JoJo’s story illustrates a difficult conundrum. When are people morally responsible for their actions? The Deep Self View of moral responsibility holds that responsibility is about authenticity: if an action reflects who you truly are, you're responsible for it. But are we really morally responsible for actions that express our deepest self, if that self was formed in a morally corrupted environment not of our own making? Philosopher Susan Wolf argues that authenticity alone isn't enough. In her influential essay “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” Wolf introduces the idea of moral sanity. According to Wolf, true responsibility requires the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to moral reasons. So for Wolf, JoJo is less than fully responsible, because his distorted upbringing prevents him from properly grasping right and wrong.

Underlying this debate is a perennial philosophical question: Does moral responsibility require the freedom to do otherwise? Philosophers call this idea the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. This question sits at the heart of the long-standing debate between compatibilists—who believe free will and determinism can coexist—and incompatibilists—who deny this. For an accessible overview of this debate, check out two Crash Course Philosophy videos on YouTube: this one and this one. The ancient Stoics were among the first to argue that a fully deterministic material universe is compatible with moral responsibility.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously challenged the Principle of Alternate Possibilities using creative examples known as Frankfurt Cases, showing that people might still be morally responsible even when they couldn't have done otherwise. For an engaging introduction, see this 1000-Word Philosophy entry on Frankfurt’s argument.

But how far should we take the idea that our upbringing can determine our later moral accountability? Does growing up in a morally compromised environment reduce—or even eliminate—our responsibility, as Susan Wolf argues? Philosopher Gideon Rosen tackles questions like these on the Philosophy Bites podcast and explores when ignorance of various kinds might “excuse” wrongdoing.

Philosopher Galen Strawson provocatively argues that moral responsibility might be impossible altogether. According to Strawson, we act as we do because of how we are. But then genuine moral responsibility would require us to have somehow created ourselves, especially our mental and moral character, from the ground up. But this, he argues, is impossible: any attempt to explain how one became the sort of person one is will always trace back to factors beyond one’s control. And introducing randomness or indeterminacy doesn’t help, since we cannot be morally responsible for chance events either.

For other examples of skepticism about moral responsibility, see this entry.If moral responsibility is an illusion, why does it still feel so real in everyday life? Galen Strawson’s father, another philosopher named P.F. Strawson, offers a provocative and enduring answer in his classic essay “Freedom and Resentment.” Rather than trying to resolve the metaphysical puzzle of whether determinism and free will are compatible, Strawson shifts focus to the lived reality of human relationships. He argues that our moral practices are shaped by “reactive attitudes”—emotions like resentment, gratitude, and forgiveness—which presuppose that others are responsible agents. These attitudes arise from the participant standpoint, the perspective from which we see others not as mere objects in the causal order but as fellow persons with whom we stand in relationships of expectation and demand. Though we can sometimes suspend this perspective—say, when someone suffers from a psychological impairment—Strawson insists that our capacity to relate to others through these attitudes is too deeply embedded in human life to be eliminated by abstract theoretical doubts. On this view, moral responsibility is something woven into the fabric of our interpersonal lives, regardless of where we come down on the issue of causal determinism.