Strategies of Naturalistic Explanation of Moral Responsibility: Compatibilism and Eliminativism

Abstract

The article explores the intuition of moral responsibility from a naturalistic perspective. The aim of the article was to analyse what possible naturalistic approaches to the concept of moral responsibility are possible from a neurophilosophical point of view. The aim is to revisit the concept of moral responsibility in order to remove the libertarian and classical compatibilist intuition and move towards a naturalistic explanation. This study shows that the intuition of moral responsibility is based on the fact that the human brain is endowed with two different parallel systems of perception of causality. With this empirical evidence in mind, two possible strategies for a naturalistic explanation of moral responsibility are proposed, conceptualised as neurophilosophical compatibilism (NC) and neurophilosophical eliminativism (NE). The first NC strategy is defended by an epistemic argument which argues that knowing exactly how someone is determined is fundamentally limited, and so we should not base our ideas about moral responsibility on actual compatibilist control alone. The second strategy of NE is divided on the strength of the elimination of moral responsibility: either the whole concept of moral responsibility or only its ontological reality is eliminated. In the first option, we are faced with the need to develop an alternative system of punishment, law and overcoming the persistent intuition of moral responsibility. In the second scenario, the preservation of moral responsibility as an emergent functional property is accepted and a total reduction to ontological naturalism or, in the case of an unreductive naturalistic approach, to ontological pluralism is achieved.