Reasons-Responsiveness, Agents, and Mechanisms1

2013 ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Reasons Responsiveness

Autonomy and Addiction

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Levy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Extended Agency ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
Autonomous Agency ◽  
The Way

Whatever its implications for the other features of human agency at its best — for moral responsibility, reasons-responsiveness, self-realization, flourishing, and so on—addiction is universally recognized as impairing autonomy. But philosophers have frequently misunderstood the nature of addiction, and therefore have not adequately explained the manner in which it impairs autonomy. Once we recognize that addiction is not incompatible with choice or volition, it becomes clear that none of the Standard accounts of autonomy can satisfactorily explain the way in which it undermines fully autonomous agency. In order to understand to what extent and in what ways the addicted are autonomy-impaired, we need to understand autonomy as consisting, essentially, in the exercise of the capacity for extended agency. It is because addiction undermines extended agency, so that addicts are not able to integrate their lives and pursue a Single conception of the good, that it impairs autonomy.

Autonomy

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Serene J. Khader
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
The Way

This chapter explains three conceptions of personal autonomy through a discussion of two teen girls’ struggles for self-definition. Autonomy is the ability to live a life that is genuinely one’s own. Starr, the protagonist of Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give, struggles to know herself because the demands of upward mobility seem to ask her to disavow her Blackness. Kiara, the author of a blog post on oppressive beauty standards, struggles to find self-worth in a society that devalues the way she looks. The chapter discusses how coherentist, reasons-responsiveness, and socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy illuminate the girls’ lives. It also explains why autonomy should not be conceived of as the rejection of all social influence.

Defeating the Externalist’s Demons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Errol Lord
Keyword(s):  
Internal State ◽  
Perceptual Justification ◽  
Evil Demon ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Internal States ◽  
New Evil Demon Problem ◽  
Rational Status

This chapter is about the New Evil Demon problem for externalist accounts of rationality. The New Evil Demon problem plagues views that hold that what is rational is not solely determined by internal states of the agent. To solve the New Evil Demon problem one has to show that internal state duplicates—agents who share all (and only) the same internal states—always share the same rational status. This chapter argues that Reasons Responsiveness can solve the New Evil Demon problem. It is argued that even though not all internal state duplicates share the same reasons, they do always share the same rational status. The chapter also argues that Reasons Responsiveness solves several problems related to the New Evil Demon problem. These include problems about getting knowledge from falsehoods, non-veridical perceptual justification, and a problem about reacting to reasons I call the New New Evil Demon problem.

Caring, Implicit Attitudes, and the Self

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Brownstein
Keyword(s):  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Central Claim

Across both virtue and vice cases, spontaneity has the potential to give rise to actions that seem “unowned.” Agents may lack self-awareness, control, and reasons-responsiveness in paradigmatic cases. But these are actions nevertheless, in the sense that they are not mere happenings. While agents may be passive in an important sense when acting spontaneously, they are not thereby necessarily victims of forces acting upon them (from either “outside” or “inside” their own bodies and minds). The central claim of this chapter is that spontaneous actions can be, in central cases, “attributable” to agents, by which I mean that they reflect upon the character of those agents. This claim is made on the basis of a care-based theory of attributability. Attributability licenses (in principle) what some theorists call “aretaic” appraisals. These are evaluations of an action in light of an agent’s character or morally significant traits.

Responsibility

Clean Hands ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 123-167
Author(s):  
Jesse S. Summers ◽  
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Reasons Responsiveness

Responsibility admits of degrees, and Scrupulosity seems to diminish responsibility for harms caused to some degree. We focus on whether Scrupulosity provides an excuse that reduces or removes moral liability responsibility for bad actions or consequences. More precisely, we distinguish attributability, answerability, and accountability responsibility. Our question is whether someone with Scrupulosity is accountability responsible—whether it is fitting to feel anger, resentment, or indignation toward them—for harms they cause. We consider two compatibilist theories of responsibility: deep-self theories and reasons-responsiveness theories. Unlike deep-self theories, reasons-responsiveness theories can distinguish scrupulous actions by distinguishing responding to reasons from responding to anxiety. Finally, we address whether present responsibility can be traced to one’s previous bad decisions and cases in which one was clearly responsible.

Responsible Belief, Influence, and Control: Response to Stephen White

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Rik Peels ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Difference ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Control Response ◽  
The Will ◽  
Doxastic Responsibility ◽  
Epistemic Obligation ◽  
And Control ◽  
Epistemic Obligations

I reply to Stephen White’s criticisms of my Influence View. First, I reply to his worry that my Appraisal Account of responsibility cannot make sense of doxastic responsibility. Then, I discuss in detail his stolen painting case and argue that the Influence View can make sense of it. Next, I discuss various other cases that are meant to show that acting in accordance with one’s beliefs does not render one blameless. I argue that in these cases, even though the subjects act in accordance with their own beliefs, there is plenty of reason to think that at some previous point in time they violated certain intellectual obligations that led to them to hold those beliefs. Even on a radically subjective account of responsibility, then, we can perfectly well hold these people responsible for their beliefs. I go on to defend the idea that reasons-responsiveness will not do for doxastic responsibility: we need influence on our beliefs as well. Thus, doxastic compatibilism or rationalism is untenable. Subsequently, I defend my earlier claim that there is a crucial difference between beliefs and actions in that actions are often subject to the will, whereas beliefs are not. Finally, I respond to White’s worry that if one has a subjective epistemic obligation just because one believes that certain actions are epistemically bad, some people will have a wide range of absurd epistemic obligations, such as the obligation to listen to Infowars.

Practical Reasoning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Kauppinen
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Instrumental Reasoning ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
To Come ◽  
Apparent Reasons

This chapter discusses two contemporary pictures of practical reasoning. According to the Rule-Guidance Conception, roughly, practical reasoning is a rule-guided operation of acquiring (or retaining or giving up) intentions to come to meet synchronic requirements of rationality. According to the Reasons-Responsiveness Conception, practical reasoning is, roughly, a process of responding to apparent reasons. Its standards of correctness derive from what we objectively have reason to do, if things are as we suppose them to be. I argue that a version of the latter has some significant advantages. This has some surprising consequences for how we should conceive of the structure and process of instrumental reasoning in particular.

Responsibility and the Condition of Moral Sense

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Russell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Responsible Agent ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Moral Capacity

This chapter presents a thesis about necessary conditions of responsible agency that arise at the interface between (compatibilist) reason-responsive theories and Strawsonian naturalistic approaches. A number of contemporary compatibilists who accept broadly Strawsonian accounts of holding responsible, as understood in terms of moral sentiments or reactive attitudes, have also advanced accounts of moral capacity and moral agency in terms of powers of rational self-control or reasons responsiveness. These accounts do not, however, involve any reference to moral sentiments and our ability to hold agents responsible. The central thesis of this chapter is that the responsible agent (i.e. one who is capable of being responsible) must also be one who is capable of holding herself responsible. Where moral sense is lacking, rational self-control is seriously impaired or compromised.

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