DOI: 10.4324/9781003282242-47 442 Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. Margaret Atwood, based on a student survey. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960–1982 Introduction Thomas Scanlon (1998: 248) distinguishes attributive responsibility, which concerns moral appraisal and attributions of praise and blame, from substantive responsibility, which con- cerns what we owe to each other. These come apart, for example, when we criticize others for being work-shy but help them bear the consequences of this conduct. Cost-bearing or liability is what matters to distributive justice and is the focus here in discussing behaviors that are “gendered” or characteristic of one sex. 1 Social constructivists attribute gender patterns to socialization alone, while others attrib- ute them to evolutionary pressures, because, as Frans de Waal (2022: 25) stresses in his recent book on gender, the same patterns are found in (i) most other mammals, (ii) young children, (iii) diverse cultures, and (iv) diverse millennia. Evolutionary explanations include not just anatomical variation but behavioral changes. For example, to be less visible, a species may become darker, nocturnal, or both. Some such behaviors are not transmitted genetically but learned. This makes socialization an important part of some evolutionary explanations. What makes them evolutionary is the mechanism: chance variation and natu- ral (and sexual) selection cause certain genes to spread. Our genes afect our conduct our entire lives, and social facts, such as stress in pregnancy, may afect individuals before birth. To simplify matters, however, philosophers often call “natural” or “biological” whatever happens before birth, and “social” whatever happens afterwards. Having clarifed our terms, we can now ask why a behavior’s social or natural origin should afect whether we can be held responsible for it. For example, some argue that while justice requires eliminating social inequalities, such as those emerging from discrimi- nation and indoctrination, eliminating natural inequalities is less justifed (Nagel 1997). Others deem eliminating natural inequalities equally justifed but more difcult, because 35 RESPONSIBILITY AND GENDER Paula Casal