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

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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals CAPACITY, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE CRIMINAL LAW

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
James Slater
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Control Theory ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Capacity Theory ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Complete Account

This article is concerned with the conflict between two theories of moral responsibility for wrongdoing, one of which I shall term the shallow capacity theory and the other the self-control theory. This conflict is of interest for two reasons. First, and fundamentally, it is important from the perspective of moral philosophy: in this regard, I will argue that the shallow capacity theory is incomplete, and as a result inferior to the self-control theory, which offers a complete account of moral responsibility for wrongdoing. Secondly, given the criminal law’s interest in moral responsibility and blame, I will argue that the self-control theory offers two important insights for the criminal law, insights that the shallow capacity theory does not provide. First, it offers the most accurate understanding of the moral significance of killing under provocation, and thus the best framework for understanding the partial defence of provocation. Secondly, it demonstrates that there is a need in the criminal law for a defence based on radical impairment of an agent’s capacity for self-control, and in so doing offers a vital insight into the notion of a partial denial of moral responsibility. It should be noted that these insights for the criminal law emerge from those features of the self-control theory that make it superior to the shallow capacity theory as a theory of moral responsibility.

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.

Relation And Responsibility

1998 ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Chelsea H. Snelgrove
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Self In Relation

This paper evaluates some philosophical views regarding the self who is an ethical deliberator and agent-specifically the traditional atomistic individualist self and the expanded biocentric self of deep ecology. The paper then presents an alternative manner of thinking about the ethical self which avoids some of the philosophical difficulties of the foregoing views. This alternative draws on the recent work by Val Plumwood and Donna Haraway. Haraway's cyborg identity is a kind of self-in-relation (Plumwood's term) which allows for ethical deliberations that take relations with others seriously without losing individuality in problematic holism (as deep ecology does). Self-in-relation is defined by the relation of intentional inclusion. This relation is given a functionalist, non-mentalistic interpretation. The notions of ontological foresight and moral foresight are introduced to enable determinations of moral responsibility without falling back into the problematic universalism which otherwise results from the functionalist view of cyborg self-in-relation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document