Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Games and the art of agency.C. Thi Nguyen - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (4):423-462.
    Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • Free will.Timothy O'Connor & Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   91 citations  
  • If You Can't Change What You Believe, You Don't Believe It.Grace Helton - 2020 - Noûs 54 (3):501-526.
    I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Vigilance and control.Samuel Murray & Manuel Vargas - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (3):825-843.
    We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes.Victoria McGeer - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2):301-323.
    This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • Implicit bias.Michael Brownstein - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    “Implicit bias” is a term of art referring to relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment and social behavior. While psychologists in the field of “implicit social cognition” study “implicit attitudes” toward consumer products, self-esteem, food, alcohol, political values, and more, the most striking and well-known research has focused on implicit attitudes toward members of socially stigmatized groups, such as African-Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community.[1] For example, imagine Frank, who explicitly believes that women and men are equally (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  • The Catch-22 of Forgetfulness: Responsibility for Mental Mistakes.Zachary C. Irving, Samuel Murray, Aaron Glasser & Kristina Krasich - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1):100-118.
    Attribution theorists assume that character information informs judgments of blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character information is a fundamental determinant of blame. Another camp holds that character information merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 495), participants rate whether someone is blameworthy when he makes a mistake (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 146–162.
    It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • The objects of moral responsibility.Andrew C. Khoury - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1357-1381.
    It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • Who’s Responsible for This? Moral Responsibility, Externalism, and Knowledge about Implicit Bias.Natalia Washington & Daniel Kelly - 2016 - In Michael Brownstein & Jennifer Saul (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    In this paper we aim to think systematically about, formulate, and begin addressing some of the challenges to applying theories of moral responsibility to behaviors shaped by a particular subset of unsettling psychological complexities: namely, implicit biases.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Responsibility for forgetting.Samuel Murray, Elise D. Murray, Gregory Stewart, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Felipe De Brigard - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (5):1177-1201.
    In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Attributionism and Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias.Michael Brownstein - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4):765-786.
    Implicit intergroup biases have been shown to impact social behavior in many unsettling ways, from disparities in decisions to “shoot” black and white men in a computer simulation to unequal gender-based evaluations of résumés and CVs. It is a difficult question whether, and in what way, agents are responsible for behaviors affected by implicit biases. I argue that in paradigmatic cases agents are responsible for these behaviors in the sense that the behavior is “attributable” to them. That is, behaviors affected (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Moral responsibility.Andrew Eshleman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • Pattern theory of self and situating moral aspects: the need to include authenticity, autonomy and responsibility in understanding the effects of deep brain stimulation.Przemysław Zawadzki - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (3):559-582.
    The aims of this paper are to: (1) identify the best framework for comprehending multidimensional impact of deep brain stimulation on the self; (2) identify weaknesses of this framework; (3) propose refinements to it; (4) in pursuing (3), show why and how this framework should be extended with additional moral aspects and demonstrate their interrelations; (5) define how moral aspects relate to the framework; (6) show the potential consequences of including moral aspects on evaluating DBS’s impact on patients’ selves. Regarding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Responsibility: the State of the Question Fault Lines in the Foundations.David Shoemaker - 2020 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 58 (2):205-237.
    Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Ways of thinking about ways of being.Bradley Rettler - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):712-722.
    Monism about being says that there is one way to be. Pluralism about being says that there are many ways to be. Recently, Trenton Merricks and David Builes have offered arguments against Pluralism. In this paper, I show how Pluralists who appeal to the relative naturalness of quantifiers can respond to these arguments.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Mind‐wandering: A philosophical guide.Zachary C. Irving & Aaron Glasser - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (1):e12644.
    Philosophers have long been fascinated by the stream of consciousness – thoughts, images, and bits of inner speech that dance across the inner stage. Yet for centuries, such ‘mind‐wandering' was deemed private and thus resistant to empirical investigation. Recent developments in psychology and neuroscience have reinvigorated scientific interest in the stream of thought. Despite this flurry of progress, scientists have stressed that mind‐wandering research requires firmer philosophical foundations. The time is therefore ripe for the philosophy of mind‐wandering. Our review begins (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Explanatory perfectionism: A fresh take on an ancient theory.Michael Prinzing - 2020 - Analysis (4):704-712.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • What is the Difference between Weakness of Will and Compulsion?August Gorman - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):37-52.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Nature and Norms of Vigilance.Samuel Murray - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (3):265-278.
    Many people have long-term commitments that require coordination and cooperation with others. To achieve this, we construct plans to settle when, how, and for how long to pursue certain goals rather than others. This raises an interesting cognitive problem, namely that individuals can, at any given moment, manage significantly less information than they will need to accomplish their goals. Call this the Problem of Scarce Information. The solution requires a special self-regulatory system that strategically manages the varying informational demands of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Forgiveness, Repentance, and Diachronic Blameworthiness.Andrew C. Khoury - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (4):700-720.
    Many theorists have found the notion of forgiveness to be paradoxical, for it is thought that only the blameworthy can be appropriately forgiven but that the blameworthy are appropriately blamed not forgiven. Some have appealed to the notion of repentance to resolve this tension. But others have objected that such a response is explanatorily inadequate in the sense that it merely stipulates and names a solution leaving the transformative power of repentance unexplained. Worse still, others have objected that such a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Blame mitigation: A less tidy take and its philosophical implications.Jennifer L. Daigle & Joanna Demaree-Cotton - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (4):490-521.
    Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent—in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong—and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Free will, determinism, and the right levels of description.Leonhard Menges - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (1):1-18.
    ABSTRACT Recently, many authors have argued that claims about determinism and free will are situated on different levels of description and that determinism on one level does not rule out free will on another. This paper focuses on Christian List’s version of this basic idea. It will be argued for the negative thesis that List’s account does not rule out the most plausible version of incompatibilism about free will and determinism and, more constructively, that a level-based approach to free will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Frankfurt’s Unwilling and Willing Addicts.Chandra Sripada - 2017 - Mind 126 (503):781-815.
    Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Towards a structural ownership condition on moral responsibility.Benjamin Matheson - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (4):458-480.
    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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Scenes as Games: Agency, Autonomy, and Value in BDSM.Dee Payton - forthcoming - Hypatia.
    Much of the existing philosophical literature on BDSM focuses on questions about the ethics of BDSM. But there is an underlying question here regarding the nature of BDSM, one which remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, I take that metaphysical question to be prior to the normative one. In other words: it will be important to have a clear view of what BDSM is before we go on to evaluate it. -/- This is a paper about the nature of BDSM (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Reasonable expectations, moral responsibility, and empirical data.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2020 - Philosophical Studies (10):2945-2968.
    Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Is punishment backward? On neurointerventions and forward‐looking moral responsibility.Przemysław Zawadzki - 2022 - Bioethics 37 (2):183-191.
    This article focuses on justified responses to “immoral” behavior and crimes committed by patients undergoing neuromodulation therapies. Such patients could be held morally responsible in the basic desert sense—the one that serves as a justification of severe practices such as backward‐looking moral outrage, condemnation, and legal punishment—as long as they possess certain compatibilist capabilities that have traditionally served as the quintessence of free will, that is, reasons‐responsiveness; attributability; answerability; the abilities to act in accordance with moral reasons, second‐order volitions, or (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Depression’s Threat to Self-Governance.August Gorman - 2020 - Social Theory and Practice 46 (2):277-297.
    Much of the literature on impairment to self-governance focuses on cases in which a person either lacks the ability to protect herself from errant urges or cases in which a person lacks the capacity to initiate self-reflective agential processes. This has led to frameworks for thinking about self-governance designed with only the possibility of these sorts of impairments in mind. I challenge this orthodoxy using the case of melancholic depression to show that there is a third way that self-governance can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Epistemic control without voluntarism.Timothy R. Kearl - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):95-109.
    It is tempting to think (though many deny) that epistemic agents exercise a distinctive kind of control over their belief‐like attitudes. My aim here is to sketch a “bottom‐up” model of epistemic agency, one that draws on an analogous model of practical agency, according to which an agent's conditional beliefs are reasons‐responsive planning states that initiate and sustain mental behavior so as to render controlled.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Fear as Preventer.Tim Kearl & Robert H. Wallace - forthcoming - In Ami Harbin (ed.), The Philosophy of Fear: Historical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Bloomsbury.
    Fear is a preventer, sometimes robustly so. When fear robustly prevents, it changes or diminishes what an agent is able to do. Various popular conceptions of fear focus on its negative role: fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we should, as in certain cases of akrasia. But by the same token, fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we shouldn’t, as in certain other cases of inverse akrasia. We end with a plea on behalf of fear, both in light (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Responsibility and the shallow self.Samuel Reis-Dennis - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):483-501.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Demystifying the Deep Self View.August Gorman - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (4):390-414.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Bringing the deep self back to the racecourse: Rethinking accountability and the deep self.Ke Zhang - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    Deep self views of moral responsibility suggest that an agent fully satisfies the freedom condition for responsibility if and only if her actions or omissions issue from, and so express, her deep self. This analysis generates both false negatives and false positives regarding people's responsibility, and counterexamples proliferate. I defend a novel version of the deep self view by offering a necessary condition for accountability while retaining the core of deep self views. Indeed, an agent may be blameworthy for her (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Neuroscience and Normativity: How Knowledge of the Brain Offers a Deeper Understanding of Moral and Legal Responsibility.William Hirstein - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2):327-351.
    Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their activity, or lack thereof, is at (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How AI Systems Can Be Blameworthy.Hannah Altehenger, Leonhard Menges & Peter Schulte - 2024 - Philosophia (4):1-24.
    AI systems, like self-driving cars, healthcare robots, or Autonomous Weapon Systems, already play an increasingly important role in our lives and will do so to an even greater extent in the near future. This raises a fundamental philosophical question: who is morally responsible when such systems cause unjustified harm? In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising claim that some of these systems can themselves be morally responsible for their conduct in an important and everyday sense of the term—the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Gratitude to God for Our Own Moral Goodness.Robert J. Hartman - 2022 - Faith and Philosophy 39 (2):189-204.
    Someone owes gratitude to God for something only if God benefits her and is morally responsible for doing so. These requirements concerning benefit and moral responsibility generate reasons to doubt that human beings owe gratitude to God for their own moral goodness. First, moral character must be generated by its possessor’s own free choices, and so God cannot benefit moral character in human beings. Second, owed gratitude requires being morally responsible for providing a benefit, which rules out owed gratitude to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • I Eat, Therefore I Am: Disgust and the Intersection of Food and Identity.Daniel Kelly & Nicolae Morar - 2018 - In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 637 - 657.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Akratic Action under the Guise of the Good.Eugene Chislenko - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):606-621.
    Many philosophers have thought that human beings do or pursue only what we see as good. These “guise-of-the-good” views face powerful challenges and counterexamples, such as akratic action, in which we do what we ourselves believe we ought not do. I propose a new way for guise-of-the-good views to address this central counterexample by appealing to conflicting beliefs. I then answer concerns that this appeal is insufficiently explanatory, attributes too much conflict, leaves out an essential asymmetry in action against one’s (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Is identity illusory?Andreas L. Mogensen - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):55-73.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations.Simon Cullen - 2018 - Cognition 180 (C):165-181.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Concomitant Ignorance Excuses from Moral Responsibility.Robert J. Hartman - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):58-65.
    Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Free will and the construction of options.Chandra Sripada - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (11):2913-2933.
    What are the distinctive psychological features that explain why humans are free, but many other creatures, such as simple animals, are not? It is natural to think that the answer has something to do with unique human capacities for decision-making. Philosophical discussions of how decision-making works, however, are tellingly incomplete. In particular, these discussions invariably presuppose an agent who has a mentally represented set of options already fully in hand. The emphasis is largely on the selective processes that identify the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert.Jay Spitzley - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4):977-997.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The fallibility paradox.Chandra Sripada - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (1):234-248.
    :Reasons-responsiveness theories of moral responsibility are currently among the most popular. Here, I present the fallibility paradox, a novel challenge to these views. The paradox involves an agent who is performing a somewhat demanding psychological task across an extended sequence of trials and who is deeply committed to doing her very best at this task. Her action-issuing psychological processes are outstandingly reliable, so she meets the criterion of being reasons-responsive on every single trial. But she is human after all, so (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Self-control and the self.Hannah Altehenger - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2183-2198.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • On the Relevance of Self-Disclosure for Epistemic Responsibility.Daniel Buckley - 2025 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12 (4):93-116.
    A number of authors have argued that, in order for S to be appropriately held morally responsible for some action or attitude (say, via moral blame), that action or attitude must somehow reflect or express a negative aspect of S’s (“true”, “deep”, or “real”) self. Recently, theorists of “epistemic blame” and “epistemic accountability” have also incorporated certain “self-disclosure” conditions into their accounts of these phenomena. In this paper, I will argue that accounts of epistemic responsibility which require disclosure of an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Foundational Grounding and Creaturely Freedom.Kenneth L. Pearce - 2021 - Mind 131 (524):1108-1130.
    According to classical theism, the universe depends on God in a way that goes beyond mere (efficient) causation. I have previously argued that this ‘deep dependence’ of the universe on God is best understood as a type of grounding. In a recent paper in this journal, Aaron Segal argues that this doctrine of deep dependence causes problems for creaturely free will: if our choices are grounded in facts about God, and we have no control over these facts, then we do (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Moral responsibility for concepts, continued: Concepts as abstract objects.Rachel Fredericks - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):1029-1043.
    In Fredericks (2018b), I argued that we can be morally responsible for our concepts if they are mental representations. Here, I make a complementary argument for the claim that even if concepts are abstract objects, we can be morally responsible for coming to grasp and for thinking (or not thinking) in terms of them. As before, I take for granted Angela Smith's (2005) rational relations account of moral responsibility, though I think the same conclusion follows from various other accounts. My (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The heart of libertarianism: Fundamentality and the will.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (1):72-92.
    :It is often claimed that libertarianism offers an unattractive conception of free will and moral responsibility because it renders free agency inexplicable and irrational. This essay aims, first, to show that the soundness of these objections turns on more basic disagreements concerning the ideals of free agency and, second, to develop and motivate a truly libertarian conception of the ideals of free agency. The central contention of the essay is that the heart of libertarians’ ideal of free agency is the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations