Constitutive Moral Luck and Strawson's Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. HARTMAN
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
The Self ◽  
Basic Argument ◽  
Constitutive Luck

AbstractGalen Strawson's Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about true moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson gives for the self-creation requirement. Second, I argue that the self-creation requirement is so demanding that either it is an implausible requirement for a species of true moral responsibility that we take ourselves to have or it is a plausible requirement of a species of true moral responsibility that we have never taken ourselves to have. Third, I explain that Strawson overgeneralizes from instances of constitutive luck that obviously undermine true moral responsibility to all kinds of constitutive luck.

The Basic Argument and Modest Moral Responsibility

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Justin Coates
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Basic Argument

Omissions, Moral Luck, and Minding the (Epistemic) Gap

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-314
Author(s):  
Joseph Metz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
Holding Responsible ◽  
Epistemic Gap

AbstractThis paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when holding others responsible for their actions—one that we might often fail to cross.

Self, Mind and Body, Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-65
Author(s):  
Alexus McLeod
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Chinese Thought ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Role Based ◽  
Early Chinese Philosophy

Chapter 1 lays out the dominant views of self, agency, and moral responsibility in early Chinese philosophy. The reason for this is that these views inform the ways early Chinese thinkers approach mental illness, as well as the role they see it playing in self-cultivation as a whole (whether they view it as problematic or beneficial, for example). This chapter offers a view of a number of dominant conceptions of mind, body, and agency in early Chinese thought, through a number of philosophical and medical texts. It covers the Confucian view of personhood as role-based and communal, and the Zhuangist deconstructive view of the self. Finally, the chapter includes an argument that early Chinese thinkers recognized a distinction between mind and body, and that mind was dealt with as a separate category, thus making the topic of “mental illness” possible.

Hume, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Pitson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Common Life

This chapter aims to relate Hume’s discussion of liberty and necessity to central themes in his philosophy, including causation, the self, the distinction between virtue and vice, and naturalism as a response to skepticism. From this perspective, many points of contact with contemporary discussions of free will and moral responsibility emerge. Hume’s account of moral responsibility, with its implications for the conditions under which ascriptions of responsibility are withheld or qualified, is considered in detail. The notion of agent autonomy is linked to Hume’s distinction between the calm and violent passions. The kind of self-determination for which Hume allows here is distinguished from that of the libertarian and is also contrasted with the problematic notion of responsibility for self that leads to skepticism about the very possibility of moral responsibility. Hume’s appeal to “common life” provides a naturalistic response to skepticism in this, as well as in other philosophical contexts.

scholarly journals Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck

Erkenntnis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 85 (6) ◽  
pp. 1417-1436
Author(s):  
Robert J. Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Free Action ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Free Actions

Abstract Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck.

A Minimal Libertarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Unsolved Problem ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

In this book Franklin develops and defends a version of event-causal libertarianism about free will and moral responsibility. This view is a combination of libertarianism—the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the upshots of nondeterministic causal processes—and agency reductionism—the view that the causal role of agents in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agents. Many philosophers contend that event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable and robust kind of freedom and responsibility. But Franklin argues that this is mistaken. Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains. Toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self and its role in the genesis of action. If this problem proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism.

A Picture of the Self Which Supports Moral Responsibility

The Monist ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Leigh Anderson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
The Self

Hume's Theory of Moral Responsibility: Some Unresolved Matters

Dialogue ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Clarence Shole Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
The Self ◽  
Previous Time ◽  
The Individual

One reaction to the theory of moral responsibility Hume presentsis that the theory cannot be reconciled with his remarks about the self in Treatise, Book One. Hume declared a self or person to be nothing but a bundle of transient perceptions, arguing further that there is no one perception that continues invariably the same at any two moments of time. It would follow from such a view that, since one and the same bundle cannot logically exist at two distinct moments, and hence a person at t1 is distinct and different from a person at t2, it is logically impossible, even unjust, to ascribe responsibility to a person at a later time for, say, a moral crime committed at a previous time. The reason is that the individual to whom responsibility will be ascribed is the successor of the criminal and not the criminal himself. But since this runs counter to our moral practices of making accountable the perpetrators of crimes, Hume would therefore have to give up or at least revise his theory of the self if he is to discuss intelligibly the issue of individual moral responsibility.

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