According to Mele & Sverdlik moral responsibility doesn't require intention or intentionality. Negligence is an example of a case when intention may not be present but moral responsibility is still assigned. Moreover, intention can exist without intentionality (as when you have the intention to skip class to arrive early to the ski resort, but accidentally you sleep in and do not go to class)

Hamilton is most interested in the issue of causal vs. moral responsibility. What one intends to do and what one is capable of doing are key to determining the type of responsibility. If I did not intend to hit a pedestrian with my car, but I did so, I am causally, although not morally, responsible.

Weiner focuses on the controllability of an action and even more specifically, whether the action is controllable in principle or in practice. This issue is discussed in more detail below.

Finally, Nelson-Le Gall asserts that to have intention you have to foresee the outcome. Therefore, if an individual was incompetent s/he might be able to "intend" to drive a car into a group of pedestrians, but not be able to foresee the outcome of that action. Nelson-Le Gall would therefore not define the action as intentional.

Assigning responsibility: Taxonomy

In assigning responsibilities we follow several rules, including whether the act was intentional or not, whether the agent had the intention or not, and others. This leads to a categorization such that an act (we use the term act in a colloquial sense here) can be intended or unintended.

1) Intended acts can be justified or not. For example, the dentist producing pain is an intended act, but it has a good justification.

2) Unintended acts can be divided using several dichotomies:

a) controllable vs. uncontrollable
b) preventable vs. unpreventable
c) foreseeable vs. unforeseeable

There is some amount of overlap between these dichotomies. Controllable acts can be further categorized as controllable in principle or controllable in practice. In the latter case there an expectation that the subject will control, but in the former there is not. Expectations (in the form of obligations, duties) are critical in attributing moral responsibility.

Social or cultural factors in the attribution of responsibility

Expectations are immersed within an ecology of cultural and social practices. Those practices also dictate the locus of responsibility. In a society where drunk driving is tolerated, the locus of responsibility may be focused on the pedestrian. If you are a pedestrian, you should be smart enough to be careful when crossing the street, because the street is a dangerous place, where cars are driven by people who might not be able to stop.

Assignment of responsibility: Role of counterfactuals

When assigning responsibilities we focused in those parts that are perceived as most changeable (e.g., If only you would have cited the editor's work in your paper, he would have accepted the manuscript). Thus, counterfactuals play an important role in the attribution of responsibility (you could have done something else, and you should have done something else). Counterfactuals are used to assess preventability.

Choice and responsibility

In assigning responsibility we weigh how much freedom the actor had to make the decision. Inner city kids might not have much choice but to do what they do. All choices are constrained, but there are different levels of constraint, the extreme case being having a gun on your head.

To assign responsibility we assess the state (mental, physical) of the actor at the time. The actor might not have had much choice (e.g., a drunk driver who unintentionally and without intention kills somebody). We also backtrack to the actions that trigger the action of interest (e.g., the actor did have choice of not getting drunk). When we don't find enough controllability in the primary cause (e.g., some cases of mental insanity) we refrain from attributing moral responsibility. This does not imply that in those cases we do not penalize the actor. We sometimes do (as in the cases of animals that attack, or other cases in which we do not attribute moral responsibility), but we do so to compensate the damaged part.

Causes and consequences as factors for responsibility

When assessing moral responsibility we consider not only the context of the action but also the content. Thus, you are not morally responsible for giving your friend's wallet to somebody when s/he is putting a gun to your head, but you are (or you might) be morally responsible for killing the whole city when somebody puts a gun to your head. Once again, these decisions are embedded in the social web. If you live in a society where giving in to threats is unacceptable, then handing over the wallet might not be acceptable. This emphasis in social expectations is troublesome, since it seems to leave no room for universal claims of what is right or wrong (or at least no room for universal claims of when someone is responsible or not).

Finally: Religious beliefs may be refinement on our folk psychology, sharing with folk psychology a core of ideas. But religious beliefs also may have several incompatibilities with folk psychology. For example, according to our folk psychology, there is no third person access to our thoughts, but when people pray they expect God to understand them without direct verbal interchanges.