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  1. Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...)
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  • Is There Such a Thing as Genuinely Moral Disgust?Mara Bollard - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):501-522.
    In this paper, I defend a novel skeptical view about moral disgust. I argue that much recent discussion of moral disgust neglects an important ontological question: is there a distinctive psychological state of moral disgust that is differentiable from generic disgust, and from other psychological states? I investigate the ontological question and propose two conditions that any aspiring account of moral disgust must satisfy: it must be a genuine form of disgust, and it must be genuinely moral. Next, I examine (...)
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  • Psychiatric fictionalism and narratives of responsibility.Sam Wilkinson - 2022 - Philosophical Explorations 26 (1):91-109.
    I explore the relationship between psychiatric fictionalism and the attribution of moral responsibility. My central claim is as follows. If one is a psychiatric fictionalist, one should also strongly consider being a fictionalist about responsibility. This results in the ‘intrinsic view’, namely, the view that mental illness does not just happen to interfere with moral responsibility: that interference is an intrinsic part of the narrative. I end by discussing three illustrative examples.
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  • Conscience as the rational deficit of psychopaths.Marijana Vujošević - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (8):1219-1240.
    I develop here a Kantian framework for understanding conscience in order to examine whether moral flaws of psychopaths are traceable to their dysfunctional conscience. When understood as the reflective capacity for moral self-assessment that triggers certain emotional reactions, conscience proves to be a fruitful tool for explaining psychopathic moral incompetence. First, I show how the unrealistic moral self-assessment of psychopaths affects their competence in judging moral issues and in being motivated to act morally. I then highlight how focusing on this (...)
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  • Identifications, Volitions and the Case of Successful Psychopaths.Somogy Varga - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (1):87-106.
    While many profound philosophical questions arise about psychopaths, I wish to draw attention to two limitations in current debates. First, philosophers mainly deal with offender and forensic populations neglecting so-called ‘successful’ psychopaths. Second, philosophers mainly focus on the issue of empathy and responsibility, while relatively little attention is paid to volitional aspects. I address these two limitations together and argue that ‘successful’ psychopaths are volitionally constrained. In order to grasp and explore this deficiency, I argue in favour of a more (...)
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  • Justification, coercion, and the place of public reason.Chad Van Schoelandt - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (4):1031-1050.
    Public reason accounts commonly claim that exercises of coercive political power must be justified by appeal to reasons accessible to all citizens. Such accounts are vulnerable to the objection that they cannot legitimate coercion to protect basic liberal rights against infringement by deeply illiberal people. This paper first elaborates the distinctive interpersonal conception of justification in public reason accounts in contrast to impersonal forms of justification. I then detail a core dissenter-based objection to public reason based on a worrisome example (...)
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  • Reasons-Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility: The Case of Autism.Nathan Stout - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):401-418.
    In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Empirical evidence suggests that (...)
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  • Conversation, responsibility, and autism spectrum disorder.Nathan Stout - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (7):1-14.
    In this paper, I present a challenge for Michael McKenna’s conversational theory of moral responsibility. On his view, to be a responsible agent is to be able to engage in a type of moral conversation. I argue that individuals with autism spectrum disorder present a considerable problem for the conversational theory because empirical evidence on the disorder seems to suggest that there are individuals in the world who meet all of the conditions for responsible agency that the theory lays out (...)
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  • Response-Dependent Responsibility; or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Blame.David Shoemaker - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (4):481-527.
    This essay attempts to provide and defend what may be the first actual argument in support of P. F. Strawson's merely stated vision of a response-dependent theory of moral responsibility. It does so by way of an extended analogy with the funny. In part 1, it makes the easier and less controversial case for response-dependence about the funny. In part 2, it shows the tight analogy between anger and amusement in developing the harder and more controversial case for response-dependence about (...)
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  • Qualities of will.David Shoemaker - 2013 - Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2):95-120.
    One of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when (...)
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  • Some Methodological Issues in Neuroethics: The Case of Responsibility and Psychopathy.Luca Malatesti & John McMillan - 2021 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (4):681-693.
    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 (...)
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  • Psychopaths and blame: The argument from content.Neil Levy - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):351–367.
    The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation (...)
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  • Psychopaths and blame: The argument from content.Neil Levy - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):351-367.
    The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation (...)
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  • Are psychopaths moral‐psychologically impaired? Reassessing emotion‐theoretical explanations.Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (2):177-193.
    Psychopathy has been theorized as a disorder of emotion, which impairs moral judgments. However, these theories are increasingly being abandoned as empirical studies show that psychopaths seem to make proper moral judgments. In this contribution, these findings are reassessed, and it is argued that prevalent emotion‐theories of psychopathy appear to operate with the unjustified assumption that psychopaths have no emotions, which leads to the hypothesis that psychopaths are completely unable to make moral judgments. An alternative and novel explanation is proposed, (...)
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  • Psychopathy and internalism.Victor Kumar - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):318-345.
    Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples (...)
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  • Neuropsychology and the Criminal Responsibility of Psychopaths: Reconsidering the Evidence.Marko Jurjako & Luca Malatesti - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (5):1003-1025.
    Recently it has been argued that certain neuropsychological findings on the decision-making, instrumental learning, and moral understanding in psychopathic offenders offer reasons to consider them not criminally responsible, due to certain epistemic and volitional impairments. We reply to this family of arguments, that collectively we call the irresponsibility of the psychopath argument. This type of argument has a premise that describes or prescribes the deficiencies that grant or should grant partial or complete criminal exculpation. The other premise contends that neuropsychological (...)
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  • Instrumentalism about Moral Responsibility Revisited.Anneli Jefferson - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276):555-573.
    I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...)
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  • On Blaming and Punishing Psychopaths.Marion Godman & Anneli Jefferson - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1):127-142.
    Current legal practice holds that a diagnosis of psychopathy does not remove criminal responsibility. In contrast, many philosophers and legal experts are increasingly persuaded by evidence from experimental psychology and neuroscience indicating moral and cognitive deficits in psychopaths and have argued that they should be excused from moral responsibility. However, having opposite views concerning psychopaths’ moral responsibility, on the one hand, and criminal responsibility, on the other, seems unfortunate given the assumption that the law should, at least to some extent, (...)
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  • The good, the bad, and the ugly: three agent-type challenges to The Order of Public Reason.Gerald Gaus - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (3):563-577.
    In this issue of Philosophical Studies, Richard Arneson, Jonathan Quong and Robert Talisse contribute papers discussing The Order of Public Reason (OPR). All press what I call “agent-type challenges” to the project of OPR. In different ways they all focus on a type (or types) of moral (or sometimes not-so-moral) agent. Arneson presents a good person who is so concerned with doing the best thing she does not truly endorse social morality; Quong a bad person who rejects it and violates (...)
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  • Constructivist and ecological modeling of group rationality.Gerald Gaus - 2012 - Episteme 9 (3):245-254.
    These brief remarks highlight three aspects of Christian List and Philip Pettit's Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents that illustrate its constructivist nature: its stress on the discursive dilemma as a primary challenge to group rationality and reasoning; its general though qualified support for premise-based decision-making as the preferred way to cope with the problems of judgment aggregation; and its account of rational agency and moral responsibility. The essay contrasts List and Pettit's constructivist analysis of group (...)
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  • The Selves and the Shoemaker: Psychopaths, Moral Judgement, and Responsibility.Stephen Finlay - 2011 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1):125–133.
    David Shoemaker argues from (A) psychopaths’ emotional deficiency, to (B) their insensitivity to moral reasons, to (C) their lack of criminal responsibility. This response observes three important ambiguities in this argument, involving the interpretation of (1) psychopaths’ emotional deficit, (2) their insensitivity to reasons, and (3) their moral judgements. Resolving these ambiguities presents Shoemaker with a dilemma: his argument either equivocates or it is falsified by the empirical evidence. An alternative perspective on psychopaths’ moral and criminal responsibility is proposed.
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  • Moral Appraisal for Everyone: Neurodiversity, Epistemic Limitations, and Responding to the Right Reasons.Claire Https://Orcidorg Field - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (3):733-752.
    De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...)
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  • At least you tried: The value of De Dicto concern to do the right thing.Claire Https://Orcidorg Field - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (9):2707-2730.
    I argue that there are some situations in which it is praiseworthy to be motivated only by moral rightness de dicto, even if this results in wrongdoing. I consider a set of cases that are challenging for views that dispute this, prioritising concern for what is morally important in moral evaluation. In these cases, the agent is not concerned about what is morally important, does the wrong thing, but nevertheless seems praiseworthy rather than blameworthy. I argue that the views under (...)
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  • Autonomous Military Systems: collective responsibility and distributed burdens.Niël Henk Conradie - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (1):1-14.
    The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will most (...)
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  • Organizational and Moral Portraits of Responsibility.Robert Albin - 2022 - Journal of Human Values 28 (3):221-233.
    This article aims to argue in favour of two different kinds of responsibility: moral and organizational. I present the notion of moral responsibility and, specifically, moral accountability, which stands at the centre of the later discussion. I address Coleen Macnamara’s view of accountability, a model of enforcement involved in setting demands and sanctions. Then I account for some cases of morally impaired persons’ failure to respond adequately to moral demands, in contrast to their capacity to respond effectively to organizational demands. (...)
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  • Moral responsibility.Andrew Eshleman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...)
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  • “Psychopathy, Moral Reasons, and Responsibility”.Erick Ramirez - 2013 - In Alexandra Perry C. D. Herrera (ed.), Ethics and Neurodiversity.
    In popular culture psychopaths are inaccurately portrayed as serial killers or homicidal maniacs. Most real-world psychopaths are neither killers nor maniacs. Psychologists currently understand psychopathy as an affective disorder that leads to repeated criminal and antisocial behavior. Counter to this prevailing view, I claim that psychopathy is not necessarily linked with criminal behavior. Successful psychopaths, an intriguing new category of psychopathic agent, support this conception of psychopathy. I then consider reactive attitude theories of moral responsibility. Within this tradition, psychopaths are (...)
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  • The societal response to psychopathy in the community.Marko Jurjako, Luca Malatesti & Inti Angelo Brazil - 2022 - International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 66 (15):1523–1549.
    The harm usually associated with psychopathy requires therapeutically, legally, and ethically satisfactory solutions. Scholars from different fields have, thus, examined whether empirical evidence shows that individuals with psychopathic traits satisfy concepts, such as responsibility, mental disorder, or disability, that have specific legal or ethical implications. The present paper considers the less discussed issue of whether psychopathy is a disability. As it has been shown for the cases of the responsibility and mental disorder status of psychopathic individuals, we argue that it (...)
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  • On Theorizing about Public Reason.Gerald Gaus - 2013 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 9 (1):64-85.
    This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the idea of moral truth (...)
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  • Is it OK to Make Mistakes? Appraisal and False Normative Belief.Claire Field - 2019 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    Sometimes we make mistakes, even when we try to do our best. When those mistakes are about normative matters, such as what is required, this leads to a puzzle. This puzzle arises from the possibility of misleading evidence about what rationality requires. I argue that the best way to solve this puzzle is to distinguish between two kinds of evaluation: requirement and appraisal. The strategy I defend connects three distinct debates in epistemology, ethics, and normativity: the debate over how our (...)
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  • Brain Pathology and Moral Responsibility.Anneli Jefferson - 2022 - In Matt King & Joshua May (eds.), Agency in Mental Disorder: Philosophical Dimensions. Oxford University Press.
    Does a diagnosis of brain dysfunction matter for ascriptions of moral responsibility? This chapter argues that, while knowledge of brain pathology can inform judgments of moral responsibility, its evidential value is currently limited for a number of practical and theoretical reasons. These include the problem of establishing causation from correlational data, drawing inferences about individuals from group data, and the reliance of the interpretation of brain findings on well-established psychological findings. Brain disorders sometimes matter for moral responsibility, however, because they (...)
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  • Empathy and Moral Judgment.Antti Kauppinen - 2017 - In Heidi Maibom (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Empathy. Routledge.
    Empathic feelings seem to causally influence our moral judgments at least sometimes. But is empathy necessary for our ability to make moral judgments? And is it a good thing if our judgments are based on empathy? This chapter examines the contemporary debate on these issues.
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  • Psychopathy: Philosophical and Empirical Challenges.Marko Jurjako, Luca Malatesti & John McMillan - 2018 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 14 (1):5-14.