Moral Harm and Moral Responsibility: A Defence of Ascriptivism

This paper investigates the relations between the concepts of moral harm and moral responsibility, arguing for a circularity between the two. On this basis the conceptual soundness of descriptivism, on which consequentialist and non-consequentialist arguments are often grounded, is questioned. In the last section a certain version of ascriptivism is defended: the circularity is relevant in order to understand how a restricted version of ascriptivism may in fact be well founded.