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Mapping Responsibility
Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture
Herbert Fingarette
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
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