ABSTRACT
Strawson suggests that responsibility has to do with being an appropriate target of certain natural human attitudes. Furthermore, these attitudes are only appropriately directed towards other moral agents—that is, towards beings who are capable of undertaking and understanding moral behavior. There are lots of things that probably have to be true of someone in order for him to be a moral agent. There is a lot of philosophical literature on this issue, but suffice it to say that most philosophers agree that moral agency at least requires certain cognitive abilities. Dogs, cats, and very young children, for example, while clearly agents with desires, motives, and so forth, probably do not qualify as moral agents because they lack certain intellectual capacities. Coming up with conditions for responsibility is a harder task than it might seem, and there will probably never be a complete consensus amongst philosophers.
