AIM Framework glossary
Acquisition-Graduated Responsibility Principle
Canonical definition
The principle that the attribution of full moral responsibility is graduated by whether the Individual has acquired the vocabulary that makes a motivation's source identifiable, so that responsibility is stronger where AIM Vocabulary Acquisition has occurred and weaker where it has not. The Individual remains the locus of I-Override and therefore the locus of moral agency throughout; what varies is not agency but the capacity to exercise it against a motivation Source Opacity conceals. Acquisition therefore strengthens the grounds for attribution rather than supplying an excuse, and the Acquisition-Graduated Responsibility Principle graduates responsibility on a condition that can be supplied rather than on a disposition that cannot.
Explanation
A person cannot be held fully to account for acting on a want they had no means of recognising as borrowed. The architecture destroys the source tag before any account of the want is formed, so the recognition is not something an honest person could manage by trying harder; it requires a vocabulary that has to be learned. Where that vocabulary has been acquired, the excuse closes and the responsibility is full. Where it has not, the responsibility is correspondingly weaker.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle (normative).
Derivation
Related terms
- AIM Vocabulary Acquisition
- Source Opacity
- I-Override
- Knowledge Patch
- Non-Malice Corollary
- Epistemic-Ethical Fusion Principle
- Structural Determination Principle
- Justice
- Cascading Consequences
- Burden-Reversal Principle