International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Page 271-287, May 2012.

In a recent paper I argued that agent causation theorists should be compatibilists. In this paper, I argue that compatibilists should be agent causation theorists. I consider six of the main problems facing compatibilism: (i) the powerful intuition that one can't be responsible for actions that were somehow determined before one was born; (ii) Peter van Inwagen's modal argument, involving the inference rule (β); (iii) the objection to compatibilism that is based on claiming that the ability to do otherwise is (...) a necessary condition for freedom; (iv) "manipulation arguments," involving cases in which an agent is manipulated by some powerful being into doing something that he or she would not normally do, but in such a way that the compatibilist's favorite conditions for a free action are satisfied; (v) the problem of constitutive luck; and (vi) the claim that it is not fair to blame someone for an action if that person was determined by forces outside of his or her control to perform that action. And in the case of each of these problems, I argue that the compatibilist has a much more plausible response to that problem if she endorses the theory of agent causation than she does otherwise. (shrink)

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in (...) corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se consequentialism enacts constraints through (...) the very same feature that nonconsequentialist theories do. (shrink)

Agentive awareness is one's awareness of oneself as presently acting. Dominant accounts in cognitive science consider agentive awareness to be grounded in the states and processes underlying sensorimotor control. In this paper, I raise concerns for this approach and develop an alternative. Broadly, in the approach I defend, one is agentively aware in the virtue of intending to act. I further argue that agentive awareness is not constituted by intentions themselves but rather first-personal thoughts that are formed on the (...) basis of them. I develop this proposal, highlight some of its theoretical advantages, and show how it successfully meets various challenges. (shrink)

The project takes as its starting point our conflicting intuitions about personal identity exposed by Bernard Williams' thought experiment involving the switching of bodies in "The Self and the Future." The conflicted intuitions are identified as animalist and psychologist and correspond roughly with the two major approaches to personal identity. The traditional strategy to resolve the conflict---thought experiments---is critically examined and the project concludes that proper thought experiments will reveal the conflict but are unlikely to resolve it. A (...) new reading of the conflict is proposed. The concept of the person is a cluster concept with distinct components: biological human beings, rational agency and psychological continuity, where the latter is construed as the temporal analog of phenomenological unity at a time. The project then suggests that moral theory is best pursued not by a naturalist conception of persons that unites the components of the cluster, but by a novel conception that separates them. This can be accomplished best by eliminating the concept of the person altogether. Objections that the concept of the person is ineliminable are considered and rejected, as are objections that the nature of conflict is not reason enough to abandon the concept. Personhood's centrality for value theory is questioned and the eliminativist strategy is defended on the grounds that responsibility, self-concern and moral rights are best analyzed with the component concepts instead of the cluster concept. Eliminativism is therefore preferable to competing accounts of personal identity because the former is better suited for moral theory. Among the advantages are the ability to: attribute responsibility to group agents without calling them persons, make sense of our conflicting demonstrations of self-concern without taking them as evidence for conflicting theories of personal identity, and attribute moral rights to entities who fail to meet traditional criteria for personhood but who are nonetheless entitled to moral respect. (shrink)

The dilemma of free will is that if actions are caused deterministically, then they are not free, and if they are not caused deterministically then they are not free either because then they happen by chance and are not up to the agent. I propose a conception of free will that solves this dilemma. It can be called agent causation but it differs from what Chisholm and others have called so.

This dissertation is a defence of agent-regret and an exploration of its role in our lives. I argue that agent-regret shows that an agent takes seriously her status as an agent who impacts the world, but who only has fallible control over it. To accept responsibility for any outcomes, she must accept responsibility for unintended outcomes, too: agent-regret is part of being a human agent. In doing this, I try to defend and develop Williams’s own conception of agent-regret. -/- In (...) the first part, I explore the nature of agent-regret. Agent-regret is distinct from guilt because we can feel agent-regret without being at fault. I argue that several challenges that seek to reduce agent-regret to a form of guilt fail. I further argue that agent-regret takes as its object not only something one has done, but the fact that one did it; I discuss this in terms of what Bernard Williams called taking an “external” view on one’s own action. -/- I suggest that we can best understand the object of agent-regret as one’s responsibility for an outcome. I argue that this form of “responsibility” is conceptually separate from liability or answerability; it concerns whether the outcome can be ascribed to an agent. This is a restricted form of causal responsibility but retains its agential character. I suggest that we can be responsible for outcomes even when we did not intend to bring them about. -/- In the second part, I vindicate the propriety of agent-regret against the ideas that we are not responsible for unintended outcomes or that such responsibility is not important. I set out several challenges to this effect. I argue that we are responsible for unintended outcomes because in order to be responsible as agents at all, we must use fallible abilities. When we exercise these abilities but fail, we are responsible as agents for those unintended outcomes that arise. I then consider the importance of being responsible for particular unintended outcomes and analyse the idea that this affects our identities. I argue that responsibility for an outcome affects a form of identity, but that it does not involve essential features of a person. Instead, our responsibility for outcomes is a contingent feature that nonetheless plays an important role in our interpersonal interactions and self-conceptions. I argue that these reactions are appropriate, because our responsibility for particular outcomes is independently significant—but these reactions also lend this responsibility added significance as part of inescapable human practices. -/- Thus our responsibility for outcomes is important. Its importance means that it can serve as an appropriate object of agent-regret that vindicates the propriety of agent-regret. I end by considering several interesting features of agent-regret, including its expression and “pure” cases, which are cases where an agent feels agent-regret despite not regretting the result of her action. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)

The prohibition against using others ‘merely as means’ is one of Kant’s most famous ideas, but it has proven difficult to spell out with precision what it requires of us in practice. In ‘How to Use Someone “Merely as a Means”’ (2020), I proposed a new interpretation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for using someone ‘merely as a means’. I argued that my agent-focused actual consent inter- pretation has strong textual support and significant advantages over other readings of the (...) prohibition. In the present essay, I respond to comments by Claudia Blöser, Irina Schumski, and Oliver Sensen. I first address the role of maxims in relation to the Formula of Humanity, and I spell out in more detail the relation between the agent’s belief and the actual facts pertaining to the consent of the person who is used as means to the agent’s end. I then discuss the importance of the requirement that agents make their use of others conditional on the others’ consent as a matter of moral principle. I next show that the proposed reading of the prohibition, despite its focus on the agent’s maxims and practical reasoning, yields important conclusions about the moral status of external actions, and I address several cases that are pur- ported to spell trouble for my reading of Kant’s prohibition. I end by outlining two challenges for possible (rational) consent readings of the prohibition against using others merely as means. (shrink)

In recent work, Robert Brandom has articulated important connections between the deontic normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the alethic modal statuses of possibility and necessity. In this paper, I articulate an until now unexplored connection between Brandom’s core normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the agentive modal statuses of ability and compulsion. These modals have application not only in action, but also in perception and inference, and, in both of these cases, there is a direct mapping between (...) the normative statuses that one bears towards various claims, articulated from the perspective of the attributor of commitments and entitlements, and the agentive modal statuses that one bears towards various judgments, articulated from the perspective of the undertaker of commitments. I will highlight this correspondence, focusing on the case of perception, and show how it sheds light on the account of mindedness that emerges from Brandom’s theory of discursive practice. (shrink)

Este artículo defiende que toda acción es un suceso que entraña, responsabilidad agente. Toda acción es el suceso que es el "hacer" de alguien. La responsabilidad del agente que define una acción es el tipo que justifica el premio-castigo. Esto implica que la acción es, en todos los casos, revocable y socialmente sancionada, igual que lo es la responsabilidad que la define. Más aún, si la identidad personal se ha de comprender dentro del reino de la acción, las teorías (...) de corte narrativo, más que las aproximaciones mentalistas, se encuentran mucho mejor posicionadas para llevar a cabo esta labor de comprensión.Este artículo defiende que toda acción es un suceso que entraña, responsabilidad agente. Toda acción es el suceso que es el "hacer" de alguien. La responsabilidad del agente que define una acción es el tipo que justifica el premio-castigo. Esto implica que la acción es, en todos los casos, revocable y socialmente sancionada, igual que lo es la responsabilidad que la define. Más aún, si la identidad personal se ha de comprender dentro del reino de la acción, las teorías de corte narrativo, más que las aproximaciones mentalistas, se encuentran mucho mejor posicionadas para llevar a cabo esta labor de comprensión.This paper argues that an action is an event that essentially conveysagent responsibility. Any action is the event that is someone’s doing. Andagent responsibility, which defines action, is the kind of responsibility that justifiesreward and punishment. This means that action is, in all cases, defeasileand socially santioned, such as it is the type of responsibility that defines action.Moreover, if pesonal identity is to be understood within the frame ofaction, narrativist kind of theories, rather than mentalist approaches, are in amuch better position to do the job. (shrink)

If a person has lost all or most of her capacities for agency, how can she be harmed? This paper begins by describing several ways in which a person loses, or never develops, significant capacities of agency. In contrast with other work in this area, the central analyses are not of fetuses, small children, or the cognitively disabled. The central analyses are of victims of mistreatment or oppressive social circumstances. These victims are denuded of their agential capacities, becoming, in an (...) important sense, objects or pseudo-agents. In light of this, the concern of this paper is how further harm to ersatz agents should be understood. (shrink)

This article argues that agents can initiate causal processes.

A number of theorists have argued that Scanlon's contractualist theory both "gets around" and "solves" the non-identity problem. They argue that it gets around the problem because hypothetical deliberation on general moral principles excludes the considerations that lead to the problem. They argue that it solves the problem because violating a contractualist moral principle in one's treatment of another wrongs that particular other, grounding a person-affecting moral claim. In this paper, I agree with the first claim but note that all (...) it shows is that the act is impersonally wrong. I then dispute the second claim. On Scanlon's contractualist view, one wrongs a particular other if one treats the other in a way that is unjustifiable to that other on reasons she could not reasonably reject. We should think of person-affecting wronging in terms of the reasons had by the actual agent and the actual person affected by the agent's action. In non-identity cases, interpersonal justifiability is therefore shaped both by the reason to reject the treatment provided by the bad suffered and the reason to affirm the treatment provided by the goods had as a result of existing. I argue it would be reasonable for the actual person to find the treatment justifiable, and so I conclude that Scanlon's contractualist metaethics does not provide a narrow person-affecting solution to the non-identity problem on its own terms. I conclude that the two claims represent a tension within Scanlon's contractualist theory itself. (shrink)

In this paper Sullins argues that in certain circumstances robots can be seen as real moral agents. A distinction is made between persons and moral agents such that, it is not necessary for a robot to have personhood in order to be a moral agent. I detail three requirements for a robot to be seen as a moral agent. The first is achieved when the robot is significantly autonomous from any programmers or operators of the machine. The second (...) is when one can analyze or explain the robot's behavior only by ascribing to it some predisposition or 'intention' to do good or harm. And finally, robot moral agency requires the robot to behave in a way that shows and understanding of responsibility to some other moral agent. Robots with all of these criteria will have moral rights as well as responsibilities regardless of their status as persons. (shrink)

In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...) puzzle. I propose that ‘ought’ is evaluated relative to contextual parameters (e.g., Kratzer’s conversational backgrounds, Finlay and Snedegar’s alternative sets) and those contextual parameters are sensitive to agents as well as possible worlds. (shrink)

Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based account (...) of deference. Drawing on recent work on self-knowledge, I argue that a person normally has a distinctive type of cognitive agency; specifically she is able to constitute her psychological attitudes by making judgments about what they ought to be. I then argue that a speaker expresses this agentive authority when she self-ascribes a psychological attitude and this is what justifies deferentially trusting what she says. Because the notion of expression plays a central role in this account, I contrast it with recent neo-expressivist theories. (shrink)

One of the goals of physiologists who study the detailed physical, chemical,and neurological mechanisms operating within the human body is to understand the intricate causal processes which underlie human abilities and activities. It is doubtless premature to predict that they will eventually be able to explain the behaviour of a particular human being as we might now explain the behaviour of a pendulum clock or even the invisible changes occurring within the hardware of a modern electronic computer. Nonetheless, it seems (...) fair to say that hovering in the background of investigations into human physiology is the promise or threat, depending upon how one looks at the matter that human beings are complete physical-chemical systems and that all events taking place within their bodies and all movements of their bodies could be accounted for by physical causes if we but knew enough. I am not concerned at the moment with whether or not this ’mechanistic’ hypothesis is true, assuming that it is clear enough to be intelligible, nor with whether or not we could ever know that it is true. I wish to consider the somewhat more accessible yet equally important question whether our coming to believe that the hypothesis is true would warrant our relinquishing our conception of ourselves as beings who are capable of acting for reasons to achieve ends of our own choosing. I use the word ’warrant’ to indicate that I will not be discussing the possibility that believing the mechanistic hypothesis might lead us, as a matter of psychological fact, to think of human beings as mere automata, as objects whose movements are to be explained only by causes rather than by reasons, as are the actions of a personal subject. I intend to consider only whether the acceptance of mechanism would in fact justify such a change in conception. (shrink)

The article aims at formulating a philosophical framework and by this giving some means at hand to save human libertarian freedom, God’s omniscience and God’s ”eternity’. This threefold aim is achieved by 1) conceiving of an agent as having different possibilities to act, 2) regarding God’s knowledge -- with respect to agents -- not only as being ”propositional’ in character but also as being ”experiential’: God knows an agent also from the ”first person perspective’, as the agent knows herself, (...) and, 3), formulating ”eternity’ and ”temporality’ as being homeomorphically related to each other. This gives rise to a coherent interplay that saves both human libertarian freedom and God’s omniscient ”view from eternity’. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jonathan Quong tries to offer further support for “the proposition that there are sometimes agent-relative prerogatives to harm nonliable persons.” In this brief paper, I will demonstrate that Quong’s argument implicitly relies on the premise that the violinist in Thomson’s famous example has a right not to be unplugged. Yet, first, Quong provides no argument in support of this premise; and second, the premise is clearly wrong. Moreover, throughout his paper Quong just question-beggingly and without argument (...) assumes that one cannot lose rights in other ways than by one’s own responsible action. I conclude that Quong has failed to provide further support for his thesis. (shrink)

This paper is about when associations, and in particular associations that are part of the state, should be treated as legal persons. I distinguish two forms of association – those that render coherent the agency of their members and those that are group agents – and argue that only the latter should be treated as persons. Following this, I discuss the conditions under which associations that are part of the state can legitimately be group agents.

When we think about ethics, we normally focus on a particular sort of agent: the individual person. Some philosophers have argued that we should rethink the limits of what counts as an ethically relevant unit of agency by expanding outward, and claiming that groups of people can have normative reasons for action. In this paper, I explore whether we can go in the other direction. Are there sub‐personal beings who count as agents with their own reasons for action? (...) In particular, might the temporal parts of persons, beings like “me‐in‐my‐twenties,” be thought of as normative agents? This idea, I argue, has deep attractions, and deep, but surmountable, challenges. And if we do accept this idea, I argue, this can indirectly help to support the case for thinking that groups can have reasons for action. (shrink)

Artificial Social Agents (ASAs), which are AI software driven entities programmed with rules and preferences to act autonomously and socially with humans, are increasingly playing roles in society. As their sophistication grows, humans will share greater amounts of personal information, thoughts, and feelings with ASAs, which has significant ethical implications. We conducted a study to investigate what ethical principles are of relative importance when people engage with ASAs and whether there is a relationship between people’s values and the (...) ethical principles they prioritise. The study uses scenarios, embedded with the five AI4People ethical principles (Beneficence, Non-maleficence, Autonomy, Justice, and Explicability), involving ASAs taking on roles traditionally played by humans to understand whether these roles and behaviours (including dialogues) are seen as acceptable or unacceptable. Results from 268 participants reveal the greatest sensitivity to ASA behaviours that relate to Autonomy, Justice, Explicability, and the privacy of their personal data. Models were created using Schwartz’s Refined Values as a possible indicator of how stakeholders discern and prioritise the different AI4People ethical principles when interacting with ASAs. Our findings raise issues around the ethical acceptability of ASAs for nudging and changing behaviour due to participants’ desire for autonomy and their concerns over deceptive ASA behaviours such as pretending to have memories and emotions. (shrink)

According to agent relativism, each person's moral requirements are relative to her desires or interests. That is, whether a person morally ought to ø depends on what interests or desires she has. Some philosophers charge that the main argument for agent relativism trades on an ambiguity in the term "reason," "reason for action,'' or the like. This paper shows that although the argument for agent relativism may indeed harbor an ambiguity, the ambiguity is no Achilles’ heel. To remove it is (...) not to discredit the argument, but to uncover the strongest form of it, the form that makes agent relativism tenacious. (shrink)

This essay examines Locke’s chapter “Of Identity and Diversity” (Essay 2.27) in the context of the series of chapters on ideas of relations (Essay 2.25–28) that precede and follow it. I begin by introducing Locke’s account of how we acquire ideas of relations. Next, I consider Locke’s general approach to individuation and identity over time before I show how he applies his general account of identity over time to persons and personal identity. I draw attention to Locke’s claim that (...) “person” is a forensic term and analyse his arguments for why the sameness of a human being and the sameness of a substance or soul are neither necessary nor sufficient for personal identity. Instead, Locke argues that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness. Locke regards persons as moral agents who are accountable for their actions. If a person now is held accountable for a past action it is important that the person now is the same person as the person who did the action. This means that moral accountability presupposes personal identity. Additionally, it will be important to consider whether the person deserves reward or punishment for the action. Locke’s account of moral relations, which he develops in Essay 2.28, addresses this issue and I show how it supplements his account of persons and personal identity. (shrink)

Agent-centered morality has been a serious challenge to ethical theories based on agent-neutral morality in defining what is the moral point of view. In this paper, my concern is to examine whether arguments for agent-centered morality, in particular, arguments for agent-centered option, can be justified. -/- After critically examining three main arguments for agent-centered morality, I will contend that although there is a ring of truth in the demands of agent-centered morality, agent-centered morality is more problematic than agent-neutral morality. Nevertheless, (...) we need to take seriously the challenges to agent-neutral morality by finding a way to reflect the insight of agent-centered morality within the framework of agent-neutral morality without collapsing it into agent-centered morality. As a way of doing so, I suggest that we need to integrate the situated, rather than transcendental, nonideal, rather than idealized, and dialogical, rather than monological, perspectives developed in feminist ethics, into agent-neutral morality. (shrink)

A central dispute in discussions of self-locating attitudes is whether attitude relations like believing and knowing are relations between an agent and properties (things that vary in truth value across individuals) or between an agent and propositions (things that do not so vary). Proponents of the proposition view have argued that the property view is unable to give an adequate account of relations like communication and agreement. We agree with this critique of the property view, and in this essay we (...) show that the problems facing the property view are much more serious than has been appreciated. We then develop and explore two versions of the proposition view. In each case, we show how facts about the self-ascription of properties may be determined by facts about propositional attitudes in conjunction with certain other facts. (shrink)

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent’s psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of a (...) systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies. (shrink)

This paper compares two approaches to representing personality traits in synthetic agents. It proposes a set of goals that any computational implementation of personality should satisfy. It describes the personality trait system used in The Sims 3. Then an alternative system is described, in which traits are represented as conditionals relating world state to emotional state. It is shown that the conditionals model does a better job of satisfying the desiderata.

David Benatar has argued both for anti-natalism and for a certain pessimism about life's meaning. In this paper, I propose that these positions are expressions of a deeply impersonal philosophical temperament. This is not a problem on its own; we all have our philosophical instincts. The problem is that this particular temperament, I argue, leads Benatar astray, since it prevents him from answering a question that any moral philosopher must answer. This is the question of rational authority, which requires the (...) moral philosopher to say why existing human agents have strong practical reasons to comply with the philosopher's dictates. A purely impersonal ethical system can never do this, and this is why Benatar has no answer to this question. (shrink)

In her book Experience Embodied Anik Waldow devotes a chapter to “Locke’s Experimental Persons.” Her chapter aims to show how Locke’s views on persons, personal identity, and moral agency in his Essay concerning Human Understanding build on his esteem-based approach to education that he develops in Some Thoughts concerning Education. After outlining main contributions that Waldow makes in her chapter, I turn to three issues that in my view deserve further consideration. First, I draw attention to the question of (...) how Locke’s esteem-based education can be reconciled with his moral views in the Essay. I propose that the question of how children become persons or moral agents who see their actions bound by divine law is worth examining with more detail. Second, I contrast Waldow’s interpretation of what a Lockean action is with an alternative interpretation and show that this has implications for how we understand the role of consciousness in Locke’s account of persons and personal identity. Third, I take a closer look at Waldow’s view that consciousness has an epistemic function in Locke’s account of persons and personal identity and highlight advantages of also acknowledging a metaphysical function of consciousness. (shrink)

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a person have the right (...) to attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

The concept of the person is widely assumed to be indispensable for making a rights claim. But a survey of the concept's appearance in legal discourse reveals that the concept is stretched to the breaking point. Personhood stands at the center of debates as diverse as the legal status of embryos and animals to the rights and responsibilities of corporations and nations. This Note argues that personhood is a cluster concept with distinct components: the biological concept of the human being, (...) the notion of a rational agent, and unity of consciousness. Use of these component concepts (in lieu of the concept of the person) in legal reasoning would promote greater systematicity and coherence. (shrink)

In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects but for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that (...) thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons. (shrink)

In a study that goes beyond the ego affirmed by Freudian psychology, David Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfillment based on the development of our capacity for listening. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, he uses the vocabulary of phenomenological psychology to distinguish four stages in this developmental process and brings us the significance of these stages for music, psychotherapy, ethics, politics, and ecology. This analysis substantiates his claim that the development of (...) our listening capacity is a process that fits Foucault's conception of a practice of the self, forming our character as social beings and moral agents. David Levin contends that our self- development as auditory beings is necessary for the achievement of a just and democratic society. (shrink)

I happen to believe that though human experiences are to be characterized as pluralistic they are all rooted in the one reality. I would assume the thesis of pluralism but how could I maintain my belief in the realism? There are various discussions in favor of realism but they appear to stay within a particular paradigm so to be called “internal realism”. In this paper I would try to justify my belief in the reality by discussing a special use of (...) indexicals. I will argue for my indexical realism by advancing the thesis that indexicals can be used as an inter-agentic referential term. Three arguments for the thesis will be presented. The first argument derives from a revision of Kaplan-Kvart’s notion of exportation. Their notions of exportation of singular terms can be analyzed as intra-agentic exportation in the context of a single speaker and theirs may be revised so as to be an inter-agentic exportation in the context of two speakers who use the same indexicals. The second is an argument from the notion of causation which is specifically characterized in the context of inter-theoretic reference. I will argue that any two theories may each say “this” in order to refer what is beyond its own theory. Two theories address themselves to ‘this’ same thing though what ‘this’ represents in each theory turn out to be different objects all together. The third argument is an argument which is based on a possibility of natural reference. Reference is used to be taken mostly as a 3-place predicate: Abe refers an object oi with an expression ej. The traditional notion of reference is constructive and anthropocentric. But I would argue that natural reference is a reference that we humans come to recognize among denumerably many objects in natural states: at a moment mi in a natural state there is a referential relation among objects o1, o2, o3, . . , oj, o j+1, . . which interact to each other as agents of information processors. Natural reference is an original reference which is naturally given and to which humans are passive as we derivatively refer it by using ‘this’. (shrink)

For Aristotle, some wrongdoers do not deserve blame, and the virtuous judge should extend sungnōmē, a correct judgment about what is equitable, under the appropriate excusing circumstances. Aristotle’s virtuous judge, however, does not forgive; the wrongdoer is excused from blame in the first place, rather than being forgiven precisely because she is blameworthy. Additionally, the judge does not fail to blame because she wishes to be merciful or from natural feeling, but instead, because that is the equitable action to take (...) under the circumstances. Moreover, while Aristotle does claim in his discussions of the virtues of megalopsychia and praotēs that the virtuous person will sometimes fail to become angry at blameworthy wrongdoers, Aristotle’s reasons for repudiating anger or forestalling blame have little to do with the sorts of reasons that one would or could be forgiving for. Although an Aristotelian virtuous agent does let go of anger for her own reasons, she does not forgive. As a result, I argue that since Aristotle’s account of equity entails that forgiveness is positively vicious, forgivingness is not merely a virtue left out of Aristotle’s account, but is in fact incompatible with his account. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the question of whether respect for persons requires toleration of the expression of any extremist political or religious viewpoint within public discourse. The starting point of my discussion is Steven Heyman and Jonathan Quong’s interesting defences of a negative answer to this question. They argue that respect for persons requires that liberal democracies should not tolerate the public expression of extremist speech that can be regarded as recognition-denying or respect-denying speech – that (...) is, speech or other expressive conduct that expresses viewpoints that explicitly reject that all persons should be regarded and treated as free and equal persons or citizens. According to Heyman and Quong, recognition-denying speech falls outside the scope of the right to participate in public discourse (i.e. what it is a right to). In contrast to Heyman and Quong, one can argue that a strong case can be made for viewpoint neutrality on the basis of what can be called a libertarian or Nozickean status-based theory of rights. According to this theory, toleration in a liberal democracy requires respect for the status of persons as thinking agents, and respect for thinking agents and their sovereignty over their own mind requires viewpoint neutrality – that is, a basic right to participate in public discourse as speakers and listeners free from state-imposed viewpoint-based restrictions. All persons should have a basic right to express, hear and consider any viewpoint within public discourse. This doctrine of viewpoint neutrality requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any viewpoint within public discourse, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views. (shrink)

The generic pronoun 'one' (or its empty counterpart, arbitrary PRO) exhibits a range of properties that show a special connection to the first person, or rather the relevant intentional agent (speaker, addressee, or described agent). The paper argues that generic 'one' involves generic quantification in which the predicate is applied to a given entity ‘as if’ to the relevant agent himself. This is best understood in terms of simulation, a central notion in some recent developments in the philosophy of mind (...) and cognitive science (Simulation Theory). (shrink)

This paper is concerned with a recent, clever, and novel argument for the need for genuine collectives in our ontology of agents to accommodate the kinds of normative judgments we make about them. The argument appears in a new paper by David Copp, "On the Agency of Certain Collective Entities: An Argument from 'Normative Autonomy'" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility, XXX, 2006, pp. 194-221; henceforth ‘ACE’), and is developed in Copp’s paper for this special journal (...) issue, “The Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis” (henceforth ‘CAT’). The argument goes as follows. -/- (1) We correctly assign blame (or obligations) to collectives in circumstances in which it would be a mistake to assign any (relevantly related) blame (or obligations) to their members. (2) If (1), then collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. (3) Therefore, collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. -/- Following Copp, I call (1) the Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis (CMA). Copp argues for CMA primarily by appeal to cases, but also offers two general arguments for it. In the cases that Copp describes, we are to judge that a collective act is blameworthy, though each member of the group that acts is blameless because he is merely following procedures appropriate for his participation, or because there are excusing factors, or because of overriding personal duties. -/- I argue that the case for CMA has not been made. In particular, I argue that, in each case in which we feel inclined to hold a group responsible for something but not its members, it is because -/- 1. we have accepted a false dilemma, that when no one agent is fully responsible for the action of a group of which he is a member, the only entity that could be responsible is the group as such, or 2. we have directed our attention to the wrong individual or individuals, or 3. we have become confused about the commitments of the individuals, or 4. we have mistaken ameliorating for excusing factors, or 5. we have mistaken moral blameworthiness and all-in rational blameworthiness, or 6. a combination of these things. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how Kant’s development of the idea of the disposition in the Religion copes with problems implied by Kant’s idea of transcendental freedom. Since transcendental freedom implies the power of absolutely beginning a state, and therefore of absolutely beginning a series of the consequences of that state, a transcendentally free act is divorced from the preceding state of an agent, and would thus seem to be divorced from the agent’s character as well. The paper is divided (...) into two parts. First I analyze Kant’s understanding of the disposition and discuss the ways in which it allows us to understand a person’s transcendentally free actions in terms of that person’s character. I then discuss Kant’s resources for understanding the Socratic injunction to care for the soul in light of his concept of the disposition. (shrink)

Personal indexicals are often taken to refer to the agent of an expression’s context, but deviant uses (e.g. ‘I’m parked out back’) complicate matters. I argue that personal indexicals refer to the extended self of the agent, where the extended self is a mereological chimera incorporating whatever determines our behavioral capacities. To ascertain the persistence conditions of personal identity, I propose a method for selecting a level of description and a set of functional properties at that level (...) that remain constant over a lifetime. I argue for functional constancy, and against continuity, as the central determinant of diachronic identity. (shrink)

Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: -/- If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative (C). -/- The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose (...) effects could be different, even if they were to recur under identical circumstances. We have here a denial of Laplacian Determinism (LD), according to which the condition of the world at any instant makes only one state possible at any other instant. One prominent defender of this view, Robert Kane, holds that unless an agent’s neural mechanisms operated indeterministicly in forming her character she is not responsible for its manifestations. This requirement is entailed by the principle of “ultimate responsibility” (UR) according to which an act is freely willed only if (a) its agent is personally responsible for its performance in the sense of having caused it to occur by voluntarily doing something that was avoidable and (b) there is no sufficient condition for its performance for which its agent is not personally responsible. The orthodox Compatibilist, adducing counterexamples to UR, argues that even if C and its antecedent are true, free will is possible. Ned Markosian has provided the Compatibilist with yet another response to UR-based objections to her view, wedding it to the notion of agent causation: here the deterministic causing of an act by its agent is necessary and sufficient for its being “morally free.” I criticize this view as inconsistent with the agent causalist's belief that moral responsibility precludes causation of a choice by any power other than the maker thereof: he being its efficient cause. (shrink)

Theories of individual well‐being fall into three main categories: hedonism, the desire‐fulfilment theory, and the list theory (which maintains that there are some things that can benefit a person without increasing the person's pleasure or desire‐fulfilment). The paper briefly explains the answers that hedonism and the desire‐fulfilment theory give to the question of whether being virtuous constitutes a benefit to the agent. Most of the paper is about the list theory's answer.

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. (...) I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard bases her interpretation of personal identity upon the notion of moral agency and thereby refutes the Reductionist thesis of Derek Parfit. Korsgaard indicates that actions and choices, from the practical standpoint, must be viewed as having agents and choosers. This is what makes them our own actions and choices as well as contributes to the process of self-constitution. Personal identity manifested as the chooser of our desires and author of our actions can be viewed as (...) the common denominator between Korsgaard and Wang Yangming (王陽明). For liangzhi (良知) is none other than the agency that acts as the capacity for moral judgment and the motivation of performing moral actions. Given liangzhi is the authentic self that make laws for us, our true identities are exhibited in the performance of moral behaviors. Moreover, further engagement between the two sides reveals that Wang’s characterizations of liangzhi, particularly those of practical justification, law-embodying identity, and zhih –zhi (致知), can be seen as either a complement to practical standpoint argument or an approach of consummating self-constitution. (shrink)

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...) paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought. (shrink)

I explore various ways of integrating the framework for predeterminism, agency, and ability in[P.McNamara, Nordic J. Philos. Logic 5 (2)(2000) 135] with a framework for obligations. However,the agential obligation operator explored here is defined in terms of a non-agential yet personal obligation operator and a non-deontic (and non-normal) agency operator. This is contrary to the main current trend, which assumes statements of personal obligation always take agential complements. Instead, I take the basic form to be an agent’s being (...) obligated to be such that p. I sketch some logics for agential obligation based on personal obligation and agency, first in a fairly familiar context that rules out conflicting personal obligations (and derivatively, conflicting agential obligations), and then in contexts that do allow for conflicts (of both sorts). (shrink)