Praiseworthiness: The Lighter Side of Moral Responsibility

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Philosophers have had a lot to say about moral blameworthiness, but much less about moral praiseworthiness. In this book Zoë Johnson King bucks the trend: she offers a conceptual framework with which to theorise about praiseworthiness in its own right, and a comprehensive theory of the types of thing for which we can be praiseworthy and the substantive conditions under which we are praiseworthy for things of each type. Johnson King argues that what we’re fundamentally praiseworthy for — what makes us good people, to the extent that we are — are what we care about and what we try to do. She then argues that we can be praiseworthy for what we successfully do and bring about to the extent that our actions are deliberate and are coming from a good place.

In developing this account, Johnson King draws on resources from moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, moral metasemantics, and philosophy of action, as well as from the philosophical literature on moral responsibility. She then uses her account to shed light on some practical issues concerning improving your own praiseworthiness by working on yourself, the prevalence of moral luck, and the impact of oppression and injustice on praiseworthiness. The final chapter turns from praiseworthiness to the ethics of praise: Johnson King takes the backlash against praise of essential workers during the pandemic as a case study that illustrates an array of pitfalls around which we must delicately skirt when attempting to praise the praiseworthy.

Zoë Johnson King, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

Zoë Johnson King is Assistant Professor at Harvard University. Johnson King obtained her BA and M.Phil from the University of Cambridge and her PhD from the University of Michigan. She also has a PGCE, having completed the Teach First programme and taught at a secondary school in Croydon in between her MPhil and her PhD. Her work has been published in many publications such as Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Oxford Studies in Metaethics.