Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues 295holding responsible. Because we can’t ground her responsibility in a morally
defective conscious psychological state, as our practice would have it, the pro-
posal would have us ground it in some other feature of her, perhaps a psycholog-
ical state that is not morally defective, or, more likely, a neural constitution
without a psychological correlate (Pereboom, 2016).
But it might be too quick to claim that Alessandra’s blameworthiness can’t be
grounded in a morally defective conscious psychological state. Take the case in
which a parent finds the unconscious child in the car, and feels terrible as a
result. Pereboom agrees that there is no failure of caring here, and more gener-
ally, no failure of quality of will, but there may instead be a failure of vigilance.^6
Vigilance, on his conception, is “a persisting attunement to protect, which fea-
tures, among other things, a standing disposition to respond to danger, triggered
by indications of danger in the environment.” When one first has children, after
an early accident or near- miss, parents become aware that they should set their
degree of vigilance at a higher level. Blameworthiness in the case of the child
left in the back of the car would then trace back to a past blameworthy failure to
become appropriately vigilant, where the parent was sufficiently aware of the
fact that he should set his vigilance at the higher level.
Pereboom concedes, however, that there are cases of apparent responsibility
of this sort that do not credibly trace back to a blameworthy failure to become
vigilant. Suppose a first- time parent, Matt, inhabits one of our especially safe
environments, and due to a failure in his vigilance, his child takes a fall from the
bed. For most other parents in this environment, the experience with danger that
serves as the call to become more vigilant does not involve serious harm to the
child. Matt is unfortunate, however, because in his case this call does involve
severe harm. Here we may want to hold him morally responsible. Still, we
waver. Pereboom argues that we should accept that Matt is not morally respons-
ible in the basic desert sense, rather than, say, accepting Sher’s revision to the
justificatory part of our practice. As noted in the preceding chapter, in Pere-
boom’s view our practice of holding morally responsible involves senses of
responsibility that are backward- looking insofar as they invoke desert. Matt
would be responsible only in a sense that does not invoke desert.
There are many other issues concerning responsibility for omissions that we
won’t address here. One is the question of what omissions are, precisely (Clarke,
2014b). Another is the nature of our responsibility for outcomes of omissions,
and whether they require a different sort of treatment from responsibility for out-
comes of actions (Fischer and Ravizza, 1998; Sartorio, 2005). A related question
is whether responsibility for omissions and their outcomes requires alternative
possibilities, and whether there are successful Frankfurt cases for omissions
of various sorts (Clarke, 1994; Fischer and Ravizza, 1998; Pereboom, 2016;
Sartorio, 2005).