scholarly journals The limits of the neuroscience of moral responsibility

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Daniel de Vasconcelos Costa
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Readiness Potential ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Psychological Capacities

The findings of the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet are among the most discussed in moral philosophy. They present a clear challenge to the notion of intentional action as a consciously chosen action. According to them, the awareness of the decision to act by the subjects of his studies came only after the moment of preparedness of the action in our brains, called “readiness potential”. Many, including Libet, saw these results as an evidence that we do not have free will nor moral responsibility. The aim of this article is to criticize the claim that moral responsibility would be in danger because of the Libet’s findings. First, the concept of free will as intentional action will be explained in order to understand how the notion of being conscious in deciding when and how to act is relevant. Then, the findings from Libet’s experiments and the argument of how they could be a challenge to the notions of free will and of moral responsibility are presented. At the end, it will be argued that the notion of moral responsibility involves more than psychological capacities, but, foremost, the attribution of social roles in a moral community.

Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Hieronymi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Metaphysics Of Morals ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment” is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. This book closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, the book carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between “reactive” and “objective” responses to the actions and attitudes of others, the book turns to its central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. The book finds the two common interpretations of this argument, “the simple Humean interpretation” and “the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation” both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, the book concludes that the argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's “social naturalism.” The final chapter defends this naturalistic picture against objections. The book sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. It also features the complete text of Strawson's “Freedom and Resentment.”

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred R. Mele
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Free Action ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Standard Terminology

This chapter introduces key concepts and provides a preview of the book. Featured concepts include action, action-individuation, intention, intentional action, and free will. Some standard terminology in the literature on free will is introduced, including agent causation, compatibilism, determinism, incompatibilism, and libertarianism. The notion of free action central to the book is identified as moral-responsibility-level free action—free action of such a kind that if all the freedom-independent conditions for moral responsibility for a particular action were satisfied without that sufficing for the agent’s being morally responsible for it, the addition of the action’s being free to this set of conditions would entail that he is morally responsible for it.

Direct and Indirect Freedom in Addiction: Folk free will and blame judgments are sensitive to the choice history of drug users

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Taylor ◽  
Heather M. Maranges ◽  
Susan K. Chen ◽  
Andrew Vonasch
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Addictive Substance ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Moral Blame

People view addiction as a source of diminished free will and free will as a requisite to moral responsibility. Accordingly, people should judge addicts as less blameworthy when they act immorally. Yet, people are also sensitive to the personal histories of moral actors, such that the way by which people became addicted may influence these judgments. That is, people’s intuitions may track two types of choices: directly free acts are volitionally unconstrained during the moment of action, whereas indirectly free acts result from temporally prior directly free acts. Across two studies (N=806), we compare people’s moral intuitions about cases in which the actor becomes addicted by force or by choice. We find that perceptions of reduced free will partially mediate an association between choice (vs. no choice) in addiction and moral blame for a bad act (Study 1). We replicate this pattern with another case, and show that blame judgments are stronger when the bad act is related (vs. unrelated) to obtaining the addictive substance (Study 2). Our work highlights that lay people evince relatively nuanced intuitions about the role of free will in addiction and morality, tracking direct and indirect freedom when doling out moral blame.

The Role and Location of Indeterminism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
Basic Action ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Libertarian Theory ◽  
The Moment

According to incompatibilists, free will and moral accountability exist only in nondeterministic worlds. But which ones? Where exactly must indeterminism be located, and what role must it play to make room for the possibility of freedom and accountability? This chapter evaluates three possible libertarian answers—non-action-centered accounts, nonbasic action-centered accounts, and basic action-centered accounts—and argues that libertarians should embrace a basic action-centered account that locates indeterminism at the moment of basic action (e.g., choice). Central to this chapter is showing that the source of the major problems with Kane’s event-causal libertarian theory can be traced to his problematic conception of the role and location of indeterminism and that we can avoid these problems by embracing the alternative conception developed in minimal event-causal libertarianism.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Reactive Attitudes

The essay offers an interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” on which attributions of moral responsibility presuppose a practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions, and what explains the practice is our liability to such reactive attitudes as resentment and indignation. The interpretation is offered to correct a common misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay. On this common misinterpretation, attributions of moral responsibility are implicit in the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, and consequently our liability to these attitudes cannot explain these attributions. The reason this is a misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay is that Strawson’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem requires that our liability to the reactive attitudes be conceptually prior to our attributions of moral responsibility.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Quality Of Will ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Standing To Blame

This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

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