  Bradley begins his study of morality and the moral agent with an analysis of the ordinary person’s understanding of moral responsibility. The reason for this starting-place is revealed much later, when he argues that children are not moral creatures until they have developed a measure of self-consciousness. This, he says, makes possible “imputation and responsibility, and here begins the proper moral life of the self” (Ethical Studies, p. 299). If an action has any moral significance whatsoever then the person responsible (in the causal sense) can be held accountable (responsible in the normative sense). One could feel accountable to other people, to God or to one’s own conscience, and with this goes a sense of liability to censure or punishment. Actually being guilty and thereby deserving of censure or punishment requires the satisfaction of three conditions: the person held accountable must be the same person as the one who did the act, the act must have been that person’s, and he or she must have had some understanding of the moral quality of the act. While not in a position to provide a philosophical opinion on questions concerning personal identity or what constitutes an action, the ordinary person nevertheless recognizes cases in which an accused person was “not himself” or “did not mean to do it” or acted under duress, and sees these as mitigating circumstances. In sum, the ordinary person’s view, as Bradley presents it, is Aristotelian: for the purposes of determining moral responsibility an act has to be the agent’s in that its origin (arche) lies with or in the agent in some sense—and the agent must not be acting under coercion or in a state of non-culpable ignorance. These last conditions reflect the common view that one cannot, in justice, hold someone accountable unless she had a measure of control over the situation and thereby could be viewed as acting of her own free will.