of “ascriptivism,” his analysis established the prototype of defeasibility: evaluating actions by checking for excusing conditions that sever the bond between outcome and agent.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern natural law theorists formalized this insight under the doctrine of imputation (imputatio). Thinkers such as Samuel von Pufendorf and later Immanuel Kant argued that to impute an action to someone is to judge them as its free author, thereby subjecting them to the rewards or sanctions of the moral law. Kant insisted that only an autonomous rational being could be an imputatio subject, drawing a strict line between natural mechanical causation (which governs non-human animals and inanimate objects) and the moral attribution of responsibility that applies exclusively to rational wills.
The watershed moment in twentieth-century analytical philosophy occurred with H. L. A. Hart's 1949 address to the Aristotelian Society, “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights.” Hart challenged the prevailing Cartesian view in action theory—which held that an “action” equals a physical bodily movement plus an interior mental event of willing or intention. Hart contended that this model fundamentally misconstrued ordinary language and legal practice. Legal concepts like contract, trespass, and murder, Hart showed, are defeasible concepts whose primary role is to ascribe rights and liabilities. Although Hart later modified some of his linguistic claims in the 1968 collection Punishment and Responsibility following criticisms by Peter Geach, his insight regarding the normative, defeasible nature of legal imputation permanently reoriented jurisprudence.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the conversation broadened significantly through the work of moral responsibility theorists such as P. F. Strawson, Gary Watson, and T. M. Scanlon. Strawson's 1962 landmark paper “Freedom and Resentment” re-anchored ascription in participant reactive attitudes (such as resentment, gratitude, and indignation), demonstrating that holding someone responsible is an interpersonal social stance rather than an abstract metaphysical calculation. Watson further refined this landscape by distinguishing between “attributability” (evaluating an act as an expression of the agent's core values) and “accountability” (demanding answerability and applying sanctions).
6. Theoretical Foundations
Ascriptive responsibility draws its vitality from several overlapping theoretical frameworks across philosophy, law, and social psychology. In jurisprudence, it rests upon legal institutionalism and legal positivism. Law does not wait for metaphysical certainty regarding free will versus determinism; instead, it establishes authoritative criteria under which an individual is recognized as a legal subject. The legal system sets formal thresholds for capacity (e.g., reaching the age of majority, having a sound mind) and outlines precisely which elements of conduct (actus reus) and psychological culpability (mens rea) must be established before liability can be ascribed.
From the vantage point of ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, pioneered by J. L. Austin and John Searle, the attribution of responsibility is understood as an illocutionary and perlocutionary speech act. To declare “You broke that contract” or “The defendant is guilty” is not merely to describe reality; it is a performative utterance that alters social reality. It places the accused in a position of normative indebtedness, obligating them to explain, apologize, pay damages, or submit to penal sanction.
In social and cognitive psychology, the concept connects directly to attribution theory, developed by Fritz Heider, Edward E. Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley. Attribution theorists study the cognitive heuristics through which ordinary observers infer intentionality, dispositional traits, and blameworthiness from observed behavior. Psychologists distinguish between locus of causality (did internal desires or external pressure generate the event?) and ascriptions of responsibility (does the actor deserve moral sanction for that outcome?). Research reveals that human beings routinely make spontaneous, normative ascriptions that often exceed the bounds of strict causal logic.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
Ascriptive responsibility can be deconstructed into several foundational components, structural dimensions, and functional types:
- Positive Ascription Conditions: The initial factual and normative criteria required to establish a prima facie case of responsibility. These typically include voluntary bodily engagement, causal contribution to an outcome, cognitive awareness of surrounding circumstances, and minimum mental capacity.
- Negative (Defeating) Conditions: The recognized classes of counter-arguments that extinguish or diminish the initial ascription. These are broadly partitioned into:
- Justifications: Arguments demonstrating that the conduct, though prima facie wrongful, was morally or legally warranted under the circumstances (e.g., legitimate self-defense, necessity, lawful authorization).
- Excuses: Arguments demonstrating that while the deed was wrongful, the actor cannot be justly held at fault due to cognitive, volitional, or circumstantial impediments (e.g., involuntary intoxication, duress, non-culpable ignorance, acute psychiatric disorder).
- Attributability: The dimension of responsibility wherein an action or attitude is ascribed to an agent as revealing their fundamental character, evaluative commitments, or self-governance.
- Answerability: The relational dimension wherein an agent is normatively situated to provide reasons, justifications, or explanations for conduct when challenged by an authorized party.
- Accountability: The coercive or sanction-bearing dimension of ascription, authorizing a community or judicial body to impose penalties, demand restitution, or alter interpersonal relationships.
- Role-Ascriptive Responsibility: Duties and liabilities ascribed to an agent purely by virtue of occupying an institutional office or social role (e.g., ship captain, physician, corporate director, parent), irrespective of specific personal misconduct.
- Vicarious and Collective Ascription: Structural frameworks where responsibility is imputed to an entity (a partnership, a municipal government, a nation-state) for the acts of designated representatives.
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
To see ascriptive responsibility in action, consider the classic legal problem of involuntary automatism. Suppose a driver, Driver A, has no history of medical illness, drives with exemplary caution, but suddenly suffers an unpredictable epileptic seizure, veering onto a sidewalk and damaging a fruit stand. Under a purely causal analysis, Driver A caused the damage: his hands were on the wheel and his vehicle crushed the merchandise. However, under ascriptive responsibility, Driver A is not held liable in criminal law, and often not in tort law. The presence of automatism operates as a recognized defeating condition that negates voluntary agency, preventing the law from ascribing the physical occurrence to Driver A as an intentional or negligent human action.
Contrast this with a corporate fiduciary scenario. A catastrophic industrial oil spill occurs when a deteriorated pipe ruptures. The chief executive officer (CEO) was thousands of miles away at corporate headquarters and possessed no direct knowledge of the maintenance schedule for that specific segment of pipeline. From a mechanical perspective, the CEO played no direct physical role in the rupture. Nevertheless, under principles of role-based ascriptive responsibility—such as the responsible corporate officer doctrine—regulatory and criminal authorities may formally ascribe culpability to the executive. The legal system holds that the CEO assumed a systemic duty of oversight, making the failure to establish adequate monitoring protocols legally imputable to the executive office.
Another compelling contemporary case arises in algorithmic decision-making and autonomous vehicles. If a level-4 autonomous car misclassifies an obstacle during inclement weather and causes an accident, tracing descriptive mechanical causation reveals an intricate web of neural network weights, sensor signals, and road conditions. Determining ascriptive responsibility, however, requires a normative decision: should the legal system ascribe fault to the human backup driver for inadequate monitoring, to the software engineering corporation for defective algorithmic training data, or treat the event as an act of non-culpable technical misadventure? This debate illustrates that ascription is never settled by technical data alone; it requires normative boundary-setting.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Unlike continuous physical quantities such as mass or velocity, ascriptive responsibility is a discrete, normative construct assessed through structured legal doctrines, standardized psychological instruments, and forensic evaluations.
In formal legal proceedings, ascription is evaluated through structured legal burdens of proof and standardized doctrinal tests. The trier of fact (judge or jury) uses a two-stage heuristic: first, evaluating whether the prosecution or plaintiff has satisfied the positive elements of liability (e.g., intentionality, recklessness, negligence, causation); second, examining whether the defense has introduced competent evidence supporting a recognized defense (e.g., insanity under the M'Naghten rules, necessity, duress). In civil systems, codified fault principles in civil codes govern the formal imputation of liability.
In empirical and psychological research, researchers measure the cognitive processes underlying responsibility ascription using validated psychometric scales and experimental vignettes. Common instruments and paradigms include:
- The Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ): Developed by Martin Seligman and colleagues, measuring individual tendencies to ascribe causes of events to internal versus external, stable versus unstable, and global versus specific factors.
- Bernard Weiner's Causal Attribution Scale: Measures perceptions of locus, stability, and controllability to determine whether observers attribute blameworthiness and recommend punishment or sympathy.
- Experimental Moral Vignettes: Systematically manipulate an actor's epistemic state (knowledge vs. ignorance), motivational status (benevolent vs. malevolent), and outcome severity to quantify shifts in participants' willingness to ascribe blame, utilizing continuous Likert scales (e.g., 1 to 7 scales measuring blameworthiness and obligation to compensate).
10. Applications & Practical Significance
The doctrine of ascriptive responsibility has far-reaching practical consequences across multiple social domains. In criminal jurisprudence, it establishes the moral legitimacy of punishment. A justice system that punished individuals purely on the basis of causal connection—without inquiring into mental state, coercion, or capacity—would degenerate into an arbitrary engine of terror. Ascriptive safeguards ensure that punitive sanctions are applied only to agents who had the fair opportunity and cognitive capacity to conform their behavior to the law.
In organizational governance and corporate compliance, clear frameworks of ascriptive responsibility prevent the diffusion of accountability. In massive hierarchical institutions, wrongdoers frequently attempt to evade sanction by claiming they were “merely cogs in a machine.” Robust compliance structures explicitly map duties to executive roles, ensuring that regulatory failures are ascribed to high-ranking officials to maintain institutional accountability and consumer safety.
In public policy and political ethics, the doctrine underpins ministerial and administrative responsibility. In parliamentary democracies, a government minister is traditionally held ascriptively responsible for major bureaucratic failures within their department, even if the minister had no direct personal involvement in the operational blunder. This convention preserves democratic accountability by preventing political leaders from disowning public catastrophes caused by civil servants under their institutional command.
Finally, in daily interpersonal relationships, ascription governs the micro-practices of forgiveness, apology, and grievance resolution. Healthy social functioning requires individuals to distinguish between an intentional insult and an accidental slip of the tongue. When a party acknowledges ascriptive responsibility for harm caused, offers an apology, and commits to restitution, it restores social equilibrium and repairs damaged trust.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
Decades of behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy have empirically demonstrated that human beings do not ascribe responsibility as detached, objective logicians. Instead, human ascriptive processes are deeply influenced by intuitive heuristics and moral evaluations.
A landmark finding in experimental philosophy is the Knobe Effect (or the Side-Effect Effect), identified by Joshua Knobe. Knobe presented subjects with identical scenarios involving a corporate chairman who adopted a profitable program that had an inevitable side effect on the environment. When the side effect was harmful, 82% of participants ascribed intentionality to the chairman, stating that he “intentionally harmed the environment.” However, when the exact same scenario was framed such that the side effect was beneficial, only 23% judged that the chairman had “intentionally helped the environment.” This demonstrated that judgments of moral blameworthiness do not merely follow determinations of intentional agency; rather, moral appraisal retroactively drives the ascription of intentional action itself.
Further empirical validation comes from the work of Mark Alicke, who developed the Culpable Control Model of blame. Alicke's experiments demonstrated that when observers form an immediate, spontaneous negative affective reaction to an actor's character or outcome, they systematically inflate their estimates of the actor's causal control, intentionality, and foresight. Observers actively lower the threshold for ascribing full blameworthiness while discounting legitimate mitigating or excusing factors.
Similarly, neuroscientific investigations utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have highlighted the distinct neural substrates recruited during responsibility ascription. Research by Fiery Cushman and Liane Young confirms that assessments of causal outcome and mental state intent recruit distinct cortical networks—including the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) for mental state inference and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) for affective moral evaluation. These studies empirically confirm the foundational philosophical intuition: ascribing responsibility is not a mere computation of physical causality, but an integrative socio-cognitive process.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
Although the need to regulate social conduct is universal, the criteria and boundaries of ascriptive responsibility vary widely across different cultural and historical contexts. Cross-cultural psychology routinely contrasts individualistic societies (such as those in Western Europe and North America) with collectivist societies (such as those in East Asia, Latin America, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa).
In individualistic legal and moral traditions, ascription is overwhelmingly atomistic. Blame and liability are tightly restricted to the individual actor, with deep scrutiny applied to personal mental states, individual free choice, and direct internal motivations. If an individual acts entirely without internal subjective intent or negligence, Western legal traditions strongly resist ascribing criminal liability.
Conversely, collectivist and kinship-oriented traditions often incorporate substantial degrees of collective and relational ascription. In traditional societies guided by communal philosophies such as Ubuntu in Southern Africa (“A person is a person through other persons”), the boundary between individual and community is permeable. Harm committed by one member of an extended clan may be socially and financially ascribed to the kin group as a whole, requiring collective mediation and communal compensation (such as wergild or blood-money traditions historically seen in Germanic and customary legal systems). Similarly, in corporate cultures in Japan and South Korea, senior executives routinely accept moral ascription and resign for the transgressions of low-level employees as a demonstration of institutional solidarity and shared collective honor.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
Despite its theoretical utility, the concept of ascriptive responsibility has generated intense philosophical debate, facing formidable critiques from logic, metaphysics, and social theory.
The most celebrated philosophical challenge came from British logician Peter Geach in his influential 1960 critique of “Ascriptivism.” Geach argued that Hart had committed a basic logical fallacy by confusing the meaning of an assertion with its pragmatic force—an issue closely tied to the broader Frege-Geach problem. Geach pointed out that if sentences like “Smith took the watch” are purely ascriptive (analogous to passing a verdict) rather than descriptive propositions, one cannot make sense of them when they appear in unasserted conditional clauses, such as: “If Smith took the watch, he is liable to arrest.” In the conditional clause, no responsibility is yet ascribed or condemned; the proposition is merely entertained as a hypothesis. Hart eventually conceded the force of Geach's logical critique, admitting in 1968 that sentences asserting actions must possess descriptive, truth-evaluable content even while serving an ascriptive social function.
A second persistent dilemma is the problem of moral luck, articulated by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. If ascribing responsibility is supposed to track an agent's voluntary control, it is deeply troubled by the reality that human actions are ubiquitously contaminated by factors beyond an individual's control. Nagel classified constitutive luck (an individual's genetic temperament), circumstantial luck (the situations one happens to face), and resultant luck (the unpredictable consequences of one's choices). When two identical, equally reckless drivers run a red light, but one happens to strike an unexpected pedestrian while the other hits an empty street, our social and legal systems ascribe vastly different levels of criminal responsibility. Critics argue that this exposes ascriptive practices as hypocritical and fundamentally unfair.
Finally, radical advancements in behavioral neuroscience and hard determinism present an ongoing ontological challenge. Thinkers such as Robert Sapolsky argue that human behavior is the strict, deterministic product of neurochemical, hormonal, and evolutionary processes. From this hard incompatibilist standpoint, the entire apparatus of ascriptive responsibility—with its retributive language of desert, blameworthiness, and culpability—is an outdated cognitive illusion that ought to be replaced by purely preventative, therapeutic, and consequentialist public safety models.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
To avoid conceptual confusion, ascriptive responsibility must be distinguished from several closely aligned notions in ethics and legal theory:
- Causal Responsibility: Refers exclusively to the objective physical relation between an event (cause) and a subsequent state of affairs (effect). A short circuit can be causally responsible for a fire, but it cannot be ascriptively responsible, because an electrical spark is not a normative agent governed by rules.
- Moral Accountability: While closely related, accountability represents the specific relational consequence of ascription—namely, the liability to be met with demands for justification, reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation), or interpersonal sanctions. Ascription is the upstream determination that the act belongs to the agent; accountability is the downstream consequence.
- Role Responsibility: The prospective cluster of obligations and duties attached to a particular social office or position (e.g., the duty of a lifeguard to keep watch). Ascriptive responsibility is the retrospective reckoning of whether an agent fulfilled or breached those obligations.
- Liability Responsibility: The formal exposure under positive law to civil redress or criminal punishment. An individual can be ascriptively responsible in a moral sense (e.g., lying to a friend) without incurring legal liability responsibility.
- Imputability (Imputatio): The classical scholastic and Kantian prerequisite for responsibility—the metaphysical capacity of an agent to act autonomously and rationally. Imputability is the capacity to be an agent; ascription is the concrete attribution of a specific act to that agent.
15. Summary & Key Takeaways
Ascriptive responsibility remains one of the most foundational concepts organizing human moral and legal communities. The essential takeaways include:
- Ascriptive responsibility is the normative imputation of an act, omission, or consequence to a designated agent, moving beyond mere physical description to establish social and legal answerability.
- The concept relies centrally on defeasibility, meaning that responsibility attributions hold provisionally upon prima facie evidence but can be defeated by recognized justifications, excuses, or evidence of incapacity.
- Originally theorized by H. L. A. Hart and later refined by contemporary theorists of action and ethics, ascription demonstrates that human agency is partially constituted through shared social norms and speech acts.
- Ascription operates across multiple institutional tiers, from direct individual blameworthiness to role-based, vicarious, and collective accountability.
- Empirical research demonstrates that psychological ascription is driven by intuitive moral appraisals and emotional heuristics, often diverging from detached mechanical logic.
In summary, ascriptive responsibility represents the essential bridge between the physical universe of mechanical cause and effect and the normative realm of justice, duty, and human dignity. By providing the structural rules through which societies hold individuals and institutions answerable for their deeds, it ensures that human actions remain meaningful, evaluable, and bound to the collective welfare of the moral community.
References
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- Cushman, F. (2008). Crime and punishment: Substantial approach to morality. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(4), 353–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308323982
- Geach, P. T. (1960). Ascriptivism. The Philosophical Review, 69(2), 221–225. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183506
- Hart, H. L. A. (1949). The ascription of responsibility and rights. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 49(1), 171–194. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/49.1.171
- Hart, H. L. A. (2008). Punishment and responsibility: Essays in the philosophy of law (2nd ed., with an introduction by J. Gardner). Oxford University Press.
- Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190–194. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/63.3.190
- Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1–25.
- Watson, G. (1996). Two faces of responsibility. Philosophical Topics, 24(2), 227–248. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics199624222