Some Methodological Issues in Neuroethics: The Case of Responsibility and Psychopathy

There are some distinct methodological challenges, and possible pitfalls, for neuroethics when it evaluates neuroscientific results and links them to issues such as moral or legal responsibility. Some problems emerge in determining the requirements for responsibility. We will show how philosophical proposals in this area need to interact with legal doctrine and practice. Problems can occur when inferring normative implications from neuroscientific results. Other problems arise when it is not recognized that data about brain anatomy or physiology are relevant to the ascription of responsibility only when they are significantly correlated with the psychological capacities contemplated by the legal formulations of responsibility. We will demonstrate this by considering two significant cases concerning psychopathy. Some paradigms that aim at measuring higher-order capacities, such as moral understanding, have limited validity. More robust paradigms for the study of learning in restricted controlled conditions, on the other hand, have limited ecological validity across individuals and context to be of any use for the law.

Communicative discourse in the formation of a deliberative society

The article examines the relevance of communicative discourse in the period of formation and development of a modern deliberative society. The interrelations between the philosophy of discourse and communicative philosophy are justified, the stages of their development are analyzed. Modern manifestations of the communicative approach to various socio-cultural practices are considered. Mediation and dialogue are defined as basic communicative technologies. Humanitarian and moral understanding of the communicative discourse will help identify and resolve contradictions through openness and discussion that meet the needs, interests and goals of modern society.

The interval between humans: A probe into the possibilities of being

By taking as background a few examples from Japanese culture and society, as well as an ethnographic insight, this article reconsiders the way anthropology usually deals with and talks about issues regarding cultural differences in human relations. These issues, which start from the fact that different cultures articulate human relations in different ways, have as one of their main theoretical outcomes the analysis around the categories of “self” or “person.” However, within this move lies something akin to a “gestalt misconception” that reduces a shared moral understanding (human relations) to an analysis of conceptual categories and their cognitive, psychological, subjective (or other) processes. Alternatively, the article proposes a more dialogical approach informed by Gadamer’s idea of “dialog” and “fusion of horizons,” where one aims to learn from other cultures and not about them. As a result, some reflections of a philosophical, moral, and practical character are presented, leaving theoretical formulations about the “Japanese self” out of the equation. This article’s general purpose is not an exploration of “Japaneseness,” but rather a probe into the possibilities of Being.

On the Teachability of Moral

From the perspective of moral connotation and moral conditions, moral is essentially a tendency of human nature to be good, which embodies the practical wisdom of human beings. The article combines predecessors' discussion and research on moral education, and demonstrates that moral is teachable from two aspects: whether moral is innate and whether moral can be developed. Then three paths of moral education are proposed: the telling of moral stories; the development of moral education teaching materials; the awakening of cultural sympathy,in order to promote people’s moral understanding and moral practice.

A Special Case

This chapter is concerned with moral assertion. In recent years, much attention has been given to the epistemic credentials of belief based on moral testimony. Some people think pure moral deference is wrong, others disagree. It comes as a surprise, however, that while the epistemic responsibilities of the receiver of moral testimony have been closely scrutinized, little discussion has focused on the epistemic duties of the speaker. This chapter defends a functionalist account of the normativity of moral assertion. According to this view, in virtue of its function of reliably generating moral understanding in the audience, a moral assertion that p needs be knowledgeable and accompanied by a contextually appropriate explanation why p.

Moral zombies: why algorithms are not moral agents

In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons.

Moral Progress and Evolution: Knowledge Versus Understanding

The paper explores the interplay among moral progress, evolution and moral realism. Although it is nearly uncontroversial to note that morality makes progress of one sort or another, it is far from uncontroversial to define what constitutes moral progress. In a minimal sense, moral progress occurs when a subsequent state of affairs is better than a preceding one. Moral realists conceive “it is better than” as something like “it more adequately reflects moral facts”; therefore, on a realist view, moral progress can be associated with accumulations of moral knowledge. From an evolutionary perspective, on the contrary, since there cannot be something like moral knowledge, one might conclude there cannot even be such a thing as moral progress. More precisely, evolutionism urges us to ask whether we can acknowledge the existence of moral progress without being committed to moral realism. A promising strategy, I will argue, is to develop an account of moral progress based on moral understanding rather than moral knowledge. On this view, moral progress follows increases in moral understanding rather than accumulations of moral knowledge. Whether an understanding-based account of moral progress is feasible and what its implications for the notion itself of moral progress are, will be discussed.

Advising Duos and Joint Agency

This final chapter aims to show that the actions of those who trust moral advice can have moral worth. Some adviser-advisee duos are joint agents. The activity of this joint agent displays moral understanding, autonomy, and all the other goods had by individual moral agents. To show this, this chapter argues 1) that highly informal duos can exhibit joint agency, 2) that joint agents can be constituted by individuals whose contributions are highly idiosyncratic, 3) that a commander and a commandee can exhibit joint agency, 4) that an adviser and an advisee can likewise exhibit joint agency, and finally 5) that their actions can be morally evaluated and have moral worth. This chapter ends with a conclusion about the value of studying plural agency.

Moral Testimony and the Value of Moral Understanding

This chapter addresses a distinct worry about accepting moral testimony: if you cannot gain moral understanding by means of moral testimony, it is better to believe moral truths for nontestimonial reasons than for testimonial reasons. There are two distinct sorts of reasons trusting moral testimony might be unable to deliver moral understanding. The first turns on the thought that it is intrinsically bad to lack moral understanding, and so if moral testimony cannot deliver moral understanding, then forming one’s moral views on the basis of testimony is problematic. The second reason for concern relies on the thought that a lack of moral understanding is fundamentally a practical worry: those who lack moral understanding cannot act as well as those who do understand. This chapter addresses the worry about moral understanding on multiple fronts. It argues that one can indeed get moral understanding from moral testimony: when you are unsure whether some action would be wrong, but are aware of the relevant considerations, testimony whether the action would be wrong can fill this epistemic gap, putting you in a position to have quite a bit of moral understanding. Next, this chapter questions whether any residual unavailable moral understanding is as important as pessimists about moral testimony typically make it out to be. The partial understanding that moral testimony affords is nearly as valuable as complete understanding is. Moreover, even if there is something virtuous about understanding morality entirely on one’s own, there might also be something virtuous about being epistemically dependent upon the moral testimony of others, a topic explored in the next two chapters.

Psychopaths and Symmetry: A Reply to Nelkin

An agent is morally competent if she can respond to moral considerations. There is a debate about whether agents are open to moral blame only if they are morally competent, and Dana Nelkin’s “Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility” is an important contribution to this debate. Like others involved in this dispute, Nelkin takes the case of the psychopath to be instructive. This is because psychopaths are similar to responsible agents insofar as they act deliberately and on judgments about reasons, and yet psychopaths lack moral competence. Nelkin argues that, because of their moral incompetence, vices such as cruelty are not attributable to psychopaths. It follows that psychopaths are not open to moral blame since their behavior is only seemingly vicious. I have three aims in this reply to Nelkin. First, I respond to her claim that psychopaths are not capable of cruelty. Second, I respond to the related proposal—embedded in Nelkin’s “symmetry argument”—that a “pro-social psychopath” would not be capable of kindness. My responses to these claims are unified: even if the psychopath is not capable of “cruelty,” and the pro-social psychopath is not capable of “kindness,” the actions of these agents can have a significance for us that properly engages our blaming and praising practices. Finally, I argue that Nelkin’s strategy for showing that moral competence is required for cruelty supports a stronger conclusion than she anticipates: it supports the conclusion that blameworthiness requires not just moral competence, but actual moral understanding.