Agency, Responsibility, Selves, and the Mechanical Mind

Embodied Agency and Habitual Selves

The Selves and the Shoemaker: Psychopaths, Moral Judgement, and Responsibility

David Shoemaker argues from (A) psychopaths’ emotional deficiency, to (B) their insensitivity to moral reasons, to (C) their lack of criminal responsibility. This response observes three important ambiguities in this argument, involving the interpretation of (1) psychopaths’ emotional deficit, (2) their insensitivity to reasons, and (3) their moral judgements. Resolving these ambiguities presen...

Epistemic Responsibility without Epistemic Agency

This article discusses the arguments against associating epistemic responsibility with the ordinary notion of agency. I examine the various “Kantian” views which lead to a distinctive conception of epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility, in particular the one proposed by Pamela Hieronymi (2007). I try to explain why we can be held responsible for our beliefs in the sense of obeying norms...

Précis of Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency.

Does it make sense for people to hold one another responsible for what they do, as happens in countless social interactions every day? One of the most unsettling lessons from recent psychological research is that people are routinely mistaken about the origins of their behavior. Yet philosophical orthodoxy holds that the exercise of morally responsible agency typically requires accurate self-aw...

Responsibility and punishment: whose mind? A response.

Cognitive neuroscience is challenging the Anglo-American approach to criminal responsibility. Critiques, in this issue and elsewhere, are pointing out the deeply flawed psychological assumptions underlying the legal tests for mental incapacity. The critiques themselves, however, may be flawed in looking, as the tests do, at the psychology of the offender. Introducing the strategic structure of ...