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)

This article discusses the notion of rationality and agency in Fernando Broncano's Racionalidad, Acción y Opacidad (2017). In this book, contradicting the apriorist normative theses or simple naturalistic descriptivism, Broncano argues that rationality is something that is directly associated with our ordinary practices of evaluating the judgments, actions and decisions of others. “Rationality” should be considered as a term we use as an intellectual qualifier or as a virtue we bestow on people who can make theoretical and practical decisions autonomously. (...) Thus, rationality would not be an a priori condition for someone to become a person or a capacity to eliminate the turbulence of human cognitive and moral precariousness, but a form of involvement in the world that positively qualifies the organism that relates thought and action, judgment and choice in the search for lucidity in an uncertain world. With this, rationality and agency would be products of the social interdependence that one has in relation to the other, since we learn it and teach it in the context of natural life. This article is organized in three sections: in the first section I make a very brief presentation of one of the aspects of the problem that has motivated the philosophical discussion on rationality and agency; in the second section, I present my understanding of the themes developed in Racionalidad, Acción y Opacidad, their internal structure and, of course, their central thesis; in the third section, I specifically discuss the theme that the normativity of rationality arises from our dialectical encounter with other people and make personal considerations on the value and scope of the arguments constructed in this book. (shrink)

Free will is difficult to classify with respect to determinism or indeterminism, and its phenomenology in consciousness often shows both aspects. Initially, it is felt as unlimited and indeterminate will power, with the potentiality of multiple choices. Thereafter, reductive deliberation is led by determinism to the final decision, which realises only one of the potential choices. The reductive deliberation phase tries to find out the best alternative and simultaneously satisfying vague motivations, contextual conditions and personal preferences. The essential sense of (...) free will is the introduction of personal preferences, which allows a higher diversity of reactions to vague motivations. With an oversimplified model of determinism as a chain of events, incompatibilists define “free” as “undetermined” so that determinism becomes incompatible with any free choice between alternatives. In consciousness, free will requires a more complex model of network determinism as well as the consideration of unconsciousness as a causal factor. When “free” defined as “undetermined” is applied to the context of consciousness, it should be reinterpreted as “unconscious of being determined” or not aware of underlying determinism. Lacking information on determinism generates a feeling of “free” in consciousness and, therefore, gives the impression of indeterminism. Lacking information may be induced by an uncertain future without determined events—an unconscious past with biological reactions suddenly emerging from the unconsciousness or an unknown present unable to distinguish determinism of complex events. Therefore, at the level of human consciousness, the experience of free will is associated with apparent indeterminism although it is based on unconscious determinism. The concepts of compatibilism and incompatibilism are only two different aspects of the same phenomenon and correspond to consciousness and unconsciousness. Nevertheless, they can be considered together with a free will concept based on relativity depending on two different reference frames—the first person’s experience frame or the Laplace’s demon frame with knowledge on every molecule of the universe. Only relativity of the free will concept avoids the contradiction between “free” and “unfree” for the same phenomenon and could be a compromise for considering compatibilism and incompatibilism equally. (shrink)

The tragedy of the commons is a primary contributing factor in ensuring that humanity makes no serious inroads in averting climate change. As a recent Canadian politician pointed out, we could shut down the Canadian economy tomorrow, and it would make no measurable difference in global greenhouse gas emissions. When coordinated effort is required, it would seem that doing the “right thing” alone is irrational: it will harm oneself with no positive consequences as a result. Such is the tragedy. And (...) that is the challenge that we take up here. Though Garrett Hardin suggests that the solution is a governmental process that rules over all contenders, since a world government seems unlikely before the planet hits the tippy point, we suggest an educational initiative instead: one that holds a mirror up to the behaviour of individuals, rather than to the behaviour of individuals in groups. Such an educational initiative would be focused on priming individuals to keep constant track of what they do as individuals as opposed to focusing on the behaviour of humanity in general. Such an educational initiative would focus on tackling the “problem solvers” rather than just “the problem”. (shrink)

One can think of the traditional logic of blame as involving three intuitively plausible claims: (1) blame is justified only if one is deserving of blame, (2) one is deserving of blame only if one is relevantly in control of the relevant causal antecedents, and (3) one is relevantly in control only if one has libertarian freedom. While traditional compatibilism has focused on rejecting either or both of the latter two claims, an increasingly common strategy is to deny the link (...) between blame and desert expressed in (1). While I think there is something right about many of these accounts of blame, I deny that the logic of blame can be divorced from the logic of desert. On my view, blame does have a conceptual connection to desert, but its justification is practical rather than theoretical, as the libertarian condition is a matter of adopting a stance towards a person rather than having a belief about her and the “true” causes of her action. I argue that blame fundamentally requires interacting with a person from the participant perspective and that the participant perspective, understood in terms of second-personal address, involves an ontological commitment to freedom. (shrink)

In political philosophy, the concept of autonomy is often associated with liberalism: it serves as a justification for the liberal values of state neutrality and value pluralism, and seems coherent with the liberal definition of freedom as the absence of interference. Neo-republicans have pointed out that freedom as non-interference fails to acknowledge the fact that one may be unfree while non-interfered with, while on the other hand, not all forms of interference are freedom-limiting. They have proposed to replace the concept (...) by freedom as non-domination, which they define as the absence of actual or possible arbitrary interference. Although their definition is promising, neo-republicans tend to neglect the concept of self-government and therefore, are vulnerable to the same accusations of incompleteness faced by liberals. By focusing on the negative part of freedom as non-domination, they have omitted two aspects: first, that there are other ways to be unfree than to be the subject of mere arbitrary interference, and second, that the real value of non-domination is the capacity to act as a non-dominated being, which requires a level of self-mastery. To fix this problem, I propose an extension of the concept of non-domination and argue that the theory would benefit from including autonomy in the list of its conditions for freedom. Following the republican idea that one is only free in a free state, I propose a definition of republican autonomy that is political in nature, and depends on globalized nondomination. (shrink)

This article identifies a novel challenge to standard understandings of responsibility practices, animated by experimental studies of biases and heuristics. It goes on to argue that this challenge illustrates a general methodological challenge for theorizing about responsibility. That is, it is difficult for a theory to give us both guidance in real world contexts and an account of the metaphysical and normative foundations of responsibility without treating wide swaths of ordinary practice as defective. The general upshot is that theories must (...) either hew more closely to actual practice than they appear to, or they must provide some normative foundation for responsibility that does not go through actual practice. (shrink)

A proper examination shows that the existing definitions of free will are incomplete and implausible as, in addition of being partial, they involve various problems for why they fail to capture the idea of freedom in a true sense. In the present paper, the loopholes and incompleteness of these existing definitions have been identified. Besides, it has been argued in this paper that a complete and plausible definition of free will must contain both the surface freedom and the deeper freedom. (...) Even though such a complete and plausible definition of free will has not been found in the existing literature concerning free will and moral responsibility, this paper ends up with the expectation that such a definition of free will can be found soon. (shrink)

Like the ‘thoughts and prayers’ so commonly offered by politicians in the aftermath of disaster, it is incredibly common to hear ‘autonomy and dignity’ invoked together in response to some threat to human wellbeing. As such, it seems natural to assume they must bear some kind of relation to one another. But are they merely two core human interests, that happen to be vulnerable to the same kinds of threat? Or are they interrelated in a deeper way? What I aim (...) to do in this chapter is draw on the philosophical literature on both concepts to consider how they might be connected, and explore whether certain ways of connecting them are more fruitful than others. I argue that the two most prominent connections drawn in the philosophical literature – that dignity is grounded in autonomy, and that respect for dignity is synonymous with respect for autonomy – are both highly problematic. Instead, I suggest we see autonomy and dignity as mutually supportive. Doing so has both practical and theoretical benefits: it can help us identify threats to both autonomy and dignity; and it exposes theoretical lacunae, especially within the autonomy literature. (shrink)

Our values change. What we value, want, desire, prefer, and how much; for nearly everyone, these will be different at different times in their life. These changes can be gradual or abrupt; they can be long-lasting or short-lived; and they can be induced by forces outside yourself or they can come from within or they can have no specific catalyst at all. Such preference change raises a number of questions for our theorising about rational choice, and these have been discussed (...) at length. In §2 and §3, I’ll outline two of these questions along with some of the putative solutions that have been proposed. But preference change also raises questions for our theorising about autonomy, and these have hardly been considered at all. In §4, I’ll outline three problems for personal autonomy; and in §5, I’ll outline one problem for political autonomy. In §6, I conclude. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non‐free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help understand the logic behind so‐called manipulation arguments, but also show why these arguments are ultimately (...) flawed. (shrink)

We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.

The principal aim of the thesis is to develop a developmental account of conscious experience. In this account, the objective is to understand and explain the phenomenal experience of newborns and pre-linguistic infants. The question that guides the investigation concerns the phenomenality of babies' experiences: what is it like to be a baby? There are some crucial philosophical issues that any account of the nature of infant consciousness must face: the ontology of early conscious states; the epistemic status of infants' (...) experiences; the content of infants' experiences. The thesis addresses how we evolve as conscious beings from early states of life until we become full self-conscious beings who are morally responsible for our actions. The thesis involves four chapters. The first chapter explores phenomenal consciousness in newborns, first addressing the epistemological and methodological problems, and then arguing that newborns are phenomenally conscious and have a variety of phenomenal experiences. The second chapter addresses representation in newborns, claiming that their conscious experiences represent the world and discussing the consequences for representationalism. The third chapter focuses on the sense of agency, arguing that infants have a sense of agency and a sort of self-consciousness. The fourth chapter discusses moral agency, focusing mainly on the role of empathy. (shrink)

In his 2004 article “Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard: Pedagogy in the Consumer Society,” Trevor Norris bemoans the degree to which contemporary education’s focus can increasingly be described as primarily nurturing “consumers in training.” He goes on to add that the consequences of such “mindless” consumerism is that it “erodes democratic life, reduces education to the reproduction of private accumulation, prevents social resistance from expressing itself as anything other than political apathy, and transforms all human relations into commercial transactions of (...) calculated exchange.” This, then, is the challenge of the age: to articulate the sort of education that might prompt our youngsters to imagine a genuine alternative to this consumer madness—a challenge that the authors of this paper attempt to tackle. (shrink)

What is self-control and how does the concept of self-control relate to the notion of will-power? A widespread philosophical opinion has been that the notion of will-power does not add anything beyond what can be said using other motivational notions, such as strength of desire and intention. One exception is Richard Holton who, inspired by recent research in social psychology, has argued that will-power is a separate faculty needed for persisting in one's resolutions, what he calls 'strength of will'. However, (...) he distinguishes strength of will from self-control. In this paper I argue that will-power is essential also to a certain form of self-control. I support this claim by arguments showing that the traditional philosophical accounts of self-control run into difficulties because they pay insufficient attention to will-power as an independent source of motivation. (shrink)

Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and (...) those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck. (shrink)

This extended abstract summarises some of the basic points of AI ethics and policy as they present themselves now. We explain the notion of AI, the main ethical issues in AI and the main policy aims and means.

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)

(2013). Autonomy and the Normativity Question: Framing Considerations. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.727014.

Informed consent is considered by many to be a moral imperative in medical research. However, it is increasingly acknowledged that in many actual instances of consent to participation in medical research, participants do not employ the provided information in their decision to consent, but rather consent based on the trust they hold in the researcher or research enterprise. In this article we explore whether trust-based consent is morally inferior to information-based consent. We analyse the moral values essential to valid consent (...) – autonomy, voluntariness, non-manipulation, and non-exploitation – and assess whether these values are less protected and promoted by consent based on trust than they are by consent based on information. We find that this is not the case, and thus conclude that trust-based consent if not morally inferior to information-based consent. (shrink)

The ‘Big 3’ theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, and objective list theory—attempt to explain why certain things are good for people by appealing to prudentially good-making properties. But they don’t attempt to explain why the properties they advert to make something good for a person. Perfectionism, the view that well-being consists in nature-fulfilment, is often considered a competitor to these views (or else a version of the objective list theory). However, I argue that perfectionism is best understood as explaining why certain (...) properties are prudentially good-making. This version of perfectionism is compatible with each of the Big 3, and, I argue, quite attractive. (shrink)

Many researchers have argued that humanity will create artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next twenty to one hundred years. It has been suggested that AGI may inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale ('catastrophic risk'). After summarizing the arguments for why AGI may pose such a risk, we review the fieldʼs proposed responses to AGI risk. We consider societal proposals, proposals for external constraints on AGI behaviors and proposals for creating AGIs that are safe due to (...) their internal design. (shrink)

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...) fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate. (shrink)

This article examines the free will problem as it arises within Thomas Hobbes' naturalistic science of morals in early modern Europe. It explains that during this period, the problem of moral and legal responsibility became acute as mechanical philosophy was extended to human psychology and as a result human choices were explained in terms of desires and preferences rather than being represented as acts of an autonomous faculty. It describes how Hobbes changed the face of moral philosophy, through his Leviathan, (...) in ways that still structure and resonate within the contemporary debate. (shrink)

A standard account of privacy says that it is essentially a kind of control over personal information. Many privacy scholars have argued against this claim by relying on so-called threatened loss cases. In these cases, personal information about an agent is easily available to another person, but not accessed. Critics contend that control accounts have the implausible implication that the privacy of the relevant agent is diminished in threatened loss cases. Recently, threatened loss cases have become important because Edward Snowden’s (...) revelation of how the NSA and GCHQ collected Internet and mobile phone data presents us with a gigantic, real-life threatened loss case. In this paper, I will defend the control account of privacy against the argument that is based on threatened loss cases. I will do so by developing a new version of the control account that implies that the agents’ privacy is not diminished in threatened loss cases. (shrink)

Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...) explanationist answer comes apart from the modalist answer. For it holds that actions are responses to reasons if they are explained by those reasons even if they don’t share a modally robust relationship. Explanationism thus offers a novel way of vindicating the intuition that alternative possibilities don’t matter to responding to reasons and (consequently) free agency. The key dialectical position the thesis develops is that both modalism and explanationism constitute attempts to capture he core type of relationship encoded by the notion of a response. Responses to reasons, at core, involve a non-accidental relationship between reason and action. We can either understand non-accidentality as a modal phenomenon – as a modally robust tracking between two facts. Or we can understand non-accidentality as an explanatory phenomenon – as a special explanatory relationship between two facts. According to my rival explanationist proposal, two facts share a non-accidental relationship iff we can give a unified explanation of why both obtain. Unified explanations are explanations of why [p&q] that cannot be decomposed into two (or more) separate independent explanations of p and of q. Consequently, according to explanationism about responding to reasons, actions are responses to reasons iff those reasons offer a rational explanation of the action that cannot be decomposed into separate independent components. (shrink)

In this work I examine the reasons offered by David Lewis in favor of tolerance in his works “Mill and Milquetoast” and “Academic Appointments: Why Ignore the Advantage of Being Right?” In the first section I expose and discuss the conception of tolerance that is the target of Lewis’s objections, namely, the conception defended by J.S. Mill. In the second section I expose and discuss Lewis’s main reasons in favor of tolerance and the advantages that, according to Lewis, has his (...) position in relation to that of Mill. In the third section I discuss some of the philosophical and political consequences that seem to follow from Lewis’s proposal and from his criticisms of Mill’s conception of tolerance. (shrink)

The classical tragedies relate conflicts, choices and dilemmas that have meaningful parallels in our own experience. Many of the normative dimensions of tragedy, however, rely critically on the causal and motivational efficacy of divine forces. In particular, these narratives present supernatural interventions invading their characters’ practical deliberations and undermining their claims to autonomous agency. Does this dynamic find any analogy in a contemporary, secular conception of moral agency? It does, but it is an analogy that challenges certain standard philosophical accounts (...) of agentive self-governance. (shrink)

The paper examines Schiller’s argument concerning the subjective experience of adopting a morality based on Kantian principles. On Schiller’s view, such experience must be marked by a continuous struggle to suppress nature, because the moral law is a purely rational and categorically commanding law that addresses beings who are natural as well as rational. Essential for Schiller’s conclusion is the account he has of what it takes to follow the law, that is, the mental states and functions that encapsulate the (...) idea of moral self contained in Kant’s ethics. Focusing on the fundamental psychological elements and processes to which Kant’s theory appeals and on which it depends to have application, the paper defends an alternative idea of moral self to the one Schiller attributes to Kant. (shrink)

Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...) also overcomes difficulties confronted by previous views according to which free actions might be a natural kind. On my view, free actions exist and we often act freely, as long as we possess various features that are related in the right sorts of ways to each other and to the world. In turn, we acquire and retain the concept as long as most of us possess enough of those features. (shrink)

We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal (...) source of a manipulated agent’s actions instead lies outside of the agent in the intentions of the manipulator. As a result, determined agents can have free will and be morally responsible in a way that manipulated agents cannot, contrary to what Manipulation Arguments conclude. In this way, our account demonstrates not only how Manipulation Arguments fail but also how compatibilism can be strengthened by means of a plausible account of causal sourcehood. (shrink)

: The idea of enhancing our mental functions through medical means makes many people uncomfortable. People have a vague feeling that altering our brains tinkers with the core of our personalities and the core of ourselves. It changes who we are, and doing so seems wrong, even if the exact reasons for the unease are difficult to define. Many of the standard arguments against neuroenhancements—that they are unsafe, that they violate the distinction between therapy and enhancements, that they undermine equality, (...) and that they will be used coercively—fail to show why the use of any such technologies is wrong in principle. Two other objections—the arguments that such changes undermine our integrity and that they prevent us from living authentic lives—will condemn only a few of the uses that are proposed. The result is that very few uses of these drugs are morally suspect and that most uses are morally permissible. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a critique of a set of assumptions relating to agency, choice and the legitimacy of actions impacting health that can be seen in some approaches to health promotion. After a brief discussion about the definition of health promotion, I outline two contrasting approaches to this area of health care practice. The first is focused on the provision of information and the second is concerned with seeking to change people’s preferences in a particular way. It has (...) been argued by a number of critics of health promotion that only the first approach is ethical, as it is for individuals to make their own lifestyle choices and adopt their own conception of the good life. I argue against this ‘information’ approach to health promotion on two grounds. First, I suggest that given the aims of health promotion, the provision of information is, as a matter of fact, of limited effectiveness in achieving these aims. Second, I argue that we have good reasons to question the appropriateness of respecting many of the preferences that individuals happen to have, given the origins and quality of such preferences. I then go on to argue, that by contrast we have good reasons to focus on changing at least some of the preferences that people have related to their lifestyle choices. This involves a commitment to both paternalism and a defence of a certain conception of the good life, but both can be defended. I use the example of potential responses to the growing problem of obesity to illustrate my argument, arguing that only policy that, at least sometimes, aims at preference change will be both effective and ethical. (shrink)

It has often been said that 'desire' is ambiguous. I do not believe the case for this has been made thoroughly enough, however. The claim typically occurs in the course of defending controversial philosophical theses, such as that intention entails desire, where it tends to look ad hoc. There is need, therefore, for a thorough and single-minded exploration of the ambiguity. I believe the results will be more profound than might be suspected.

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason (...) to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect. (shrink)

Honoring a living will typically involves treating an incompetent patient in accord with preferences she once had, but whose objects she can no longer understand. How do we respect her precedent autonomy by giving her what she used to want? There is a similar problem with subsequent consent: How can we justify interfering with someone''s autonomy on the grounds that she will later consent to the interference, if she refuses now?Both problems arise on the assumption that, to respect someone''s autonomy, (...) any preferences we respect must be among that person''s current preferences. I argue that this is not always true. Just as we can celebrate an event long after it happens, so can we respect someone''s wishes long before or after she has that wish. In the contexts of precedent autonomy and subsequent consent, the wishes are often preferences about which of two other, conflicting preferences to satisfy. When someone has two conflicting preferences, and a third preference on how to resolve that conflict, to respect his autonomy we must respect that third preference. People with declining competence may have a resolution preference earlier, favoring the earlier conflicting preference (precedent autonomy), whereas those with rising competence may have it later, favoring the later conflicting preference (subsequent consent). To respect autonomy in such cases we must respect not a current, but a former or later preference. (shrink)

As non-biological machines come to be designed in ways which exhibit characteristics comparable to human mental states, the manner in which the law treats these entities will become increasingly important both to designers and to society at large. The direct question will become whether, given certain attributes, a non-biological machine could ever be viewed as a legal person. In order to begin to understand the ramifications of this question, this paper starts by exploring the distinction between the related concepts of (...) human, person, and property. Once it is understood that person in the legal sense can apply to a non-biological entity such as a corporation, the inquiry then goes on to examine the folk psychology view of intentionality and the concept of autonomy. The conclusion reached is that these two attributes can support the view that a non-biological machine, at least in theory, can be viewed as a legal person. (shrink)

This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to better (...) understand actual-sequence theories of moral responsibility more generally and showing how actual-sequence theorists should respond to a recent criticism. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist account over (...) a purely nonhistorical structuralist account. (shrink)

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the (...) men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low- and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative. (shrink)

The problem of free will is associated with a specific and significant kind of control over our actions, which is understood primarily in the sense that we have the freedom to do otherwise or the capacity for self‐determination. Is Buddhism compatible with such a conception of free will? The aim of this article is to address three critical issues concerning the free will problem: (1) what role should accounts of physical and neurobiological processes play in discussions of free will? (2) (...) Is a conception of mental autonomy grounded in practices of meditative cultivation compatible with the three cardinal Buddhist doctrines of momentariness, dependent arising, and no‐self? (3) Are there enough resources in Buddhism, given its antisubstantialist metaphysics, to account for personal agency, self‐control, and moral responsibility? (shrink)

Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by dissociating the presumed link between value-free conceptions of disease and a broadly naturalistic approach; offering a naturalistic argument for a form of social constructivism; and suggesting avenues that strike us as especially promising for filling in (...) the details of an alternative approach and addressing the most obvious objections. (shrink)

Adaptive preference formation is the unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available. Jon Elster has argued that this is bad because it undermines our autonomy. I agree, but think that Elster's explanation of why is lacking. So, I draw on a richer account of autonomy to give the following answer. Preferences formed through adaptation are characterized by covert influence (that is, explanations of which an agent herself is necessarily unaware), and covert influence undermines our (...) autonomy because it undermines the extent to which an agent's preferences are ones that she has decided upon for herself. This answer fills the lacuna in Elster's argument. It also allows us to draw a principled distinction between adaptive preference formation and the closely related phenomenon of character planning. (shrink)