I defend normative externalism from the objection that it cannot account for the wrongfulness of moral recklessness. The defence is fairly simple—there is no wrong of moral recklessness. There is an intuitive argument by analogy that there should be a wrong of moral recklessness, and the bulk of the paper consists of a response to this analogy. A central part of my response is that if people were motivated to avoid moral recklessness, they would have to have an unpleasant sort (...) of motivation, what Michael Smith calls “moral fetishism”. (shrink)

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the (...) desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models. (shrink)

What should a person do when, through no fault of her own, she ends up believing a false moral theory? Some suggest that she should act against what the false theory recommends; others argue that she should follow her rationally held moral beliefs. While the former view better accords with intuitions about cases, the latter one seems to enjoy a critical advantage: It seems better able to render moral requirements ‘followable’ or ‘action-guiding.’ But this tempting thought proves difficult to justify. (...) Indeed, whether it can be justified turns out to depend importantly on the rational status of epistemic akrasia. Furthermore, it can be argued, from premises all parties to the moral ignorance debate should accept, that rational epistemic akrasia is possible. If the argument proves successful, it follows that a person should sometimes act against her rationally held moral convictions. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer evidence that folk views of free will and moral responsibility accord a central place to consciousness. In sections 2 and 3, I contrast action production via conscious states and processes with action in concordance with an agent's long-standing and endorsed motivations, values, and character traits. Results indicate that conscious action production is considered much more important for free will than is concordance with motivations, values, and character traits. In section 4, I contrast the absence of (...) consciousness with the presence of consciousness in behaviorally identical agents. Most participants attribute free will to conscious agents, but not to nonconscious agents. Focusing in particular on two leading views of free will and moral responsibility, namely, Deep Self and Reasons-Responsive Views, I argue that these results present philosophers of mind and action with the following explanatory burden: develop a substantive theory of the connection between consciousness on the on.. (shrink)

To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...) when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation. What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. (shrink)

One of the most pervasive criticisms of nudges has been the claim that they violate, undermine or decrease people’s autonomy. This claim, however, is seldom backed up by an explicit and detailed conception of autonomy. In this paper, we aim to do three things. First, we want to clear up some conceptual confusion by distinguishing the different conceptions used by Cass Sunstein and his critics in order to get clear on how they conceive of autonomy. Second, we want to add (...) to the existing discussion by distinguishing between ‘autonomy’ as the ability to set your own ends and ‘autocracy’ as the ability to actually realize those ends. This will allow for a more careful ethical evaluation of specific nudge interventions. Third, we will introduce the idea of ‘perimeters of autonomy’ in an attempt to provide a realistic account of personal autonomy and we will argue that it can alleviate most of the worries about nudging being autonomy-undermining. (shrink)

Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – and set out to demonstrate (...) that these factors are only blame-mitigating where, and to the extent that, they complicate ascriptions of insufficient concern. Matters become more complex, however, when we turn to difficult circumstances that seem to generate such objectionable attitudes. This is arguably the case with epistemic difficulty and certain instances of moral ignorance. Here I argue that certain difficult circumstances diminish the sense in which false moral beliefs are genuinely revelatory of the agents who hold them. In particular, I draw on the distinction between difficulty that generates objectionable attitudes, and objectionable attitudes that generate difficulty. I argue that the former, but not the latter, can plausibly be viewed as blame mitigating, and that this would apply to (limited) cases of moral ignorance. (shrink)

Feasting on a plethora of social media platforms, news aggregators, and online marketplaces, recommender systems (RSs) are spreading pervasively throughout our daily online activities. Over the years, a host of ethical issues have been associated with the diffusion of RSs and the tracking and monitoring of users’ data. Here, we focus on the impact RSs may have on personal autonomy as the most elusive among the often-cited sources of grievance and public outcry. On the grounds of a philosophically nuanced notion (...) of autonomy, we illustrate three specific reasons why RSs may limit or compromise it: the threat of manipulation and deception associated with RSs; the RSs’ power to reshape users’ personal identity; the impact of RSs on knowledge and critical thinking. In our view, however, notwithstanding these legitimate concerns, RSs may effectively help users to navigate an otherwise overwhelming landscape. Our perspective, therefore, is not to be intended as a bulwark to protect the _status quo_ but as an invitation to carefully weigh these aspects in the design of ethically oriented RSs. (shrink)

One of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when (...) we let her off the hook, we are doing so in virtue of her lacking the capacity for the relevant quality of will. Strawson's own attempt to put forward such a view fails, for reasons Gary Watson has given, but several other theorists have advanced their own, more developed,Pure Quality of Willtheories in recent years. Specifically, there have been three distinct interpretations of “will” defended in the literature, yielding three different possible targets of our responsibility responses: quality ofcharacter, quality ofjudgment, or quality ofregard.My first task in this essay will be to show that none of these theories individually can captureallof our responsibility responses, given our deeply ambivalent responses to several marginal cases. One reaction to this fact might be to abandon the quality of will approach altogether. Another, more plausible, reaction is to develop a pluralistic account of responsibility, one that admits three noncompeting conceptions of responsibility, each of which emphasizes one of the three different qualities of will as the target of a distinct subset of our responsibility responses. On this pluralistic approach, marginal agents might be responsible on some conceptions, but not responsible on others. In the bulk of the paper, I discuss each of the relevant subsets of responsibility responses, the different qualities of will they target, what the capacities for the three qualities of will are, and how the pluralistic qualities of will approach could account for our ambivalence in the marginal cases. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the situationist literature provides a rich area of exploration for those interested in freedom and responsibility. Interestingly, it does not do so primarily because it is situationist in the sense of supporting the substantive thesis about the role of character traits. Rather it is because it makes us wonder whether we really do act on a regular basis with the particular normative, epistemic,and reactive capacities that are central to our identity as free and responsible agents.

Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but (...) not to their compulsive desires. This view allows identificationist theorists of moral responsibility to explain why weak-willed actions, but not compulsive actions, are attributable to agents such that they can, in theory, be praised or blamed for them. After motivating and presenting the view in detail, I show how it has unique resources for explaining the ethics of managing one's compulsions. (shrink)

I argue that, in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion, one does not violate a rational requirement of any sort. Rational requirements, as the expression has come to be used, are requirements of coherence. Accordingly, my argument is that there is nothing incoherent in any way about experiencing a recalcitrant emotion. One becomes incoherent only if one allows the emotion to influence one's reasoning and/or action, in which case one violates the ‘consistency principle’ and/or the ‘enkratic principle’. From the standpoint of rationality, (...) it would even be counterproductive to put subjects under the obligation that their emotional experiences and their evaluative judgements must always fit together. When we nevertheless intuitively sense that the subject is irrational in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion this is in cases in which the emotion challenges the subject's agential identity. However, emotions can, but need not, challenge one's agential identity, and, furthermore, perceptions can do so as well. In any case, challenges of this kind do not involve the violation of a rational requirement. (shrink)

How should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain not just about morally relevant empirical matters, like the consequences of some course of action, but about the basic principles of morality itself? This question has only recently been taken up in a systematic way by philosophers. Advocates of moral hedging claim that an agent should weigh the reasons put forward by each moral theory in which she has positive credence, considering both the likelihood that that theory is (...) true and the strength of the reasons it posits. The view that it is sometimes rational to hedge for one's moral uncertainties, however, has recently come under attack both from those who believe that an agent should always be guided by the dictates of the single moral theory she deems most probable and from those who believe that an agent's moral beliefs are simply irrelevant to what she ought to do. Among the many objections to hedging that have been pressed in the recent literature is the worry that there is no non-arbitrary way of making the intertheoretic comparisons of moral value necessary to aggregate the value assignments of rival moral theories into a single ranking of an agent's options. -/- This dissertation has two principal objectives: First, I argue that, contra these recent objections, an agent's moral beliefs and uncertainties are relevant to what she rationally ought to do, and more particularly, that agents are at least sometimes rationally required to hedge for their moral uncertainties. My principal argument for these claims appeals to the enkratic conception of rationality, according to which the requirements of practical rationality derive from an agent's beliefs about the objective, desire-independent value or choiceworthiness of her options. Second, I outline a new general theory of rational choice under moral uncertainty. Central to this theory is the idea of content-based aggregation, that the principles according to which an agent should compare and aggregate rival moral theories are grounded in the content of those theories themselves, including not only their value assignments but also the metaethical and other non-surface-level propositions that underlie, justify, or explain those value assignments. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 1, Page 33-56, March 2021.

Susan Wolf objects to the Real Self View (RSV) of moral responsibility that it is insufficient, that even if one’s actions are expressions of one’s deepest or “real” self, one might still not be morally responsible for one’s actions. As a counterexample to the RSV, Wolf offers the case of JoJo, the son of a dictator, who endorses his father’s (evil) values, but who is insane and is thus not responsible for his actions. Wolf’s data for this conclusion derives from (...) what she takes to be our “pretheoretic intuitions” about JoJo. As it turns out, though, experimental data on actual pretheoretic intuitions does not seem to support Wolf’s claim. In this paper, we present such data and argue that, at least with respect to this particular objection, the RSV can survive Wolf’s attack intact. (shrink)

Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original (...) naturalistic analyses of “Self” and “internality” that replace the view’s metaphorical language with common-sensical concepts that make clear their usefulness. (shrink)

Pride in our own actions tells a story: we faced a challenge, overcame it, and achieved something praiseworthy. In this paper, I draw on recent psychological literature to distinguish to between two varieties of pride, 'authentic' pride that focuses on particular efforts (like guilt) and 'hubristic' pride that focuses on the whole self (like shame). Achievement pride is fitting when either efforts or traits explain our success in meeting contextually relevant, authoritative, and challenging standards without excessive opportunity cost. When it (...) is fitting, our lives are at least somewhat meaningful. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose and defend a structural ownership condition on moral responsibility. According to the condition I propose, an agent owns a mental item if and only if it is part of or is partly grounded by a coherent set of psychological states. As I discuss, other theorists have proposed or alluded to conditions like psychological coherence, but each proposal is unsatisfactory in some way. My account appeals to narrative explanation to elucidate the relevant sense of psychological coherence.

An area of consensus in debates about culpability for ignorance concerns the importance of an agent’s epistemic situation, and the information available to them, in determining what they ought to know. On this understanding, given the excesses of our present epistemic situation, we are more culpable for our morally-relevant ignorance than ever. This verdict often seems appropriate at the level of individual cases, but I argue that it is over-demanding when considered at large. On the other hand, when we describe (...) an obligation to know that avoids over-demandingness at large, it fails to be sufficiently demanding in individual cases. The first half of this paper is dedicated to setting up this dilemma. In the second half, I show that it cannot be easily escaped. Finally, I suggest that this dilemma impedes our ability to morally appraise one another’s ignorance, and even our own. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of moral responsibility are in widespread agreement that we can only be blamed for actions that express, reflect, or disclose something about us or the quality of our wills. In this paper I reject that thesis and argue that self disclosure is not a necessary condition on moral responsibility and blameworthiness: reactive responses ranging from aretaic appraisals all the way to outbursts of anger and resentment can be morally justified even when the blamed agent’s action expresses or discloses (...) nothing significant about his or her “deep self,” judgments and cares, or the quality of his or her will. I argue that the self-disclosure requirement on responsibility overestimates the extent to which our blaming practices and responsibility judgments are responsive to agents as opposed to actions, and that this mistake has the potential to distort both our reactive responses and our understanding of blamed agents’ characters. (shrink)

Presentation and discussion of two new experimental studies surveying intuitions about cases of moral ignorance due to childhood deprivation. Discussion of resulting asymmetry between negative and positive cases and proposal of speculative hypothesis to explain results, The Difficulty Hypothesis.

In this paper, I argue for two main hypotheses. First, that self-control is not a natural mental kind and, second, that there is no dedicated mechanism of self-control. By the first claim, I simply mean that those behaviors we label as “self-controlled” are a somewhat arbitrarily selected hodgepodge that do not have anything in common that distinguishes them from other behaviors. In other words, self-control is a gerrymandered property that does not correspond to a natural mental or psychological kind. By (...) the second claim, I mean that self-controlled behaviors are not produced by a mechanism that is not utilized in the production of other behaviors. Not only is there no natural mental property of self-control, there is no mechanism that is dedicated to producing self-controlled behavior. I further evaluate whether this account of self-control has enough explanatory power to account for a range of phenomena related to self-control. I argue that my account does a better job of explaining these phenomena than accounts which appeal to a dedicated self-control mechanism. (shrink)

The notion of supererogation—going above and beyond the call of duty—is typically discussed in a moral context. However, in this paper we argue for the existence of rationally supererogatory actions: that is, actions that go above and beyond the call of rational duty. In order to establish the existence of such actions, we first need to overcome the so-called paradox of supererogation: we need to provide some explanation for why, if some act is rationally optimal, it is not the case (...) that we are rationally required to carry out that act. We argue that a response to this ‘paradox’ can be found by reflecting on normative conflicts: cases where what is best according to some normative domain is different from what is best according to some other normative domain. (shrink)

The idea that conscious control, or more specifically akratic wrongdoing, is a necessary condition for blameworthiness has durable appeal. This position has been explicitly championed by volitionist philosophers, and its tacit influence is broadly felt. Many responses have been offered to the akrasia requirement espoused by volitionists. These responses often take the form of counterexamples involving blameworthy ignorance: i.e., cases where an agent didn’t act akratically, but where they nevertheless seem blameworthy. These counterexamples have generally led to an impasse in (...) the debate, with volitionists maintaining that the ignorant agents are blameless. In this paper, I explore a different sort of counterexample: I consider agents who have acted akratically, but whose very conscious awareness of their wrongdoing complicates their blameworthiness. I call these cases of “complex akrasia,” and I suggest that they are a familiar aspect of moral life. I interpret these cases as supporting non-volitionist accounts, and particularly Quality of Will accounts. (shrink)

Questions about sincerity play a central role in our lives. But what makes an assertion insincere? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it has sometimes been taken to be. Until recently the dominant answer has been that a speaker makes an insincere assertion if and only if he does not believe the proposition asserted. There are, however, persuasive counterexamples to this simple account. It has been proposed instead that an insincere (...) assertion that p is one made by a speaker who (a) does not express his belief that p; or (b) does not believe that he believes that p; (c) does not assent to p; or (d) does not express any of these cognitive states. We show that these .. (shrink)

Alex Gregory (2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2021) provides an ingenious, systematic defence of the view that desires are a species of belief about normative reasons. This view explains how desires make actions rationally intelligible. Its main rival, which is attractive for the same reason, says that desires involve a quasi-perceptual appearance of value. Gregory (2017a; 2018; 2021) has argued that his view provides the superior explanation of how desires are sensitive to evidence. Here, I show that the quasi-perceptual view fairs better (...) in this regard. Negatively, I argue that Gregory’s view overestimates the evidence-sensitivity of desires and implies that we are systematically mistaken in having different attitudes about desires and beliefs. Positively, I argue that quasi-perceptual appearances of value are brought into the scope of rational control through their dependence on prior representational states. I also provide a novel explanation of why some kinds of desires are resistant to rational control. I propose that desires are produced through exercises of an affective capacity to discriminate value. Variations in the way this capacity is exercised, and its links to prior representational states, can produce systematic insensitivity to evidence in certain kinds of desires. This paper advances the debate around desire on two fronts: first, it performs the neglected task of showing how the quasi-perceptual view can simultaneously explain both the sensitivity and insensitivity to evidence exhibited by desires and, second, it shows how the explanation offered is superior to one of its closest rivals, the view that desires are a species of normative belief. (shrink)

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the virtuous person, which I take to be the same as the good person. I argue that goodness in a person is based on her desires. Contra Aristotelians, I argue that one does not need practical wisdom to be good. There can be a perfectly good person with mental retardation or autism, for example, whether or not such conditions are compatible with the Aristotelian kind of wisdom. Contra Kantians, I argue that the sense of (...) duty - which does exist! - is compatible with a desire-based moral psychology. (shrink)

Certain of our traits are thought more central to who we are: they comprise ourindividual identity. What makes these traits privileged in this way? What accounts for theiridentity centrality? Although considerations of identity play a key role in many different areas of moral philosophy, I argue that we currently have no satisfactory account of the basis of identity centrality. Nor should we expect one. Rather, we should adopt an error theory: we should concede that there is nothing in reality corresponding (...) to the perceived distinction between the central and peripheral traits of a person. (shrink)

Within debates concerning responsibility for ignorance the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is often treated as crucial. Many prominent accounts hold that while factual ignorance routinely exculpates, moral ignorance never does so. The view that there is an in-principle distinction between moral and factual ignorance has been referred to as the “Asymmetry Thesis.” This view stands in opposition to the “Parity Thesis,” which holds that moral and factual ignorance are in-principle similar. The Parity Thesis has been closely aligned with (...) volitionist accounts of moral responsibility, whereas the Asymmetry Thesis has been closely aligned with Quality of Will accounts. Two central questions are at work here: how ignorance excuses, and whether it excuses in the same way for both moral and factual ignorance. I will argue that these questions have often been confused in the present debate, and once we have distinguished more clearly between them, it seems that Quality of Will accounts are compatible with the Parity Thesis. And more generally: that the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is far less important in debates about responsibility for ignorance than it has often appeared. (shrink)

: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on (...) the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons. (shrink)

Part I. Philosophy of novels. 1. Introduction: philosophical content and literary value -- 2. Interpreting novels -- 3. The sun also rises: incompatible interpretations -- 4. The appeal of the mystery -- Part II. Philosophy in novels. 5. Moral development in Pride and prejudice -- 6. Huckleberry Finn and moral motivation -- 7. What we learn about rules from The cider house rules -- 8. Nostromo and the fragility of the self.

An inverse akratic act is one who believes X, all things considered, is the correct act, and yet performs ~X, where ~X is the correct act. A famous example of such a person is Huck Finn. He believes that he is wrong in helping Jim, and yet continues to do so. In this paper I investigate Huck’s nature to see why he performs such acts contrary to his beliefs. In doing so, I explore the nature of empathy and show how (...) powerful Huck’s empathic feelings are. Drawing from Martin L. Hoffman, I show the relationship between empathy and a principle of justice. This relationship leads to Huck acting virtuously, as Rosalind Hursthouse maintains. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt introduces the concept of externality. Externality is supposed to be a fact about the structure of an agent's will. We argue that the pre-theorethical basis of externality has a lot more to do with feelings of alienation than it does with the will. Once we realize that intuitions about externality are guided by intuitions about feelings of alienation surprising conclusions follow regarding the structure of our will.

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)

Prima facie, it seems highly plausible to suppose that there is some kind of constitutive relationship between self-control and the self, i.e., that self-control is “control at the service of the self” or even “control by the self.” This belief is not only attractive from a pre-theoretical standpoint, but it also seems to be supported by theoretical reasons. In particular, there is a natural fit between a certain attractive approach to self-control—the so-called “divided mind approach”—and a certain well-established approach to (...) the self—the so-called “deep self” approach. I argue, however, that this initial impression is misleading: on closer inspection, the combination of the divided mind approach to self-control with the deep self approach fails to provide us with a theoretical foundation for the claim that self-control is constitutively linked to the self. I show that, in an interesting twist, combining these two approaches actually supports the opposite claim, leading us to the view that self-control and the self can come apart, and, more specifically, that we sometimes exercise self-control without our self or even against our self. (shrink)

Cases of akratic behavior are generally seen as paradigmatic depictions of the knowledge-action gap (Darnell et al 2019): we know what we should do, we judge that we should do it, yet we often fail to act according to our knowledge. In recent decades attention has been given to a particular instance of akratic behavior, which is that of “inverse akrasia”, where the agent possesses faulty moral knowledge but fails to act accordingly, thus ending up doing the right thing. In (...) particular, two literary examples are considered as exemplifying this kind of akratic situation: Huckleberry Finn (Arpaly & Schroeder 1999, Arpaly 2000, Hursthouse 1999, Kleist 2009, Holton manuscript) and Neoptolemus as understood by Aristotle (NE; Arpaly & Schroeder 1999). In this paper I will argue that those of Neoptolemus and Huck Finn are not cases of inverse akrasia (Holton manuscript) but are much better explained as instances of what Williams (1993) called “moral incapacity”. In particular, the reason why they fail to act according to their original judgments is due to a lack of motivation to act accordingly, which is grounded in their moral self-identities (Blasi 1984; Vigani 2016). The paper will unfold as follows: I will, first, argue that neither Neoptolemus nor Huck Finn show akratic behavior; thus, they cannot be legitimately labeled as “inverse akratics” (par 1.); then, I will argue that they act the way they do notwithstanding their faulty judgments because they are effectively motivated to do so. Such motivation originates in their moral self-identities and is experienced through the threat of self-betrayal (par 2); finally, I will argue that when an agent is motivated to act in a way that is integral with her moral self-identity, acting otherwise is experienced as something one cannot ultimately do; that is, as a moral incapacity (par 3). This “cannot” is neither a metaphor for an “I shouldn’t”, nor an instance of what has been recently labeled a “moral impossibility” (Caprioglio Panizza 2020, 2021), since it does not arise from the normative force of deontic judgments, and it is neither physically nor psychologically impossible for the agent to act otherwise. (shrink)

The standard account of weakness of will identifies it with akrasia, that is, with action against one's best judgment. Elsewhere I have argued that weakness of will is better understood as over-readily giving up on one's resolutions. Many cases of weak willed action will not be akratic: in over-readily abandoning a resolution an agent may well do something that they judge at the time to be best. Indeed, in so far as temptation typically gives rise to judgment shift -- to (...) a tendency to change one's judgment so that one values the tempting option as the best -- weak willed action will typically be akratic. But conversely, strong willed action now looks as though it will be akratic. I argue though that it need not be, once we distinguish between actual judgment, and dispositions to judge. Within this framework, the issue of inverse akrasia looks rather different. I argue that whilst Huckleberry Finn plausibly does show weakness of will in abandoning his resolve to turn Jim in, it is far from clear that he is akratic: a point brought out well in Twain's later additions to the text. Whilst cases of inverse akrasia are clearly theoretically possible, I suggest that, given cognitive dissonance mechanisms, they are unlikely to be very common. (shrink)

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...) structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels. (shrink)

Non‐reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite her considered judgment that what she did was wrong. In this paper I (...) show that non‐reflectivist real self views are problematic by focusing on the related but neglected phenomenon of inverse enkrasia, which occurs when an agent commits wrongdoing by following a mistaken evaluative judgment that, unbeknownst to her, runs contrary to her true values and cares. Intuitively, inverse enkratics are blameworthy for their actions although the latter don't express their real selves; therefore, non‐reflectivist real self views are false. I assess the implications of this result for the viability of the quality of will paradigm and conclude that the latter survives unscathed to the problems besetting real self views. The lesson is that defenders of the quality of will paradigm should stop talking about real selves altogether. (shrink)

Some of our motives that we act on are not only of unconstrained origin, but we also take them to express who we are and, thus, to "speak for us." Harry G. Frankfurt has maintained that it is the formation of a hierarchical structure by means of an act of wholehearted identification that makes a given motive genuinely one's own. I argue that wholehearted identifications fail to live up to this task. Instead, I demonstrate that only a subtype of wholehearted (...) identifications, namely core identifications, genuinely "speak for us." In addition, I argue that core identifications help explain the peculiar phenomenology that characterizes some of our crucial choices. (shrink)

In this work, I argue for the possibility of epistemic akrasia. An individual S is epistemically akratic if the following conditions hold: S knowingly believes that P though she judges that it is epistemically wrong to do so and Having these mental states displays a failure of rationality that is analogous to classic akrasia. I propose two different types of epistemic akrasia involving different kinds of evidence on which the subject bases her evaluation of her akratic belief. I examine three (...) objections to their possibility. I suggest that the key to defending the possibility of epistemic akrasia is to explain condition. I finally argue that epistemic akrasia is possible, and that it represents a failure of mental agency. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the impact of commercial marketing on personal autonomy. Several philosophers argue that marketing conflicts with ideals of autonomy or, at best, is neutral to these ideals. After qualifying our concept of marketing and introducing the distinctions between (i) divergent and convergent marketing and (ii) being autonomous and acting autonomously, we demonstrate the heretofore unnoticed positive impact of marketing on autonomy. Specifically, we argue that (i) convergent marketing has a significant potential to reinforce (...) autonomous action and (ii) divergent marketing has a significant potential to reinforce the state of being autonomous. (shrink)

C an actions caused by emotions be free and autonomous? The so-called rationalist conception of autonomy denies this. Only actions done in the light of reflexive choices can be autonomous and hence free. I argue that the rationalist conception does not make room for akratic actions, that is, free and intentional actions performed against the agent’s best judgement. I then develop an account inspired by Harry Frankfurt and David Shoemaker, according to which an action is autonomous when it is determined (...) by the agent’s most central cares, where cares are defined in terms of emotional dispositions. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉOn pense souvent qu'un changement significatif de notre caractère évaluatif pourrait saper notre responsabilité par rapport à nos méfaits passés. Dans cet article, j'explore cette intuition en analysant les concepts de responsabilité et de l'obligation de rendre des comptes, tels que présentés par Angela Smith. J'introduis une distinction entre « modification » et « remplacement » pour définir les limites de la responsabilité au fil du temps. Ces limites sont ensuite précisées en s'inspirant des travaux de Delia Graff sur les (...) arguments Sorites pour soutenir qu'une personne est responsable d'actes répréhensibles passés si elle demeure « manifestement similaire » à certains égards. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett, Nomy Arpaly, and others see in Huckleberry Finn's apparent praiseworthiness for not turning Jim in (even though this goes against his own moral judgments in the matter) a model for an improved, non-intellectualist approach to moral appraisal. I try to show – both on Aristotelian and on independent grounds – that these positions are fundamentally flawed. In the process, I try to show how Huck may be blameless for lacking what would have been a praiseworthy belief (that I (...) should help Jim), hence, blameless for not acting on this belief; but being ‘blamelessly unpraiseworthy’ is not the same thing as being praiseworthy. (shrink)

This paper develops Bernard Williams’s claim that moral incapacity – i.e., one’s inability to consider an action as one that could be performed intentionally – ‘is proof against reward’. It argues that we should re-construe the notion of moral incapacity in terms of self-identification with a project, commitment, value, etc. in a way that renders this project constitutive of one’s self-identity. This consists in one’s being insensitive to incentives to reconsider or get oneself to change one’s identification with this project. (...) More precisely, self-identification with a project implies that no state-given reason can justify for oneself reconsidering, or getting oneself to revise, or abandon one’s identification with that project. This view ties together integrity and self-identification, and avoids problems common to competing views: it avoids regress problems faced by hierarchical theories of identification; it demonstrates that integrationist views of identification overlook the fact that a deep, well-integrated attitude may fail to be incentive-insensitive; and it helps explain what’s wrong with ‘perverse’ cases, where one values acting in a way that one does not all things consider value. It also improves on Williams’s own view, by construing moral incapacity not merely in terms of one’s incapacity to perform an action (that undermines one’s project and thus violates one’s integrity), but also in terms of one’s incapacity to reconsider one’s commitment (to said project). (shrink)