AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Reason-Responsiveness Theories of Moral Responsibility (RRT) posits that the control necessary for moral responsibility depends on an agent's sensitivity to reasons. However, Situationist experiments present evidence that situational factors, rather than reasons, predominantly shape behavior. This paper contends that RRT cannot adequately address these challenges. After critiquing two common yet failed defenses—namely, the rarity of situational influences and the view that situational factors qualify as reasons—I discuss about RRT's usage of the Aristotelian Ethical Method (AEM), which suffers from selective application and epistemic overconfidence in attributing reason-responsiveness. Moreover, even when reason-responsiveness is capable to be captured by non-ideal cognizer, it remains irrelevant to the causal explanation of actions in situationist scenarios as a modal property. Finally, RRT falls short of meeting the Authority Demand, as it provides no authoritatively normative reason by its failure to justify a moral fact of the grounding relation between reason-responsiveness and moral responsibility.