Date of Award

Spring 5-28-2026

Document Type

Thesis (Senior Honors)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Kenneth Walden

Second Advisor

Susan Brison

Third Advisor

Timothy Rosenkoetter

Abstract

This thesis examines the justificatory foundations of moral accountability as a social practice and the profound disconnect between our ordinary intuitions about justice, the moral attitudes we hold toward one another, and the governing institutional practices of punishment. Drawing on Stephen Darwall's second-person standpoint and P.F. Strawson's account of reactive attitudes, the paper argues that legitimate accountability presupposes two necessary conditions, freedom and equality, understood as the shared capacity of rational agents to recognize moral demands and stand in reciprocal normative relation with one another. Both conditions, however, prove deeply fragile in practice: legal institutions invoke the language of rational agency while disregarding the compulsions and deprivations that impair it, and the formal presupposition of equal moral standing obscures how structural inequality unevenly distributes the cost of moral compliance itself. oncept of moral luck, the thesis demonstrates that when material conditions systematically inhibit the development of moral agency, the desert-basis that grounds our retributive intuitions is fundamentally undermined. If the justification for blame is uncertain, the justification for the deliberate infliction of harm through punishment becomes even more difficult to sustain. The paper therefore argues that distributive justice must serve as a precondition for legitimate accountability, and that restorative principles may not merely an attractive alternative to punishment but a morally necessary one.

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