ABSTRACT
McKeown-Green refers to contemporary accounts attempting to render the culpable/excusable distinction intelligible, Frankfurt's and Watson's included, as executive control theories. A theory of executive control should also pay due respect to the Naturalistic Suspicion that author continuous with physical reality – that all doings can be explained, insofar as they are explicable at all, by physical processes together with whichever deterministic or probabilistic laws govern them. This chapter considers three axes and argues that none of them contributes informatively to an account of the culpable/excusable contrast. They are: The axis of ownership, The axis of authenticity, The axis of participation. Responsibility, or some generalization of it, can be attributed to any item which figures centrally in causal explanations. Moral responsibility is just a special case. Much of the activity of (causal) agents, animate and otherwise, is subject to the institution and enforcement of criteria for success.
