Moral responsibility is centered on the idea that, given some conditions, people deserve blame or credit, punishment or reward. At least according to traditional readings, moral responsibility presupposes free will, understood as the ability to choose independently of previous events. The achievements of neuroscience in recent decades make a very good case for the hypothesis that the mind is a material entity, a subset of the electrochemical activity of the brain. However, if the mind is a material entity, then it (...) is subject to physical laws. According to some interpretations, this entails the affirmation of determinism and the denial of free will and moral responsibility. This article reviews some of those achievements and their likely impact on the attributions of moral responsibility. The first section presents evidence from lesion studies, imaging techniques and direct electrical stimulation of the brain and argues that the convergence of results from these methods supports the hypothesis that the mind is the activity of the brain. The next section concentrates on studies that are usually taken as directly threatening free will – Libet’s experiments and the apparent mental causation theory. The third section turns to the implications of these findings for moral responsibility, explaining determinism, epiphenomenalism, libertarianism, hard determinism and compatibilism. Finally, the last section defends that the requirement of free will as a precondition for moral responsibility should be replaced by the requirement of more naturalistic properties, such as behavioral flexibility, self-control and natural autonomy.Key words: moral responsibility, ethics, neuroscience, neuroethics, autonomy. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

Modern life is full of examples of environmentally-mediated “group harms” – what Derek Parfit describes as harms produced by “what we all do together.” Typically, the harms are unintended and arise from the uncoordinated actions of many individuals. Their actions ordinarily are not inherently wrong, no one’s action causes harm to an identifiable individual, and prevention of the expected harm is unlikely unless all, or nearly everyone, reduce or cease to engage in activities that collectively and cumulatively result in harm. (...) Unless the individual’s action is likely to make a difference to the outcome, it is often argued that it is not clear what, if anything, makes it wrong or a breach of personal moral responsibility. Activities that result in climate change and agricultural practices commonly employed within the global system of food production are prominent examples. There are several well-known strategies for dealing with such cases, but often they rest on idealized assumptions regarding the impact that one individual can have, provide answers suitable only in counterfactual circumstances, or rely on the kinds of principles of justice that make it difficult to identify clearly and address directly many important moral problems. The task of this chapter is to examine these strategies and propose alternative freestanding practical principles that can guide our efforts to address the world as we find it and explain the sense of wrongness individuals often experience. (shrink)

Taylor Cyr offers a novel argument against, as he puts it, “all versions of historicism” about direct moral responsibility. The argument features constitutive luck and a comparison of manipulated agents and young agents performing the first actions for which they are morally responsible. Here it is argued that Cyr’s argument misses its mark. Alfred Mele’s historicism is highlighted.

This book goes beyond historical and psychological explanations of the Holocaust to directly address the moral responsibility of individuals involved in it. While defending the view that individuals caught up in large-scale historical events like the Holocaust are still responsible for their choices, he provides the philosophical tools needed to assess the responsibility, both negative and positive, of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, victims, helpers and rescuers. This book will be an important addition to courses on the Holocaust in social (...) and political philosophy, history, religion, and applied ethics. (shrink)

The problem of induced pro-attitudes is simply this: why is action which ultimately issues from pro-attitudes such as desires, volitions, and goals, induced by techniques such as direct manipulation of the brain, hypnosis, or “value engineering,” frequently regarded as action for which its agent cannot be held morally responsible? The problem is of interest for several reasons. Ferdinand Schoeman, for instance, believes that the problem poses a resolvable but challenging predicament for compatibilists: if agents can be held (...) class='Hi'>morally responsible for actions that are causally determined, then why should actions that result from induced pro-attitudes be regarded as paradigmatically unfree actions for which agents cannot be held morally accountable? Robert Kane exploits the problem to launch a libertarian attack on compatibilists. He says that a covert non-constraining controller controls the will of another agent by arranging “circumstances beforehand so that the agent wants and desires, and hence chooses and tries, only what the controller intends.” Kane claims that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent behaves freely and those in which an agent falls prey to the covert non-constraining control of some other party. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Moral responsibility theorists divide over whether facts about holding someone morally responsible are dependent on facts about being morally responsible, or whether the dependence relation runs in the other direction. A novel answer, proposed by Michael McKenna, is that neither side depends on the other. Instead, they are interdependent. Call this the ‘interdependence thesis’. A worry is that the interdependence thesis violates formal principles of metaphysical dependence in terms of ground. This paper analyses and defends the (...) interdependence thesis, interacting with recent work in the metaphysics of grounding. I vindicate the interdependence thesis from the charge that it violates the formal principles of metaphysical grounding. I then pull from recent work in communication theory and apply it to McKenna's ‘conversational theory of moral responsibility’, in order to respond to two new objections. One upshot is that I advance the conversational theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility allegedly circumvents any appeal to the principle of alternate possibilities—persons are morally responsible for having done something only if they could have avoided doing it—to secure this species of incompatibilism. In this paper, having outlined Peter van Inwagen's elegant version of the Direct Argument, I critically discuss Michael McKenna's recent responses to the argument. I then cast doubt on the argument by constructing counterexamples to a rule of (...) inference that it invokes. (shrink)

This article explores the significance of agents’ histories for directly free actions and actions for which agents are directly morally responsible. Candidates for relevant compatibilist historical constraints discussed by Michael McKenna and Alfred Mele are assessed, as is the bearing of manipulation on free action and moral responsibility.

Is moral responsibility essentially historical? Consider two agents qualitatively identical with respect to all of their nonhistorical properties just prior to the act of A-ing. Is it possible that, due only to differences in their respective histories, when each A-s only one A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so? Nonhistorical theorists say “no.” Historical theorists say “yes.” Elsewhere, I have argued on behalf of philosophers like Harry G. Frankfurt that nonhistorical theorists can resist the historical theorists’ (...) case against them, and that, therefore, a nonhistorical thesis remains a live option. Nevertheless, I have remained officially agnostic in this debate, as I acknowledge the pull of the competing considerations speaking on behalf of each view. In what follows, I turn from defending the nonhistorical position to fashioning a new historical theory, a relatively modest one that captures what is especially gripping about the kinds of examples that seem to commend an historical conclusion. (shrink)

I argue that we are sometimes morally responsible for having and using (or not using) our concepts, despite the fact that we generally do not choose to have them or have full or direct voluntary control over how we use them. I do so by extending an argument of Angela Smith's; the same features that she says make us morally responsible for some of our attitudes also make us morally responsible for some of our (...) concepts. Specifically, like attitudes, concepts can be (a) conceptually and rationally connected to our evaluative judgments, (b) in principle subject to rational revision (reasons‐responsive), and (c) the basis for actual and potential moral assessments of people that we have good reasons to endorse. Thus, we are open to moral appraisal on the basis of having and using (or not using) our concepts when they reflect our evaluative judgments, though even then it is not always appropriate to praise or blame us on that basis. (shrink)

In this rejoinder to the foregoing responses to my article ‘Moral education in the community of inquiry’, I address what I take to be the four most fundamental objections to my proposed expansion of the community of inquiry (CoI) method. My proposal is that we make room in the CoI for directive teaching of moral standards we know to be justified or unjustified, in addition to nondirective teaching of moral standards whose justificatory status is unknown. The four objections I consider (...) are: (i) that the dominant conception of the CoI method already permits directive moral teaching; (ii) that permitting directive moral teaching in the CoI would edge out other valuable kinds of inquiry; (iii) that all moral standards are controversial; and (iv) that the task of distinguishing justified and unjustified moral standards from controversial ones is unreasonably demanding. I argue that none of these objections is successful. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that since artworks cannot take moral responsibility, it is impossible to establish any sort of ethical criticism towards them for their own sake. Ethical criticism of art is inevitably directed at the artist(s), who can take moral responsibility for creating or performing the art in certain ways. Therefore, we should distinguish between two types of criticism towards art: (1) the ethical criticism should be contextualized within the author-work framework, meaning that the extent to which the (...) author can take moral responsibility will significantly affect the ethical criticism of art, while artworks can serve as acts or evidence of acts (of the author) in ethical criticism; (2) ‘ethical’ criticism of art for the work’s own sake should be excluded from the ethical issue and instead reconstructed in the causal issue. (shrink)

While it is well recognized that many everyday consumer behaviors, such as purchases of sweatshop goods, come at a cost to the global poor, it has proven difficult to argue that even knowing, repeat contributors are somehow morally complicit in those outcomes. Some recent approaches contend that marginal contributions to distant harms are consequences that consumers straightforwardly should have born in mind, which would make consumers seem reckless or negligent. Critics reasonably reply that the bad luck that my innocent (...) purchase contributes distantly to harm provides insufficient grounds for moral blame; moreover, such distant and seemingly inevitable collective effects are not by themselves obvious reasons for agents to refrain from acting. Granting these criticisms, I argue that the harm that agents do through knowing contributions to distant collective harm actually builds on the morally sparse agential phenomenology of everyday purchases and decisions: contributors who knowingly disregard distant harms, rather than being reckless or negligent about consequences they should have foreseen, very directly perpetuate the moral invisibility and the lack of recognition from which the global poor generally suffer. This provides agents with clearer moral reasons to refrain from knowing participation in unstructured collective harms, and clearer reason to bear them in mind in acting. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Gerbert Faure’s Vrije wil, moraal en het geslaagde leven (Free Will, Morality, and the Well-lived Life). I summarize and elucidate Faure’s argument. My criticisms are directed primarily at the first chapter of the book, in which Faure develops what he regards as a Strawsonian account of free will and moral responsibility. Faure denies that we have free will; I argue that Strawsonians should not deny this. Faure argues that, although we do not have free will, (...) it is often justified to hold others responsible, because we owe it to the victim(s) of a wrong to hold the perpetrator responsible; it is our moral duty. I argue that we only have a moral duty to hold perpetrators responsible if they are morally responsible. I also comment on the way in which Faure presents Strawson’s distinction between theory and practice. (shrink)

I argue against two of the most influential contemporary theories of moral responsibility: those of Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer. Both propose conditions which are supposed to be sufficient for direct moral responsibility for actions. (By the term direct moral responsibility, I mean moral responsibility which is not traced from an earlier action.) Frankfurt proposes a condition of 'identification'; Fischer, writing with Mark Ravizza, proposes conditions for 'guidance control'. I argue, using counterexamples, that neither is sufficient for direct moral (...) responsibility. -/- My counterexample cases are based on recent research in psychology which reveals many surprising causes of our actions. Some of this research comes from the field of situationist social psychology; some from experiments which reveal the influence of automatic processes in our actions. Broadly, I call such causes 'subverting' when the agent would not identify with her action, if she knew all the causes of the action. When an action has subverting causes, the agent is not directly morally responsible for it, even though she may meet the conditions specified by Frankfurt and Fischer. -/- I also criticise the theories of Eddy Nahmias and John Doris, who have both engaged specifically with the threats posed to moral responsibility by situationist research. Against Doris and Nahmias, I argue that their conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient for direct moral responsibility. -/- My final objective is to argue that there are many everyday actions for which we mistakenly hold agents morally responsible. I review evidence that there are many everyday actions which have subverting causes. Many of those are actions for which we currently hold agents morally responsible. But I argue that, in many of those same actions, the agents are not in fact morally responsible – they bear neither direct nor traced moral responsibility. (shrink)

In “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment” Angela Smith defends her nonvoluntarist theory of moral responsibility against the charge that any such view is shallow because it cannot capture the depth of judgments of responsibility. Only voluntarist positions can do this since only voluntarist positions allow for control. I argue that Smith is able to deflect the voluntarists’ criticism, but only with further resources. As a voluntarist, I also concede that Smith’s thesis has force, and I close with a compromise position, (...) one that allows for direct moral responsibility for the nonvoluntary, but also incorporates a reasonable control condition. (shrink)

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 help. To regard such agents as worthy of one of these reactions is to ascribe moral responsibility to them on the basis of what they have done or left undone. (These are examples of other-directed ascriptions of responsibility. The reaction might also be self-directed, e.g., one can recognize oneself to be blameworthy). Thus, to be morally responsible for something, say an action, is to be worthy of a particular kind of reaction —praise, blame, or something akin to these—for having performed it.[1.. (shrink)

This work presents an "actual-sequence" model of moral responsibility. In contrast to many traditional views, an "actual-sequence" model holds that ascriptions of moral responsibility do not necessarily depend upon whether agents are free to pursue alternative courses of action; rather what is important is what the agents actually do, and how their actions come to be performed. ;Part One of this work sketches an actual-sequence theory that associates moral responsibility with control. I motivate this approach through a series of "Frankfurt-type" (...) examples which illustrate that even though agents lack alternative possibilities, they still may be held responsible in virtue of freely bringing about an event; such agents are said to exercise "actual causal control." The proposed theory has the important advantage of reconciling responsibility and causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. The next two chapters aim to defend this "semi-compatibilist" view against a variety of objections. Chapter 3 addresses a range of objections which can be raised against the Frankfurt-type examples. Chapter 4 addresses Peter van Inwagen's "direct" argument which purports to show that responsibility and determinism are incompatible. ;Part Two of this work presents a more precise analysis of actual causal control. Through an examination of several approaches , Chapters 5 and 6 develop an analysis of control which is based on the idea that in order to be responsible, agents must act in ways that are responsive to an appropriate pattern of both moral and non-moral reasons. Chapter 7 expands this account by arguing that ascriptions of responsibility depend not only on the current responsiveness of an agent, but also on the history which leads to this pattern of response. To support this point, I sketch an account of the process of taking responsibility which captures one way in which historical considerations play an important role in our ascriptions of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Roboethics is a recently developed field of applied ethics which deals with the ethical aspects of technologies such as robots, ambient intelligence, direct neural interfaces and invasive nano-devices and intelligent soft bots. In this article we look specifically at the issue of (moral) responsibility in artificial intelligent systems. We argue for a pragmatic approach, where responsibility is seen as a social regulatory mechanism. We claim that having a system which takes care of certain tasks intelligently, learning from experience and making (...) autonomous decisions gives us reasons to talk about a system (an artifact) as being “responsible” for a task. No doubt, technology is morally significant for humans, so the “responsibility for a task” with moral consequences could be seen as moral responsibility. Intelligent systems can be seen as parts of socio-technological systems with distributed responsibilities, where responsible (moral) agency is a matter of degree. Knowing that all possible abnormal conditions of a system operation can never be predicted, and no system can ever be tested for all possible situations of its use, the responsibility of a producer is to assure proper functioning of a system under reasonably foreseeable circumstances. Additional safety measures must however be in place in order to mitigate the consequences of an accident. The socio-technological system aimed at assuring a beneficial deployment of intelligent systems has several functional responsibility feedback loops which must function properly: the awareness and procedures for handling of risks and responsibilities on the side of designers, producers, implementers and maintenance personnel as well as the understanding of society at large of the values and dangers of intelligent technology. The basic precondition for developing of this socio-technological control system is education of engineers in ethics and keeping alive the democratic debate on the preferences about future society. (shrink)

This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level practice will be (...) insufficiently responsive to the forward-looking aims that are held to justify it. On the single-tier alternative, forward-looking considerations can more readily motivate substantial revisions, which the practice, due to serious and pervasive deficiencies, requires. (shrink)

The distinction between killing and letting die has been a controversial element in arguments about the morality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The killing/letting die distinction is based on causation of death. However, a number of causal factors come into play in any death; it is impossible to state a complete cause of death. I argue that John Mackie’s analysis of causation in terms of ‘inus factors,’ insufficient but nonredundant parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions, helps us to see that (...) moral responsibility for death cannot rest on causation alone. In specifying the cause of death, some factors can be considered alternatively as either causal factors or merely parts of the presupposed background conditions. If a factor is moved from the background field into the causal field, the result is a changed background field. Comparisons of cases of killing and letting die often do just this; hence, the cases depend on different presuppositions and the causation cannot be directly compared. Moral judgments determine how to apportion factors to the causal and background fields. (shrink)

Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either (...) in favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all. (shrink)

The standard response to engineering disasters like the Deepwater Horizon case is to ascribe full moral responsibility to individuals and to collectives treated as individuals. However, this approach is inappropriate since concrete action and experience in engineering contexts seldom meets the criteria of our traditional moral theories. Technological action is often distributed rather than individual or collective, we lack full control of the technology and its consequences, and we lack knowledge and are uncertain about these consequences. In this paper, I (...) analyse these problems by employing Kierkegaardian notions of tragedy and moral responsibility in order to account for experiences of the tragic in technological action. I argue that ascription of responsibility in engineering contexts should be sensitive to personal experiences of lack of control, uncertainty, role conflicts, social dependence, and tragic choice. I conclude that this does not justify evading individual and corporate responsibility, but inspires practices of responsibility ascription that are less ‘harsh’ on those directly involved in technological action, that listen to their personal experiences, and that encourage them to gain more knowledge about what they are doing. (shrink)

Traditionally, incompatibilism has rested on two theses. First, the familiar Principle of Alternative Possibilities says that we cannot be morally responsible for what we do unless we could have done otherwise. Accepting this principle, incompatibilists have then argued that there is no room for such alternative possibilities in a deterministic world. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have argued that incompatibilism about moral responsibility can be defended independently of these traditional theses (Ginet 2005: 604-8; McKenna 2001; Stump 1999: (...) 322-4, 2000 and 2002; van Inwagen 1983: 182-8; and Zagzebski 2000). Incompatibilists of this stripe are generally motivated by the concern that, if determinism .. (shrink)

Charles Hermes argues that the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility fails because one of the inference rules on which it relies, Rule A, is invalid. Rule A states that if a proposition p is broadly logically necessary, then p is true and no one is, or ever has been, even partly morally responsible for the fact that p. Hermes purports to offer a counterexample to Rule A which focuses on agents’ moral responsibility for (...) disjunctions. Hermes’s objection is motivated by the idea that the logic of moral responsibility ought to be based on the logic of truthmakers rather than the logic of propositions. I show that the logic of moral responsibility does not track the logic of truthmakers and defend the validity of Rule A against Hermes’s objection. (shrink)

Skepticism about moral responsibility is one of the most elaborated approaches to this important moral phenomenon in contemporary philosophical literature. In this paper, I use the skeptical approach in general, and specific skeptical arguments in particular, to clarify the connections between the conditions of an appropriate attribution of moral re­sponsibility and the structural elements of this attitude. A distinction is made between moral dogmatism and a critical approach to morality, and a classification is given of the possible outcomes of the (...) latter: skepticism proper, illusionism, and revolutionary ap­proach. The difference between general moral skepticism and skepticism about moral re­sponsibility is defined, and a classification of the types of skepticism about moral respon­sibility is proposed on the basis of which the elements of the structure of attribution of re­sponsibility are questioned. Galen Strawson’s Basic argument, Gideon Rosen’s argument from epistemological regress, and his alethic conception of moral responsibility are ana­lyzed. It is shown that Strawson’s argument unreasonably reduces moral responsibility to a so-called true moral responsibility. It is argued that the epistemic condition of responsi­bility to which the argument from regress is directed can be reduced to a normative con­dition, and thus regress can be avoided. The connection between responsibility and retri­bution, which Rosen postulates, is problematized. It is argued that the control condition binds the moral agent and the agent’s moral factor; the normative condition binds the agent’s moral factor and its moral value. It is argued that the connection between a moral factor and moral value cannot be the object of skepticism about moral responsibility. (shrink)

The problems caused by anthropogenic climate change threaten the lives and well-being of millions, yet it seems that we, as individuals, are powerless to prevent or worsen these problems. In this essay we consider the difficulty of assigning moral responsibility in cases of collective action problems like the problem of anthropogentic climate change. We consider two promising solutions, the expected utility and rights based solution, and argue that both are incapable of explaining why individuals have moral obligations to address collective (...) action problems. We believe, however, that this result does not justify inaction, instead it reveals a failure of moral philosophy to adequately address collective action problems. More work must be done to address the moral responsibilities that arise in cases of collective action problems and we close by pointing in the direction of some promising work in this area. (shrink)

Judging a person as morally responsible involves believing that certain responses (such as punishment, reward, or expressions of blame or praise) can be justifiably directed at the person. This paper develops an account of the evolution of moral responsibility judgment that adopts Michael Tomasello’s two-step theory of the evolution of morality and borrows also from Christopher Boehm’s work. The main hypothesis defended is that moral responsibility judgment originally evolved as an adaptation that enabled groups of cooperative individuals to (...) hold free riders responsible more safely by acting in a coordinated way. (shrink)

Moral philosophers draw an important distinction between two kinds of moral responsibility. An agent can be directly morally responsible, or they can be derivatively morally responsible. Direct moral responsibility, so many believe, presupposes that the agent could have behaved differently. However, in some situations, we hold agents responsible even though they could not have behaved differently, such as when they recklessly cause an accident or do not take adequate precautions to avoid harmful consequences. Moral (...) philosophers typically argue that what we ascribe in these cases is derivative moral responsibility. In this paper, I apply this conceptual distinction to the experimental debate about so-called folk-compatibilism. I argue that experimental philosophers have failed to consider this distinction when designing experiments and interpreting their results. I demonstrate that while compatibilism requires judgments of direct moral responsibility, participants in some of the most influential studies ascribed derivative moral responsibility. For this reason, these studies do not speak in favour of compatibilism at all. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly influential in most people’s lives. This raises many philosophical questions. One is what responsibility we have as individuals to guide the development of AI in a desirable direction. More specifically, how should this responsibility be distributed among individuals and between individuals and other actors? We investigate this question from the perspectives of five principles of distribution that dominate the discussion about responsibility in connection with climate change: effectiveness, equality, desert, need, and ability. Since much (...) is already written about these distributions in that context, we believe much can be gained if we can make use of this discussion also in connection with AI. Our most important findings are: (1) Different principles give different answers depending on how they are interpreted but, in many cases, different interpretations and different principles agree and even strengthen each other. If for instance ‘equality-based distribution’ is interpreted in a consequentialist sense, effectiveness, and through it, ability, will play important roles in the actual distributions, but so will an equal distribution as such, since we foresee that an increased responsibility of underrepresented groups will make the risks and benefits of AI more equally distributed. The corresponding reasoning is true for need-based distribution. (2) If we acknowledge that someone has a certain responsibility, we also have to acknowledge a corresponding degree of influence for that someone over the matter in question. (3) Independently of which distribution principle we prefer, ability cannot be dismissed. Ability is not fixed, however and if one of the other distributions is morally required, we are also morally required to increase the ability of those less able to take on the required responsibility. (shrink)

According to one recently popular “flicker of freedom” style response to Frankfurt-style arguments against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities—the “Triple O” flicker strategy—agents in Frankfurt-style cases are really or most fundamentally morally responsible for performing an action (A-ing) on their own, but not for A-ing simpliciter. This essay has two related aims. First, I offer an interpretation of the Triple O strategy which insulates it against an objection raised by Carolina Sartorio in “Flickers of Freedom and Moral Luck.” (...) Second, I argue that a sub-version of the strategy (“the inheritance view”) according to which agents in Frankfurt-style cases are derivatively responsible for A-ing simpliciter in virtue of A-ing on their own, for which they are basically responsible, is untenable. I show that “A-ing simpliciter” is not plausibly an outcome of “A-ing on one’s own” in the sense required for the transfer of responsibility. Several candidates for the generative relation via which responsibility might be transferred are canvassed, and it is found that none of these relations plausibly hold between an agent’s A-ing on his own and his A-ing simpliciter. Next, I identify the generative relation (if any) that does hold between these items and show that the direction of generation problematically conflicts with the direction of the inheritance view’s purported transfer of responsibility. (shrink)

Manipulation arguments for incompatibilism all build upon some example or other in which an agent is covertly manipulated into acquiring a psychic structure on the basis of which she performs an action. The featured agent, it is alleged, is manipulated into satisfying conditions compatibilists would take to be sufficient for acting freely. Such an example used in the context of an argument for incompatibilism is meant to elicit the intuition that, due to the pervasiveness of the manipulation, the agent does (...) not act freely and is not morally responsible for what she does. It is then claimed that any agent's coming to be in the same psychic state through a deterministic process is no different in any relevant respect from the pertinent manner of manipulation. Hence, it is concluded that compatibilists' proposed sufficient conditions for free will and moral responsibility are inadequate, and that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. One way for compatibilists to resist certain manipulation arguments is by appealing to historical requirements that, they contend, relevant manipulated agents lack. While a growing number of compatibilists advance an historical thesis, in this paper, I redouble my efforts to show, in defense of nonhistorical compatibilists like Harry Frankfurt, that there is still life left in a nonhistorical view. The historical compatibilists, I contend, have fallen shy of discrediting their nonhistorical compatibilist rivals. (shrink)

The responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic was first ascribed to persons associated with the Huanan Seafood Market. However, many scientists suggest that this pandemic is actually a consequence of human intrusion into nature. This opens up a whole new perspective for an examination of direct and indirect, individual and collective responsibility concerning this particular pandemic, but also zoonotic pandemics as such. In this context, one of the key issues are the consequences of factory-farming of animals, which contributes to circumstances in (...) which zoonotic pandemics emerge. Moreover, it is part of a larger economic system, global capitalism, whose logic implies certain coercion toward its participants to keep it essentially unchanged and therefore to make sure that livestock health remains?the weakest link in our global health chain?. However, even though the precise answer to the issue of moral responsibility for zoonotic pandemics outbreaks in general and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular cannot be given, it is possible to list certain indicators and make a framework helpful in ascribing moral responsibility to certain persons. The paper intends to do so by examining the notion of responsibility and by applying it to the issues mentioned. The results of this analysis show that it is misleading to place moral blame on people involved in actions that directly caused the animal-to-human transmission of a certain virus or on humanity as a whole. (shrink)

This paper seeks to determine the extent to which individuals with borderline personality disorders can be held morally responsible for a particular subset of their actions: disproportionate anger, aggressions and displays of temper. The rationale for focusing on these aspects lies in their widespread acknowledgment in the literature and their plausible primary association with blame directed at BPD patients. BPD individuals are indeed typically perceived as “difficult patients” (Sulzer 2015, Bodner et al. 2011), significantly more so than schizophrenic (...) or depressive patients (Markam 2003). The “responsibility question” for patients with BPD has already been raised (Martin 2010, Zachar & Potter 2009, Bray 2003), but this paper tackles it from a novel perspective. First, I narrow down the category of things for which the responsibility question is specific to individual with BPD. After that, I argue that some of the diagnosis criteria of BPD such as emotional instability or impulsivity might serve as excusing factors targeting the “control condition” on moral responsibility. Second, this paper also considers another widely accepted condition on moral responsibility: the epistemic condition. The view defended in the paper is that the answer to the responsibility question for individuals with BPD, concerning both the control condition and the epistemic condition, hinges on an understanding of their epistemic profile. (shrink)

This article addresses the inherently relational nature of musical agency, drawing upon interdisciplinary research. It argues that music does not exist in isolation but within social and emotional contexts shaped by a network of relationships among musicians. These interactions create a collaborative space that transcends mere technical execution, fostering a collective experience enriched by shared sensitivity and emotional engagement. Consequently, musical practice, whether compositional or performative, entails a moral responsibility, particularly challenging the perspectives of Levinas; Bauman; and Wilde, who traditionally (...) separated art from ethics. As outlined in Nielsen and Cobussen’s work “music contributes to a better understanding of one’s place within the world, and thus, to an ethical sensibility”, emphasizing how musical practice cultivates ethical awareness through its relational nature. Music is thus conceived as a moral endeavor, where care extends not only to the music itself but also to the individuals involved in its creation and performance. Moreover, this moral responsibility extends to future generations, as musical tradition is conceived as a temporal bridge linking the past, the present, and the future. The tradition is composed of individuals actively engaged in the practices that shape the tradition or traditions. Musicians bear an intergenerational responsibility toward those who will inherit and reinterpret current practices—a responsibility not grounded in direct reciprocity, but in what Randall describes as “conceptual ties”. The continuity of musical tradition and its aesthetic value depend on the care and responsibility each generation shows toward both the participants and the evolving cultural products of this process. Thus, the discussion elucidates the ethical dimensions of musical agency and practice, particularly in Western classical music, and highlights how our obligations to future generations are intrinsic to the practice itself, thereby contributing to broader debates on intergenerational care ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Moral Responsibility:Disorders of Personhood as Harmful Dysfunctions, With Special Reference to AlcoholismJerome C. Wakefield (bio)Keywordsalcohol dependence, philosophy of psychiatry, mental disorder, harmful dysfunction, psychiatric diagnosis, person, moral responsibilityIn his paper, Ethical Decisions in the Classification of Mental Conditions as Mental Illness, Craig Edwards grapples with a profound problem: why is it that when we classify a mental condition as a mental disorder, that tends to take (...) the condition out of the sphere of moral responsibility or virtuousness of character? For example, it is not uncommon when someone commits suicide and the question is raised as to why he or she did it, that instead of a reason or character trait that would place the act within a moral calculus, one is offered the explanation "she was clinically depressed" or "he was bipolar," and this tends to terminate discussion and make reasons and moral evaluation superfluous. Why does such a comment have that effect?As Edwards notes, this can get complicated as the moral and the disordered interact. Certainly people are sometimes morally responsible for acting on their disordered impulses (as in pedophilia), and they are responsible for putting themselves in the way of disorder, as when someone imbibes in a way likely to lead to alcoholism. But at the normal/disorder divide, there seems to be a consistent lifting of some responsibility, reflecting the application of the sick role. For example, the rough equivalent of our current category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a disorder in earlier wars ("shell shock," "war neurosis"), but often considered an expression of cowardice; the cowardice was morally evaluable as a failure of virtue (even if, like many personality traits, being a coward is not within the person's direct voluntary control) and led to contempt for those with PTSD, but nonetheless—except in cases thought to be malingering—the PTSD that resulted constituted a disorder for which the individual was [End Page 91] not in the same direct sense blameworthy. This moral shift requires explanation.This topic also has important social ramifications. Relief from responsibility may sound like a good thing, and it is trumpeted by mental health advocates as a reason for supporting the classification of many conditions as disorders. But as Edwards is aware, it is a two-edged sword. Disordered status may allow escape from censure and offer the protections of the sick role, but it also changes the relationship of the agent to his or her own actions and imposes the responsibility of the sick role on the individual to attempt to change ("get better"). The sick role allows for no defense of an idiosyncrasy based on normal variation ("It takes all kinds…") or the individual's eccentric vision or steadfast integrity, for that vision or sense of integrity are now seen as pathological and not morally legitimate. The individual is subjected to endless entreaties to seek help and it is implied that not to do so is irresponsible, so that a decision to embrace one's nature and remain as one is becomes illegitimate. Moreover, the sick role allows for no explanation in terms of the individual's normal defensive response to unjust, deprived, or challenging social or environmental circumstances, thus weakening the motives for social change rather than individual intervention.In sum, there is an inevitable sense in which being placed in the sick role inherently stigmatizes the "sick" condition in virtue of the special moral attitudes extended to the disordered. Cultures can thus easily exploit the sick role and its much-touted relief from responsibility to extend the reach of social control processes. This is one reason why the distinction between disorder and non-disorder is so important, and why it is crucial to identify when non-disordered conditions are mislabeled as disorders—as when, for example, psychiatry gets it wrong about the distinction between normal and disordered sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). Such overpathologization can redefine the boundaries of our moral universe on mistaken grounds.Edwards offers two provocative answers—not entirely at ease with each other—to the question of why mental disorders relieve the patient from moral responsibility: (1) mental disorders are... (shrink)

This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As...

The paper outlines a view called social (or two-level) response-dependency as an addition to standard alternatives in metaethics that allows for a position intermediate between standard versions of internalism and externalism on the question of motivational force. Instead of taking psychological responses as either directly supplying the content of ethics (as on emotivist or sentimentalist accounts) or as irrelevant to its content (as in classical versions of Kantian or utilitarian ethics), the view allows them an indirect role, as motivational (...) props to moral teaching and thus to the general institution of moral discourse. However, they are not implied by any particular moral judgment (or speaker), so that amoralism comes out as possible. The response that defines the distinctively moral notion of wrong on this account is the second-level (social) response of forbidding some behavior; but this is ultimately to be understood in terms of (variable) individual reactions. Natural human emotion tendencies thereby constrain the content of ethics, while allowing for some degree of social variation in moral codes. (shrink)

Properly speaking, the corporation, considered as an entity distinct from its members, cannot be morally responsible for wrongful corporate acts. Setting aside (in this abstract) acts brought about through negligence or omissions, we may say that moral responsibility for an act attaches to that agent (or agents) in whom the act "originates" in this sense: (1) the agent formed the (mental) intention or plan to bring about that act (possibly with the help of others) and (2) the act (...) was intentionally brought about through bodily movements over which that agent had direct control (i.e. the kind of direct mental control that I have over the body I refer to as "my" body) and through which the agent carried out his (mental) intention or plan. Corporate acts do not thus originate in some corporate entity distinct from its members because the corporation has neither a mind to form intentions nor a body it directly controls: it lacks the proper mind/body unity. Instead, corporate acts originate in individual autonomous human beings who make up the corporation and who intentionally bring about corporate acts through their own bodily movements. Such human individuals, and not "the corporation," are morally responsible for corporate acts. Moreover, to say that an entity is "morally responsible" for a wrongful act is to say that the entity is liable to blame and punishment. But it is not possible to impose blame and punishment on a corporation without inflicting it on corporate members. Thus, to say that a corporation (as an entity distinct from its members) is "morally responsible" for a wrongful corporate act is to imply that a (possibly innocent) corporate member legitimately may be punished for something for which another entity was morally responsible. This violates the moral principles that underlie blame and punishment. To hold that the corporation can be morally responsible for its acts is to adopt a dangerous organicism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 355-363 [Access article in PDF] Plato on Power, Moral Responsibility and the Alleged Neutrality of Gorgias' Art of Rhetoric (Gorgias 456c-457b) James Stuart Murray 1. Introduction You are sitting in your office on a quiet Thursday afternoon when an agitated university administrator enters with news that the students in your "Plato class" have just been interviewed on the city's largest radio station. According to (...) them, their professor claimed that the demise of their university is a direct result of the fact that senior administrative positions are held by a motley assortment of business-oriented, academically cynical, "renewal"-promoting "innovators" whose main preoccupation is "government funding opportunities" in areas of dubious academic importance.Your response might be: "That's not what I taught them." Or perhaps you might say, "That's not exactly what I taught them--I didn't say it was a 'motley' assortment." In either case, you would be relying on some form of what Robert Wardy (170, n.r 20) has dubbed the "blame students, not teachers defence." He asserts, perhaps correctly, that this defense gained the status of topos within the ancient rhetorical tradition. A version of it certainly does seem to show up in Isocrates' Antidosis (250-52) and perhaps in his Nicocles (3-4), and it is suggested by remarks in both Aristotle's Rhetoric (1355b) and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (II,16,5). On this occasion, however, I am concerned with only one rendition, probably its earliest extant instance in Greek literature. In Plato's Gorgias, the eponymous sophist argues as follows: Imagine someone who after attending wrestling school, 1 getting his body into good shape and becoming a boxer, went on to strike his father and mother or any other family member or friend. By Zeus, that's no reason to hate physical trainers... and to exile them from their cities! For while these people imparted their skills to be used justly against enemies and wrongdoers, and in [End Page 355] defense, not aggression, their pupils pervert their strength and skill and misuse them. So it's not their teachers who are wicked, nor is this a reason why the craft should be a cause of wickedness; the ones who misuse it are supposedly the wicked ones. And the same is true for oratory as well. The orator has the ability to speak against everyone on every subject, so as in gatherings to be more persuasive, in short, about anything he likes, but the fact that he has the ability to rob doctors or other craftsmen of their reputations doesn't give him any more of a reason to do it. He should use oratory justly, as he would any competitive skill. And I suppose that if a person who has become an orator goes on with this ability and this craft to commit wrongdoing, we shouldn't hate his teacher and exile him from our cities. For while the teacher imparted it to be used justly, the pupil is making the opposite use of it. So it's the misuser whom it's just to hate and exile or put to death, not the teacher. (Gorgias 456d, 457a-b) 2Change "exile from our cities" to "fire from our universities" and this makes a good passage to remember when confronted by that agitated administrator mentioned above. Blame the students, not the teachers.Not much comment has been provoked by this defense of Gorgianic rhetoric and its underlying rhetor/boxer analogy, except over the question of whether we should read the passage as an accurate reflection of the words of the historical Gorgias or as a Platonic invention. In a previous generation, E. R. Dodds (212) reckoned that this defense was "probably the standpoint of the historical Gorgias," while E. A. Havelock (195) cautioned that "there is little--very little--that he [i.e., Plato] lets Gorgias say in the Gorgias." In our own day, and on a more general level, Thomas Cole (151) states that "Plato's... (shrink)

This paper seeks to determine the extent to which individuals with borderline personality disorders can be held morally responsible for a particular subset of their actions: disproportionate anger, aggressions and displays of temper. The rationale for focusing on these aspects lies in their widespread acknowledgment in the literature and their plausible primary association with blame directed at BPD patients. BPD individuals are indeed typically perceived as “difficult patients” (Sulzer 2015:82; Bodner et al. 2011), significantly more so than schizophrenic (...) or depressive patients (Markam 2003). The “responsibility question” for patients with BPD has already been raised (Martin 2010; Zachar and Potter 2009; Bray 2003), but this paper tackles it from a novel perspective. First, I narrow down the category of things for which the responsibility question is specific to individual with BPD. After that, I argue that some of the diagnosis criteria of BPD such as emotional instability or impulsivity might serve as excusing factors targeting the “control condition” on moral responsibility. Second, this paper also considers another widely accepted condition on moral responsibility: the epistemic condition. The view defended in the paper is that the answer to the responsibility question for individuals with BPD, concerning both the control condition and the epistemic condition, hinges on an understanding of their epistemic profile. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Changing Functions, Moral Responsibility, and Mental IllnessCraig Edwards (bio)Keywordsmental illness, responsibility, character, dysfunction, personhoodI thank both Wakefield and Tomasini for their illuminating comments. Both commentaries are thought provoking and warrant a full response. However, as always, space is limited and I must make the all-too-predictable apology for not addressing both commentaries in full. Wakefield's contribution more directly engages with, and challenges, my claims, and so I focus on (...) addressing his concerns.ClarificationsWakefield correctly notes that I am interested in how mental illness (and illness generally) operates to remove moral responsibility for one's actions. Despite this, it seems at several points that he and I are talking about two different, albeit related, concepts of mental illness. 'Mental illness' is used to both explain and excuse certain behaviors, but these two functions, explanatory and exculpable, do not always operate simultaneously. As we discover biological explanations for apparently immoral behaviors, the question arises as to whether the explanation should remove the immorality and liability for punishment. The 'sick role' can be divided into two aspects. One is the role of deserving and warranting medical treatment. The other is the negation of moral responsibility. Wakefield's own example, pedophilia, involves the first sense of the sick role but not the second. Wakefield's use of this example is unusual, because it deftly highlights the limitation of his HD account. Pedophilia is a mental disorder in the sense of warranting treatment, and is a mental illness under Wakefield's model, but it is not something that negates moral responsibility. There is a sense of the term 'mental illness'—an important and, as I argue, an objective sense—that is relevant to establishing one's moral responsibility for such behaviors.In addressing my account of mental illness as though it contained two distinct answers, 'mental illness as dysfunction of rational agency, or 'mental illness as moral judgment,' it is unclear whether Wakefield takes them to be conjunctive or alternative. Hence it is worth reiterating in point form the structure of my account:1. Illness involves dysfunction;2. The 'proper function' of a bodily or psychological mechanism is determined by the purpose that we impose upon that mechanism (within the constraints of our biological needs);3. Dysfunction of rational agency is necessary, but not sufficient, for 'mental illness' in the normative sense relevant to negating moral responsibility; and [End Page 105]4. The distinction between 'mental illness' (in the above sense) and the many dysfunctions of rational agency for which we are morally responsible, turns upon (objective) normative facts rather than features internal to the dysfunctions themselves.Functions and ValueWakefield misses the point when he criticizes my comment that, although bodily mechanisms are fairly uniformly valued, there is substantial historical and cross-cultural variation in the way people value personhood. He notes—accurately, but irrelevantly—that people almost always place great value on their capacity for rational agency, probably more so than many aspects of their physical health. My comment, taken in context, has nothing to do with how much people value personhood, but has everything to do with what kinds of purposes people want their mental and physical processes to achieve. A heart has the same function for a Londoner today as it did for a Japanese peasant a thousand years ago, and although it is possible for us to want it to achieve other purposes, any culture that seriously imputes a different set of vital functions on the heart is likely to be rather disappointed. By contrast, our species has experienced vast changes in the demands we make of our rational and intellectual capacities—dysfunctions like dyslexia and alcoholism were irrelevant before the availability of written communication and alcohol.Wakefield's HD account is unable to deal with the relevance of such change. The link between evolutionary function and illness is tenuous in any event. Evolutionary explanations of specific mechanisms are often untestable, simply positing some evolutionary purpose that happens to fit our understanding of what the mechanism does. If we were to discover that alcoholism evolved as a means of increasing birthrates, or (perhaps more plausibly) that anxiety disorders occur among those for whom... (shrink)

Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defenses and instead adopt symmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions, (...) and in this paper I highlight three advantages of doing so: first, it avoids a strange implication of the truth of determinism; second, it allows for a principled reply to Philip Swenson’s recent ‘No Principled Difference Argument’; third, it provides a reason to reject a crucial inference rule invoked by Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Direct Argument’ for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism. (shrink)

The development of machine learning and deep learning (DL) in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) is the direct result of the advancement of nano-electronics. Machine learning is a function that provides the system with the capacity to learn from data without being programmed explicitly. It is basically a mathematical and probabilistic model. DL is part of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks, simply called neural networks (NNs), as they are inspired by the biological NNs that constitute organic (...) brains. Despite its similarity to biological organs such as human brains, major problems arise in trying to attribute moral responsibility to autonomic systems based on hardware including nano-electronic devices, which are sought to replace humans (moral agents) in the context of AI. It is suggested that the required emotional environment which enables actions according to reasons in humans is not witnessed at AI devices. Though AI technology raises an enticing resemblance to human actions, this resemblance is to be considered with a skeptical eye. It is because actions are associated with reasons while causes are connected to operations. Human agents are capable of acting upon their reasons, while AI devices are limited only to operations as they are conditioned by their programming, which is considered as an embodiment of some causes. As moral responsibility goes hand in hand with the capacity to act (according to reasons), attributing moral responsibility to AI devices is revealed to be but a misleading metaphor. (shrink)

Many of the most pressing moral problems that face our world are structural problems. Problems of this nature present difficulties for Christian ethicists because structural features tend to undermine conditions for the attribution of individual moral responsibility. This essay proposes an approach to this problem that reconciles a social account of sin with individual moral responsibility. Two key moves drive this proposal. First, I argue for a sharper distinction between sin and moral wrongdoing than is common. Second, I argue that (...) both sin and individual moral responsibility ought to be understood socially. This proposal addresses deep conceptual problems and points practical efforts in a new direction. (shrink)

Working out a Kantian theory of moral responsibility for animals2 requires the untying of two philosophical and interpretive knots: i.) How to interpret Kant’s claim in the important “episodic” section of the Doctrine of Virtue that we do not have duties “to” animals, since such duties are only “with regard to” animals and “directly to” ourselves; and ii.) How to explain why animals don’t have rights, while human beings who (currently or permanently) don’t have sufficient reason for moral responsibility (...) do have rights. At the heart of the problem lies the philosophical challenge of whether a Kantian account of moral responsibility for animals can take the animals themselves into account in the right way, that is, without utilizing arguments that (wrongly) presuppose that non-human animals are moral agents or can be morally responsible for their actions. The task of untying these two knots is the aim of this chapter. I start by defending Kant’s general claim that our duties regarding animals are not “to” them, but rather “with regard to” them. Relations between human and other animals are not relations between two kinds of moral beings, since animals are not capable of the kind of consciousness, in particular the reflective self-consciousness moral being requires. Instead the more complex human-animal relations are affectionate, social relations to which humans can and sometimes should relate morally. This is why these moral duties are “direct” only to ourselves; we are the only ones in the relations that can be morally responsible for them. Correspondingly, respect (in Kant’s precise sense of the word) is a distinctly reflective, moral emotion internal to the specific normative orientation we have only to beings that can be truly free (reflectively self-conscious), and so, to human beings; morality and respect single out how we regard ourselves and other human beings capable of freedom. As we will see, Kant has a consistent and not counter-intuitive account of why we have the moral attitudes we do about animals and of how it is that these attitudes have the appearance of being about the animals themselves. In addition, Kant can explain why it doesn’t follow from this that these moral attitudes arise from attributing moral rights to the animals themselves. Central to this interpretation is Kant’s Religion, as it contains an account of human nature that adequately explains why we have the positive attitudes we do towards animals; similarly, the Religion contains an account of human evil that explains why we consider other occasions of attitudes towards animals as genuine examples of moral failure. Hence, the Religion is central to understanding why Kant’s approach to animals is neither internally inconsistent nor counter-intuitive. (shrink)

While we consider directive teaching to be detrimental to the Community of Inquiry, we nonetheless find ourselves in qualified agreement with Hand as he challenges certain norms of practice that support the common presumption in favour of nondirective teaching in the moral CoI. We agree with Hand that it is possible for teachers to impart their own moral beliefs without indoctrinating students, yet we argue that the risk of indoctrination remains present in the many realistic scenarios in which teachers misjudge (...) controversial standards as uncontroversial or in which teachers’ arguments bypass students’ reason. We agree with Hand that substantively closed questions can generate satisfying inquiries, with the caveat that in the absence of open inquiry there is a chronic risk of eroding the ethos of trust in a CoI. Similarly, we find qualified agreement with Hand regarding teachers’ philosophical self-effacement. We accept that teachers may judiciously suspend neutrality in order to ensure that sound arguments and objections are aired and understood, yet we caution teachers against endorsing any particular justification or rebuttal. We further raise three distinct concerns about Hand’s theory. Firstly, we argue that Hand’s theory is insensitive to the varieties of moral controversy that emerge within the CoI. We maintain that a nondirective approach is required for a proper exploration of controversy over conflicting justifications for shared moral standards grounded in diverse normative ethical theories, where the conative power of particular justifications may differ among individuals; controversy over the meaning, scope and significance of moral concepts; and controversy over the application of moral standards and concepts to actual cases. Secondly, we argue that in light of teachers’ susceptibility to motivated reasoning and myside bias, Hand’s theory places undue demands on teachers to exercise objective judgement. Where teachers unwittingly transmit biases to students, we are not assured that Hand’s proposal can safeguard against indoctrination. Thirdly, we do not share Hand’s conception of moral inquiry as concerned exclusively with argument over the content and justification of moral standards. The narrowness of this conception, together with available evidence that moral argument alone has little effect on moral behaviour, leads us to question Hand’s claim that a fundamental reason for engaging students in moral inquiry is to reinforce their moral formation. We suggest that the scope of the moral CoI should not be limited to argument over the content and justification of moral standards, but should also include the cultivation of virtues and dispositions that prepare students for complex moral decision-making, as well as the investigation of Aristotelian questions concerning what is worthwhile in human life. Given our broader conception of the CoI as both moral and ethical, and our emphasis on students having both the freedom and the responsibility to judge reasonableness for themselves, we conclude that nondirective teaching remains a beneficial regulatory principle for CoI practice. (shrink)