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This volume explores the principles that govern moral responsibility and legal liability for omissions. Contributors defend different views about the ground of moral responsibility, the conditions of legal liability for an omission to rescue, and the basis for accepting a <"duty requirement>" for omissions in the criminal law.

This edited volume of new essays explores the principles that govern moral responsibility and legal liability for omissive conduct behavior that did not occur. Many contributors here try to make sense of the possibility of moral responsibility for omissions, including those that occur unwittingly. The disagreements among them concern the grounds of moral responsibility in these cases: the constellation of states and traits that constitute the self, or the quality of one's will, or exercises of evaluative judgment, or the ability and opportunity to avoid the omission, or the tracing back to a time when one had the witting ability to take steps to avoid future omission. Some contributors consider whether omissions need to be under one's control if one is to be morally responsible for them, as well as which sense of "control" is relevant, if it is, to the question of moral responsibility. Yet others consider whether it is possible for an agent to be morally responsible for an omission that she could not have avoided. On the legal side, contributors also consider various issues concerning the status of omissions in the law: whether circumstances that are usually described as involving legal liability for omissions are better described as involving legal liability for entire courses of conduct; the conditions (such as creation of the peril) under which one can be legally liable for an omission to rescue; why a defendant's legal guilt for a crime can be predicated on an omission to act only if the defendant was under a legal duty to engage in the omitted act; and whether this "duty requirement" is grounded in the desirability of shielding from legal liability those who are not criminally culpable or in the constraint that one's body and property may not be appropriated for the general good. Included with the essays is an introduction to the topic by the volume editors. The book will be of interest to moral philosophers, philosophers of law, and other legal scholars.

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Part I. Omissions, moral responsibility, and the self. 1. Unintentional Omissions / George Sher -- 2. Omission and Attribution Error / Matthew Talbert -- 3. Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, and Responsibility / Angela M. Smith -- Part II. Omissions, moral responsibility, and control. 4. Blameworthiness and Unwitting Omissions / Randolph Clarke -- 5. Omissions, Agency, and Control / Michael J. Zimmerman -- 6. Moral Responsibility for Unwitting Omissions : A New Tracing View / Dana Kay Nelkin and Samuel C. Rickless -- Part III. Omissions, moral responsibility, and alternative possibilities. 7. The Puzzle(s) of Frankfurt-Style Omission Cases / Carolina Sartorio -- 8. Responsibility and Omissions / John Martin Fischer -- Part IV. Criminal liability for omissions. 9. Courses of Conduct / Douglas Husak -- 10. Duties to Act Triggered by Creation of the Peril : Easy Cases, Puzzling Cases, and Complex Culpability / Larry Alexander -- Part V. The duty requirement in the criminal law of omissions. 11. The Duty Requirement / Gideon Yaffe -- 12. Omissions, Acts, and the Duty to Rescue / Kimberly Kessler Ferzan.