Contemporary Neuroscience’s Epiphenomenal Challenge to Responsibility
This paper examines a particular challenge to responsible agency thought to be mounted by contemporary neuroscience. The challenge stems from the alleged experimental demonstration that human choices, and the actions they putatively cause, are mere epiphenomena of one another, co-effects of common causes in the brain of the acting subject. Denied by this challenge is that choices cause the actions that are their objects, seemingly an indispensable requirement for there to be responsible agency. The force of this challenge is blunted by a showing that in certain cases we can control (and thus be responsible) for more than we cause—that (more specifically) we sometimes are in control of a harm that is one horn of an epiphenomenal fork by knowing of the fork’s existence and by being in control of the other horn of that fork, even while recognizing that of course there can be no causal relationship across the horns of such forks.