Automaticity, Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

Automaticity, Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

Whenandunderwhat circumstances arewe responsible for our actions?What roledoes conscious awareness of one’s actions play in the assessment and ascription of responsibility? To answer these questions, Neil Levy has written a provocative and interesting account of the necessary role of consciousness in the assessment of responsibility for action. In an economical 150 pages, Levy makes the case fo...

Moral Responsibility and Consciousness

Our goal in this paper is to raise a general question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. The evidence from cognitive science suggests that there are no conscious mental states playing the right causal roles to count as decisions, judgments, or evaluations. We propose that all theorists should determi...

Consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility: Taking the folk seriously

In this paper, I offer evidence that folk views of free will and moral responsibility accord a central place to consciousness. In sections 2 and 3, I contrast action production via conscious states and processes with action in concordance with an agent's long-standing and endorsed motivations, values, and character traits. Results indicate that conscious action production is considered much mor...

Global Poverty and Moral Responsibility

Global poverty is one of the most important challenges encountering human beings. Thousands of people die every day and 18 million people die every year as a result of poverty and its problems. The main question in this regard is whether the rich have a moral responsibility for poverty or not. Taking advantage of descriptive-analytical methods, this article examines the views of Peter Singer, J...