2025 Mala & Solomon Kamm Lecture: Susan Wolf on "Responsibility and Punishability"

Moral philosopher Susan Wolf gave the 2025 Mala and Soloman Kamm Lecture in Ethics. Her lecture, titled "Responsibility and Punishability," explores how historically, responsibility has tended to be identified with the status in virtue of which someone may deserve punishment and reward. Since the appearance of P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” responsibility has also come to be associated with the status in virtue of which reactive attitudes can be appropriate. Wolf's paper argues that these two ways of thinking about responsibility come apart: Punishment-justifying responsibility is either two deep or too shallow to constitute interpersonal responsibility (the status that qualifies one for “the participant stance” and for reactive attitudes). What is needed to be an appropriate object of punishment or reward is not the same as what is needed to be an appropriate object of blame or praise.


About Susan Wolf:

Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emerita, where she taught from 2002 till 2022. Earlier, she taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University. She received her B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from Yale University in 1974, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978.

Wolf was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. She has held fellowships at Oxford, and the Australian National University; she served as President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) in 2010-11; she delivered the Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam in 2018 and the Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 2023. In 2004-07 she was honored with the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and in 2022 she received the Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.

Wolf works chiefly in ethics and its close relations in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Her interests range widely over moral psychology, value theory, and normative ethics. She has made contributions to our understanding of the nature and plurality of value, the importance of moral virtue, the possibility of freedom and responsibility in a deterministic world, and the pursuit of meaning in life. Some of her most notable works include “Moral Saints”, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford, 1990), Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton, 2010), and The Variety of Values: Essays on
Morality, Meaning, and Love (Oxford, 2015).