Conclusion

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.

Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility

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.

Choices Without Choosers

Existentialists are often accused of painting a bleak picture of human existence. In this chapter, Neil Levy contends that, in the light of contemporary cognitive science, the picture is not bleak enough. And, although there are grounds for thinking the picture bleaker than existentialists suggest, he argues that it is not hopeless. The unified self that serves as the ultimate source of value in an otherwise meaningless universe may not exist, but we can each impose a degree of unity on ourselves. The existentialists were sociologically naïve in supposing a degree of distinction between agents and their cultural milieu that was never realistic. We are thrown into history, culture, and a biological and evolutionary history which we never fully understand and can only inflect, all without foundations and lacking even the security of knowing the extent to which or what we choose. Existentialism must face ontological, epistemological, and axiological insecurity.

Autonomy, nudging and post-truth politics

In his excellent essay, ‘Nudges in a post-truth world’, Neil Levy argues that ‘nudges to reason’, or nudges which aim to make us more receptive to evidence, are morally permissible. A strong argument against the moral permissibility of nudging is that nudges fail to respect the autonomy of the individuals affected by them. Levy argues that nudges to reason do respect individual autonomy, such that the standard autonomy objection fails against nudges to reason. In this paper, I argue that Levy fails to show that nudges to reason respect individual autonomy.

THE EPISTEMIC ANALYSIS OF LUCK

Duncan Pritchard has argued that luck is fundamentally a modal notion: an event is lucky when it occurs in the actual world, but does not occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. Jennifer Lackey has provided counterexamples to accounts which, like Pritchard's, only allow for the existence of improbable lucky events. Neil Levy has responded to Lackey by offering a modal account of luck which attempts to respect the intuition that some lucky events occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. But his account rejects that events which are as likely as those in Lackey's examples are lucky. Instead, they are merely fortunate. I argue that Levy's argument to this effect fails. I then offer a substitute account of the improbability condition which respects this intuition. This condition says that the relevant notion of probability for luck is epistemic.

Conscious Propositional Attitudes and Moral Responsibility

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.