Abstract
Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for morally responsible agency. I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility.
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Notes
Obviously, EC1 and EC2 are closely related and there is a potential overlap as the conscious control of action can plausibly be taken to involve the conscious initiation of action. Nevertheless, the two claims can be distinguished from each other insofar as they are based on distinct strands of empirical research.
The empirical challenge to moral responsibility has received much attention, but not much detailed analysis. It has usually been addressed by way of addressing the challenge to free will, and the two challenges have often not been clearly distinguished. See Libet (1999); Wegner (2002); Greene and Cohen (2004); Roskies (2006); and many of the contributions to Pockett et al. (2006); Baer et al. (2008); Sinnott-Armstrong and Nadel (2011). Doris (2002) and Nelkin (2005) focus on the challenge to moral responsibility, but their discussion is restricted to the challenge from EC4.
Cases that involve severe addiction are more complicated, but we can ignore this issue here.
Note the difference between this case and cases of indirect (or derived) responsibility, such as drunk driving. Indirect responsibility is grounded in earlier acts for which one is directly responsible. This cannot be said about the present case, for it is not clear that the omission of not indicating a lane change can be traced back to earlier acts. We assume that you have a habit of not indicating, but you may not have done anything to acquire this habit.
I shall assume here for the sake of argument that the conscious events that proximately preceded the movements were conscious intentions. I should note, however, that this assumption has also been questioned. For instance, Keller and Heckhausen (1990, 359) suggested that the conscious events in question were the result of the “selective attention” to look for an urge to move, which was, in turn, induced by the artificial setup and the instructions of the experiment. They suggested, in other words, that the conscious events in question were neither intentions nor conscious events that precede ordinary actions.
Libet and his followers assumed such a strong conception of free will (Libet 1999; Wegner 2002). Some philosophers think that free choices can be conditioned by antecedent states and events only if the conditioning is not deterministic (Kane 1998; O’Connor 2000; Pereboom 2001; Clarke 2003). Others, including myself, think that free will is compatible with deterministic causation as well. In any case, the point here is merely that it seems at least prima facie plausible to require unconditioned control for free will.
According to Fischer and Ravizza (1998), reason-responsiveness can be analyzed in terms of counterfactual conditionals. I am sympathetic to this view, but here I presume only the weaker claim that the truth of certain counterfactuals counts as evidence for reason-responsiveness.
Note that it would not seem to be particularly difficult to gather this kind of evidence. With respect to the position effect, for instance, it would be interesting to see what happens in cases where there are clear qualitative differences. This would provide a contrast class that may tell us something interesting about our responsiveness to the relevant reasons.
As Nelkin (2005) points out, the challenge here does not stem from the thesis of situationism (EC4) itself, but from the empirical evidence for this view.
As pointed out in Sect. 5, ACC appears to be the best candidate for establishing a plausible connection between moral responsibility and conscious control. Should ACC be untenable, then so are the empirical challenges to moral responsibility from conscious control.
I am setting aside here the difficult question of whether imprisonment and other forms of legal punishment are effective means for the regulation of behavior and society—this is a separate issue.
According to Fischer and Ravizza (1998), reason-responsiveness requires that there is an understandable pattern of counterfactual scenarios in which the agent recognizes the relevant reason and that there is at least one possible world in which the agent acts on that recognition (69–81). This account would seem to support my claim that the degree of reason-responsiveness is sufficiently robust in the cases in question.
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Acknowledgments
The research for this article was funded by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Earlier versions were presented at the 38th Conference on Value Inquiry (Salem State University), a workshop on Responsibility and Neuroscience (Institute of Philosophy, London), and a research meeting at the University of Leiden. I would like to thank the participants at these meetings for their helpful comments, and I am especially grateful to Neil Levy for very helpful written comments on an earlier draft.
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Schlosser, M.E. Conscious Will, Reason-Responsiveness, and Moral Responsibility. J Ethics 17, 205–232 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9143-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9143-0