and free will. Depending on how a philosopher conceives of
free will, they will have different views on moral responsibility.
Metaphysical libertarianism Metaphysical libertarians think actions are not always causally determined, allowing for the possibility of free will and thus moral responsibility. All libertarians are also incompatibilists; for they think that if causal determinism were true of human action, people would not have free will. Accordingly, some libertarians subscribe to the principle of alternate possibilities, which posits that moral responsibility requires that people could have acted differently. Phenomenological considerations are sometimes invoked by incompatibilists to defend a libertarian position. In daily life, we feel as though choosing otherwise is a viable option. Although this feeling does not firmly establish the existence of free will, some incompatibilists claim the phenomenological feeling of alternate possibilities is a prerequisite for free will.
Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that people sometimes avoid incrimination and responsibility by hiding behind determinism: "we are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse". A similar view is that individual moral culpability lies in individual character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than to murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character. How one's character was determined is irrelevant from this perspective. Robert Cummins, for example, argues that people should not be judged for their individual actions, but rather for how those actions "reflect on their character". If character (however defined) is the dominant causal factor in determining one's choices, and one's choices are morally wrong, then one should be held accountable for those choices, regardless of genes and other such factors. In law, there is a known exception to the assumption that moral culpability lies in either individual character or freely willed acts. The
insanity defenseor its corollary,
diminished responsibility (a sort of appeal to the
fallacy of the single cause)can be used to argue that the guilty deed was not the product of a guilty mind. In such cases, the legal systems of most Western societies assume that the person is in some way not at fault, because his actions were a consequence of abnormal brain function (implying brain function is a deterministic causal agent of mind and motive).
Argument from luck The argument from luck is a criticism against the libertarian conception of moral responsibility. It suggests that any given action, and even a person's character, is the result of various forces outside a person's control. It may not be appropriate, then, to hold that person solely morally responsible.
Thomas Nagel suggests that four different types of luck (including genetic influences and other external factors) end up influencing the way that a person's actions are evaluated morally. For instance, a person driving drunk may make it home without incident, and yet this action of
drunk driving might seem more morally objectionable if someone happens to jaywalk along his path (getting hit by the car). This argument can be traced back to
David Hume. If physical indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are scientifically described as probabilistic or random. It is therefore argued that it is doubtful that one can praise or blame someone for performing an action generated randomly by his nervous system (without there being any non-physical agency responsible for the observed probabilistic outcome).
Hard determinism Hard determinists (not to be confused with
fatalists) often use
liberty in practical moral considerations, rather than a notion of a free will. Indeed, faced with the possibility that determinism requires a completely different moral system, some proponents say "So much the worse for free will!".
Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney, pleaded the innocence of his clients,
Leopold and Loeb, by invoking such a notion of hard determinism. During his summation, he declared:
Paul the Apostle, in his
Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" In this view, individuals can still be dishonoured for their acts even though those acts were ultimately completely determined by God.
Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, researchers in the emerging field of
neuroethics, argue, on the basis of such cases, that our current notion of moral responsibility is founded on libertarian (and
dualist) intuitions. They argue that
cognitive neuroscience research (e.g.
neuroscience of free will) is undermining these intuitions by showing that the brain is responsible for our actions, not only in cases of florid
psychosis, but also in less obvious situations. For example, damage to the
frontal lobe reduces the ability to weigh uncertain risks and make prudent decisions, and therefore leads to an increased likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime. This is true not only of patients with damage to the frontal lobe due to accident or stroke, but also of adolescents, who show reduced frontal lobe activity compared to adults, and even of children who are chronically neglected or mistreated. In each case, the guilty party can, they argue, be said to have less responsibility for his actions. Neuroscientist
David Eagleman maintains similar ideas. Eagleman says that the legal justice system ought to become more forward looking. He says it is wrong to ask questions of narrow culpability, rather than focusing on what is important: what needs to change in a criminal's behavior and brain. Eagleman is not saying that no one is responsible for their crimes, but rather that the "sentencing phase" should correspond with modern neuroscientific evidence. To Eagleman, it is damaging to entertain the illusion that a person can make a single decision that is somehow, suddenly, independent of their physiology and history. He describes what scientists have learned from brain damaged patients, and offers the case of a school teacher who exhibited escalating
pedophilic tendencies on two occasionseach time as results of growing tumors. Eagleman also warns that less attractive people and minorities tend to get longer sentencingall of which he sees as symptoms that more science is needed in the legal system. While he acknowledges that libertarian agent causation, the capacity of agents as substances to cause actions without being causally determined by factors beyond their control, is still a possibility, he regards it as unlikely against the backdrop of the most defensible physical theories. Without libertarian agent causation, Pereboom thinks the free will required for moral responsibility in the desert-involving sense is not in the offing. However, he also contends that by contrast with the backward-looking, desert-involving sense of moral responsibility, forward-looking senses are compatible with causal determination. For instance, causally determined agents who act badly might justifiably be blamed with the aim of forming faulty character, reconciling impaired relationships, and protecting others from harm they are apt to cause. Pereboom proposes that a viable criminal jurisprudence is compatible with the denial of deserved blame and punishment. His view rules out retributivist justifications for punishment, but it allows for incapacitation of dangerous criminals on the analogy with quarantine of carriers of dangerous diseases. Isolation of carriers of the Ebola virus can be justified on the ground of the right to defend against threat, a justification that does not reference desert. Pereboom contends that the analogy holds for incapacitation of dangerous criminals. He also argues that the less serious the threat, the more moderate the justifiable method of incapacitation; for certain crimes only monitoring may be needed. In addition, just as we should do what we can, within reasonable bounds, to cure the carriers of the Ebola virus we quarantine, so we should aim to rehabilitate and reintegrate the criminals we incapacitate. Pereboom also proposes that given hard incompatibilism, punishment justified as general deterrence may be legitimate when the penalties do not involve undermining an agent's capacity to live a meaningful, flourishing life, since justifying such moderate penalties need not invoke desert.
Compatibilism Compatibilists contend that even if determinism were true, it would still be possible for us to have free will. The Hindu text
The Bhagavad Gita offers one very early compatibilist account. Facing the prospect of going to battle against kinsmen to whom he has bonds,
Arjuna despairs.
Krishna attempts to assuage Arjuna's anxieties. He argues that forces of nature come together to produce actions, and it is only vanity that causes us to regard ourselves as the agent in charge of these actions. However, Krishna adds this caveat: "... [But] the Man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, witnesses how some forces of Nature work upon other forces of Nature, and becomes [not] their slave..." When we are ignorant of the relationship between forces of Nature, we become passive victims of
nomological facts. Krishna's admonition is intended to get Arjuna to perform his duty (i.e., fight in the battle), but he is also claiming that being a successful moral agent requires being mindful of the wider circumstances in which one finds oneself.
Paramahansa Yogananda also said, "Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation." In the Western tradition,
Baruch Spinoza echoes the
Bhagavad Gitas point about agents and natural forces, writing "men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant [of those causes]." Jesus asserted that "There is a path that SEEMS right to a man which leads to Destruction". The contrapositive (equivalent) is the origin of this position of Spinoza. "If a man is Not on the road to destruction, then he has not taken the path that ONLY SEEMS right to him." P.F. Strawson is a major example of a contemporary compatibilist. His paper "Freedom and Resentment," which adduces reactive attitudes, has been widely cited as an important response to incompatibilist accounts of free will. Other compatibilists, who have been inspired by Strawson's paper, are as follows: Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, R. Jay Wallace, Paul Russell, and
David Shoemaker.
Other views Daniel Dennett asks why anyone would care about whether someone had the property of responsibility and speculates that the idea of moral responsibility may be "a purely metaphysical hankering". In this view, the denial of moral responsibility is the moral hankering to be able to assert that one has some fictitious right such as asserting parental rights instead of parent responsibility.
Bruce Waller has argued, in
Against Moral Responsibility (MIT Press), that moral responsibility "belongs with the ghosts and gods and that it cannot survive in a naturalistic environment devoid of miracles". We cannot punish another for wrong acts committed, contends Waller, because the causal forces which precede and have brought about the acts may ultimately be reduced to luck, namely, factors over which the individual has no control. One may not be blamed even for one's character traits, he maintains, since they too are heavily influenced by evolutionary, environmental, and genetic factors (inter alia). This move goes against the commonly held assumption that how one feels about free will is
ipso facto a claim about moral responsibility.
Epistemic condition for moral responsibility In philosophical discussions of moral responsibility, two necessary conditions are usually cited: the control (or freedom) condition (which answers the question 'did the individual doing the action in question have free will?') and the
epistemic condition, the former of which is explored in the above discussion. The epistemic condition, in contrast to the control condition, focuses on the question 'was the individual aware of, for instance, the moral implications of what she did?' Not all philosophers think this condition to be a distinct condition, separate from the control condition: For instance, Alfred Mele thinks that the epistemic condition is a component of the control condition. Nonetheless, there seems to be a philosophical consensus of sorts that it is both distinct and explanatorily relevant. One major concept associated with the condition is "awareness". According to those philosophers who affirm this condition, one needs to be "aware" of four things to be morally responsible: the action (which one is doing), its moral significance, consequences, and alternatives. ==Experimental research==