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IntroductionPeople who have thought long and hard about the requisites for moral responsibility are still in deep disagreement. While some feel strongly that determination of choices and actions by causes outside the agent's control undermines responsibility, i others think that what is relevant is how that action relates to the agent at the time of choice, not how the agent came to be such that she chose the way she did.ii And many disagree about whether luck of various kinds is compatible with moral responsibility and to what extent responsible actions must be fully determined by rational deliberation.iii As we will see, some of the most important arguments supplied in these controversies are effective insofar as they lead us to focus on certain aspects of the cases discussed at the expense of others: to focus on the agent's motivation and deliberation as a cause of the action, or to focus on elements of luck or the existence of prior causes. Some of these arguments tend to provoke skepticism about moral responsibility as they elicit intuitions undermining our ordinary ascriptions of responsibility; other arguments have the opposite effect. what to think about moral responsibility if we were clearer about why we react the way we do to these arguments, and why our reactions vary. To this end, we will do three things. THE EXPLANATORY COMPONENT OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 2First, we will present and motivate a psychological hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility, a hypothesis according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments.Second, we will show how this model can account not only for factors that affect the degrees to which we assign moral responsibility in ordinary life, but also for the sometimes contradictory judgments that people make in response to two of the most important skeptical arguments in the philosophical debate. Put briefly, the model can account for these phenomena because explanatory judgments are relative to explanatory interests and perspectives, and because explanatory perspectives are affected by changes in focus.Finally, we will suggest that the perspective relativity of responsibility judgments has important methodological consequences for the debate about moral responsibility. Ultimately, it provides support for judgments of responsibility that rely on everyday perspectives while undermining those that rely on perspectives induced by skeptical philosophical arguments. The three components of moral responsibilityThere are two reasons to take the psychological hypothesis that we will propose here seriously. The most important reason, ultimately, and the one that we will focus on throughout most of this paper, is that the hypothesis explains both everyday responsibility judgments and judgments made in response to philosophical arguments. The other reason is that we can expect something like it to be correct given the role that judgments of moral responsibility play in our lives. The latter, etiological, reason is more speculative, but since it also serves to in...