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...

Results Choice in genetic testing and research does not appear to be the key value for participants in this study; instead they are influenced by a sense of responsibility [3]. Choice for them is an important right, one exercised by other family members who declined a test. Their narratives however, illustrate three moral imperatives that transform choice into responsibility; they are: responsi...

A volume on leadership would be seriously incomplete without a contribution on corporate social responsibility (CSR). The essays on CSR in the present work offer insights that are important in this new century of corporate corruption and moral challenges. I shall take up the gauntlet by asking us to think more carefully about what we mean by the term, “corporate social responsibility.” There is...

Being held responsible for our actions strongly determines our moral judgements and decisions. This study examined whether responsibility also influences our affective reaction to others' emotions. We conducted two experiments in order to assess the effect of responsibility and of a sense of agency (the conscious feeling of controlling an action) on the empathic response to pain. In both experi...

Due to their non-hierarchical structure, socio-technical networks are prone to the occurrence of the problem of many hands. In the present paper an approach is introduced in which people's opinions on responsibility are empirically traced. The approach is based on the Rawlsian concept of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE) in which people's considered judgments on a case are reflectively weighed ...

INTRODUCTION Moral desires are embodied in markets. This article analyzes the implications for corporate governance of the existence of morality within consumer and capital markets. Analysis of the role of moral desires within markets represents a new way of looking at the long-standing debate concerning the social responsibility of corporations. The focus of this article is normative, that is,...

The aim of this paper is to provide a logical analysis of the concept of responsibility attribution; that is, how agents ascribe responsibility about the consequences of actions, either to themselves or to other agents. The paper is divided in two parts. The first part investigates the importance of the concept of responsibility attribution for emotion theory in general and, in particular, for ...

According to a common view among Muslim philosophers, a moral agent has free will if and only if she is able to do an action when she wants to and is able to avoid it when she wants otherwise. Implicit in this view is the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). On the other hand, according to this view, free will is dependent on requirements such as conception, judgement, tendency, decisi...

This article is based on a qualitative empirical project about a distinct kinship group who were among the first identified internationally as having a genetic susceptibility to cancer (Lynch Syndrome). 50 were invited to participate (42 were tested; eight declined genetic testing). 15, who had all accepted testing, were interviewed. They form a unique case study. This study aimed to explore in...

An inflated sense of responsibility often characterizes patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study, we asked OCD patients (n=20) and control participants (n=18) to resolve a series of moral dilemmas embedded in hypothetical scenarios. Each scenario required participants to choose one of two undesirable courses of action, both involving loss of life. The utilitarian option ...