Conscious Propositional Attitudes and Moral Responsibility

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 585-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Peters
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Conscious Decision ◽  
Neil Levy

By drawing on empirical evidence, Matt King and Peter Carruthers (2012) have recently argued that there are no conscious propositional attitudes, such as decisions, and that this undermines moral responsibility. Neil Levy (2012, forthcoming) responds to King and Carruthers, and claims that their considerations needn’t worry theorists of moral responsibility. I argue that Levy’s response to King and Carruthers’ challenge to moral responsibility is unsatisfactory. After that, I propose what I take to be a preferable way of dealing with their challenge. I offer an account of moral responsibility that ties responsibility to consciously deciding to do X, as opposed to a conscious decision to do X. On this account, even if there are no conscious decisions, moral responsibility won’t be undermined.

Consciousness and Moral Responsibility, by Neil Levy.

Mind ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 124 (496) ◽  
pp. 1328-1332
Author(s):  
George Sher
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Neil Levy

Autism, Metacognition, and the Deep Self

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-464
Author(s):  
NATHAN STOUT
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorders ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Cognitive States ◽  
Satisfactory Account ◽  
Spectrum Disorders ◽  
Metacognitive Abilities

ABSTRACT:Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive conceptions of the deep self are implausible insofar as they fail to give a satisfactory account of the responsibility of persons with autism.

scholarly journals Is Free Will Scepticism Self-Defeating?

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Ought Implies Can ◽  
Strong Connection

Free will sceptics deny the existence of free will, that is the command or control necessary for moral responsibility. Epicureans allege that this denial is somehow self-defeating. To interpret the Epicurean allegation charitably, we must first realise that it is propositional attitudes like beliefs and not propositions themselves which can be self-defeating. So, believing in free will scepticism might be self- defeating. The charge becomes more plausible because, as Epicurus insightfully recognised,there is a strong connection between conduct and belief—and so between thecontent of free will scepticism (since it is about conduct) and the attitude of believing it. Second, we must realise that an attitude can be self- defeating relative to certain grounds. This means that it might be self-defeating to be a free will sceptic on certain grounds, such as the putative fact that we lack leeway or sourcehood. This charge is much more interesting because of the epistemic importance of leeway and sourcehood. Ultimately, the Epicurean charge of self-defeat fails. Yet, it delivers important lessons to the sceptic. The most important of them is that free will sceptics should either accept the existence of leeway or reject the principle that ‘“ought” implies “can”’.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-206
Author(s):  
Oisín Deery
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
Free Actions ◽  
Neil Levy ◽  
Shed Light

This concluding chapter summarizes the central claims of the book. Additionally, it argues that the HPC natural-kind view about free actions has the resources to address various empirical threats to free will. For example, Neil Levy has argued that recent findings about how implicit biases affect actions threatens free will and moral responsibility. However, the natural-kind view defuses this threat, including Levy’s version of it. The chapter also shows how the natural-kind view can shed light on emerging questions about whether artificially intelligent agents might ever act freely or be responsible for their actions, and if so in what sense. Finally, the chapter sketches some findings indicating that folk thinking may actually assume something like the natural-kind view.

Effects, Parallels, Progress

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Streumer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Sharp Distinction

This chapter first describes the effects of coming close to believing the error theory. It then sketches how certain other philosophical views can also be defended by arguing that we cannot believe these views: scepticism about moral responsibility, eliminativism about propositional attitudes, scepticism about truth, and dialetheism. The chapter also explains how philosophers should modify their methodology if there can be true philosophical theories that we cannot believe. It concludes that we should not reject a philosophical theory because it is literally hard to believe: to make progress in philosophy, we should make a sharp distinction between a theory’s truth and our ability to believe it.

scholarly journals Deconstructing Questions: Reanalyzing a heterogenous class of speech acts via commitment and engagement

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Johannes M. Heim ◽  
Martina E. Wiltschko
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
The Common

Direct and indirect characterizations of the relation between clause type (syntactic form) and speech act (pragmatic function) are problematic because they map oversimplified forms onto decomposable functions. We propose an alternative account of questions by abandoning any (in)direct link to their clause type and by decomposing speech acts into two variables encoding propositional attitudes. One variable captures the speaker’s commitment to an utterance, another their expectation toward the addressee’s engagement. We couch this proposal in a syntactic framework that relies on two projections dedicated to managing common ground (GroundP) and managing turn-taking (ResponseP), respectively. Empirical evidence comes from the conversational properties of sentence-final intonation in English and sentence-peripheral particles that serve to manage the common ground.

A Role for Consciousness After All

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Levy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
The Common ◽  
Responsible Behaviour ◽  
The Right

In a recent paper in this journal, Matt King and Peter Carruthers argue that the common assumption that agents are only (or especially) morally responsible for actions caused by attitudes of which they are conscious needs to be rethought. They claim that there is persuasive evidence that we are never conscious of our propositional attitudes; we ought therefore to design our theories of moral responsibility to accommodate this fact. In this reply, I argue that the evidence they adduce need not worry philosophers. There is an ongoing debate over the role that consciousness of our attitudes plays in morally responsible behaviour, but the evidence they produce does not favour either side. Even if we are not conscious of our propositional attitudes as such – even if we lack introspective access to their content – we nevertheless reliably come to know their content. There are systematic differences between those attitudes of whose content we come to be aware and those we do not, and these differences are directly relevant to our moral responsibility. Moreover, coming to be aware of the content of our attitudes has effects on our behaviour, and these effects are directly relevant to our moral responsibility. The causal route whereby we come to be conscious of the content of our attitudes is irrelevant to whether they play the right kinds of roles to distinguish between actions for which we are responsible and actions for which we ought to be excused.

Moral Responsibility Ain't Just in the Head

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHELLE CIURRIA
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Intentional States

Abstract:In this paper, I dispute what I call psychological internalism about moral responsibility, which comprises most classic accounts as well as newer neurobiological ones, and I defend psychological externalism about moral responsibility instead. According to psychological internalism, an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely or primarily by her intentional states. I argue that psychological internalism is empirically challenged by recent findings in social psychology and cognitive science. In light of the empirical evidence, I contend that moral responsibility depends on historical and environmental factors to a much greater degree than previously appreciated. Thus, moral responsibility is not just in the head: indeed, it is much less in the head than typically assumed.

scholarly journals Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Moral Environment ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
And Control ◽  
Neil Levy

Philosophical theorizing about moral responsibility has recently taken a “social” turn, marking a shift in focus from traditional metaphysical concerns about free will and determinism. Yet despite this social turn, the implications of structural injustice and inequalities of power for theorizing about moral responsibility remain surprisingly neglected in philosophical literature. Recent theories have attended to the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of moral responsibility practices, and the role of the moral environment in scaffolding agential capacities. However, they assume an overly idealized conception of agency and of our moral responsibility practices as reciprocal exchanges between equally empowered and situated agents. The essays in this volume systematically challenge this assumption. Leading theorists of moral responsibility, including Michael McKenna, Marina Oshana, and Manuel Vargas, consider the implications of oppression and structural inequality for their respective theories. Neil Levy urges the need to refocus our analyses of the epistemic and control conditions for moral responsibility from individual to socially extended agents. Leading theorists of relational autonomy, including Catriona Mackenzie, Natalie Stoljar, and Andrea Westlund develop new insights into the topic of moral responsibility. Other contributors bring debates about moral responsibility into dialogue with recent work in feminist philosophy, and topics such as epistemic injustice, implicit bias and blame. Collectively, the essays in this volume reorient philosophical debates about moral responsibility in important new directions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document