Responsible Suspension and the Limits of Immediate Moral Assessment A Structural Challenge to Strawsonian, Reasons-Responsive, and Answerability Theories of Responsibility

Abstract Contemporary theories of moral responsibility—most prominently Strawson’s reactive attitudes framework, Fischer and Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness account, and Scanlon’s answerability model—share a common assumption: that moral evaluation is, in principle, immediately applicable to agents once relevant facts about action and agency are available. This paper challenges that assumption by introducing the notion of responsible suspension, the claim that certain forms of moral judgment are not merely difficult or defeasible but structurally inappropriate unless prior epistemic and agential conditions are met. I argue that responsibility attribution is not a direct function of social response, control sensitivity, or justificatory accessibility, but depends on whether the agent’s structural condition permits non-distortive evaluation. The result is a revisionary constraint on when responsibility attributions are epistemically and normatively warranted.