Why do we have responsibility

Our experiments obviously cannot prove directly that lay people are semi-compatibilists, as we did not ask them explicitly about their views on the relationship between determinism and freedom or moral responsibility. We doubt that lay people have stable, developed, or detailed views about such abstract theoretical notions 1. Nonetheless, our studies do show that notions like reason and deliberation, which form an integral part of the necessary abilities for responsible agency according to semi-compatibilists, are in fact also positively associated with responsibility in the mind of lay people, in contrast with lay intuitions on freedom.

The gap between the intuitions of lay people, scientific results and philosophical theorizing in this respect might be less deep than often assumed. RD designed the study and analyzed the data.

TV designed the study. WS-A conceptualized the input. J-DH designed the study and supervised the data analysis. All authors wrote the manuscript. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar. Augustine Probing folk-psychology: do Libet-style experiments reflect folk intuitions about free action? Fischer, J. My way: Essays on Moral Responsibility.

Responsibility and Control a Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gazzaniga, M. London: Hachette. Jackson, F. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Kane, R. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason.

Libet, B. Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Brain Sci. Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity Readiness Potential.

Brain , — Locke, J. Mecacci, G. A reason to be free. Neuroethics 8, — Nahmias, E. Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest Stud. Surveying freedom: folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Nichols, S. Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions. Nous 41, — It certainly did for me. For a long time, alcohol was the only thing that made me happy or gave me any sense of comfort.

Of course, it was only a temporary, fleeting happiness. Once I got sober, I had to […]. It is very easy for those of us in recovery to forget where we came from — we can sometimes have a very short memory.

We suddenly forget how we started our lives in recovery — and those people who helped us along the way. Some of us can even let our ego make us […]. This had something of a positive affect — it drove my excitement and confidence in returning to a sober life. I also knew that the enthusiasm I had could be a double-edged sword, because it could […]. For a more recent defense of the response-dependent approach to responsibility, see Shoemaker b; for criticism of such approaches, see Todd Reasons-responsiveness approaches to responsibility have been particularly attentive to these issues.

Interpreted broadly, reasons-responsiveness approaches include a diverse collection of views, such as David Brink and Dana Nelkin , John M.

Jay Wallace , and Susan Wolf Fischer and Ravizza begin with a distinction between regulative control and guidance control. Guidance control, on the other hand, does not require access to alternatives: it is manifested when an agent guides her behavior in a particular direction and regardless of whether it was open to her to guide her behavior in a different direction.

A number of factors can undermine guidance control. Thus, Fischer and Ravizza characterize possession of guidance control as partially dependent on responsiveness to reasons. Guidance control also requires that an agent owns the mechanism on which she acts. In a Frankfurt case, an agent is responsible for an action even though his so acting is ensured by external factors. But the presence of these external factors means that the agent in a Frankfurt case would have acted the same no matter what reasons he was confronted with, which suggests that the responsible agent in a Frankfurt scenario is not responsive to reasons.

A strongly reasons-responsive mechanism would both recognize and respond to any sufficient reason to act otherwise But strong reasons-responsiveness cannot be required for guidance control since many intuitively responsible agents—i. On the other hand, weak reasons-responsiveness is not enough for guidance control. Fischer and Ravizza settle on moderate reasons responsiveness as the sort that is most germane to guidance control 69— Some critics focus on the contrast just noted between the conditions they impose on receptivity to reasons and those they impose on reactivity to reasons McKenna , Mele a, Watson Do our responsibility practices accommodate distinct forms of moral responsibility?

Are there different senses in which people may be morally responsible for their behavior? Contemporary interest in these possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary Watson. According to these views, a person is responsible for behavior that is attributable to her real self, and. Wolf The basic idea is that a responsible agent is not simply moved by her strongest desires, but also, in some way, approves of, or stands behind, the desires that move her because they are governed by her values or because they are endorsed by higher-order desires.

According to Wolf, one point in favor of Real Self views is that they explain why people acting under the influence of hypnosis or compulsive desires are often not responsible Since these agents are typically unable, under these conditions, to govern their behavior on the basis of their valuational systems, they are alienated from their actions in a way that undermines responsibility. But, for Wolf, it is a mark against Real Self views that they tend to be silent on the topic of how agents come to have the selves that they do.

However, Wolf argues that ascriptions of moral responsibility go deeper than such attributions can reach:. When…we consider an individual worthy of blame or of praise, we are not merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself in some more focused, noninstrumental, and seemingly more serious way.

This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose real self is the product of pressures such as a traumatic childhood that have distorted her moral vision. Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to responsibility—i. But Watson denies that these attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility assessment.

However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than attributing actions to agents. The moral demands, and potential for adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part of our accountability as opposed to attributability practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether behavior is attributable to an agent Watson [ ].

There is responsibility-as-attributability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting morally important features of her self—her virtues and vices, for example.

But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that predominantly characterize moral blame. Attributionists take moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether an action or omission, character trait, or belief is attributable to an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually means that the action or omission, etc.

However, it would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls responsibility-as-attributability. See the previous subsection for the distinction between accountability and attributability. According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior.

This means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse conditions Scanlon —85 , or if the thing for which the agent is blamed was not under her control Sher b and , A. Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior.

Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be understood as a form of moral protest Hieronymi , A. Smith , Talbert ; part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not met.

Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility mentioned in the last paragraph Levy , ; Shoemaker , a; Watson It has also been argued that the attributionist account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal Levy ; Wallace 80—1; Watson In addition, Scanlon has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame Wallace , Wolf ; a similar criticism would apply to Sher a.

However, A. JoJo was raised by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the desires e. Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing.

For detailed development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in terms of considerations of fairness, see R. The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an appropriate response.

The basic idea here is that, while morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of flouting of moral norms that grounds blame Watson [ ].

In other words, a failure to respect others, is not always an instance of blame-grounding disrespect for others, since the latter but not the former requires the ability to comprehend the norms that one violates Levy , Shoemaker Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the recent trend of conversational theories of responsibility, which construe elements of our responsibility practices as morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation.

The thought here is that to fruitfully and fully participate in such a conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the moral language of that conversation. Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility practices are internal to moral relationships that are.

For additional defenses and articulations of the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall , Miranda Fricker , and Colleen Macnamara Impairments of moral competence come in degrees. However, at the far end of the spectrum, we encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the psychopath.

In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological capacities, is entirely—or as nearly so as possible—incapable of responding appropriately to moral considerations.

This is something of a philosophical construct since real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment, corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures. And still others have argued that even those who are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long as they possess broader rational competencies Scanlon —; Talbert This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad relevance for thinking about responsibility.

If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that no one is ever morally responsible. The skeptical positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of determinism. Is there such a thing as moral luck? Consider a would-be assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird.

It seems that such a would-be assassin has good moral outcome luck that is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior.

One might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin as a result of good moral luck did not.

For important recent defenses of moral luck, see Hanna and Hartman Of course, the successful assassin is responsible for something killing a person for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be possible to argue that both are morally responsible—and presumably blameworthy— to the same degree insofar as it was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward bringing about that outcome see M.

Zimmerman and for this influential perspective. But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this option. This would-be assassin is willing to kill under favorable circumstances and so he may seem to have had good circumstantial moral luck since he was not in those circumstances. Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares their willingness to kill.

But an account that focuses on how agents would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform terrible actions under the right circumstances.

Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility ascriptions. If this is right, then perhaps,. Research reveals that participating in community service programs and learning about the importance and value of serving others can be a powerful influence on positive character development. Patriotism is an important part of good citizenship. Patriotism is love of and loyalty to our country.

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