Notion Of Moral Responsibility Research Articles

The metaphysics of environmental responsibility in the context of self-determination of human being

The article analyzes the metaphysical meaning of responsibility as a fundamental constituent of human existence. The urgency of the research is determined by contradictions of modern information-driven civilization, simulative nature of reality imitating human life, with man becoming the construct of rational schemes and technical manipulations, i. e. the conditions leading to downplaying human essence of a sane and responsible personality. The correlation of personality, freedom and responsibility in the metaphysical experience of man is revealed. It is shown that responsibility forms personal competence of man, is a structural element of his metaphysical experience, his event structure. The essence of responsibility as a structurally forming element of human existence, performing man-forming function, is analyzed. In this respect the problem of man’s identity in the modern world is comprehended. The essence of freedom as the reverse side of responsibility, as responsibility for one’s own content and being is shown. The notion of moral responsibility is explicated. The conclusion is made that the criterion of responsibility should be placed at the basis of human relations with the world.

The influence of moral disengagement on responses to climate change

Notions of moral responsibility and ethical obligation pervade social and political discourse about climate change in Australia. However, comparatively little is known about the importance of moral considerations in people’s mitigative and adaptive behaviours. Here, we draw on Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement to explore this issue. We conducted two nationally representative online surveys, 12 months apart. Participants were 5,030 Australian residents, of whom 1,355 participated in both surveys. We found that levels of moral engagement mediate between (a) opinions about the causes of climate change and pro‐environmental behaviour, (b) individual response efficacy and pro‐environmental behaviour, and (c) responsibility for causing climate change and pro‐environmental behaviour. Moreover, people placed more responsibility on groups and organisations, and less on individuals, for both causing and responding to climate change, regardless of their opinion on the causes of climate change. Longitudinal analyses showed that those who became more sceptical about anthropogenic climate change also became less morally engaged. Relatedly, those who became less morally engaged reported feeling less guilty about climate change, though there was evidence suggesting that this relationship is bidirectional. We suggest that moral disengagement is a key mechanism through which reductions in both effortful behaviour and guilt are achieved.

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered: Integrating Chance, Choice and Constraint

Clarity is needed regarding moral responsibility, for theoretical and practical purposes, such as philosophical coherence and social regulation. In this article, I examine the notion of (individual) moral responsibility. I first dispense with a preliminary concern, that the notion of moral responsibility can be used in at least two distinct ways, which I argue are necessarily related and hence can be jointly addressed in this article. I then elaborate on what I consider to be the three key tenets of the proposed theoretical approach: chance, choice and constraint (which can hence be termed the 3Cs theory of responsibility); specifically, I consider chance as indeterminate (although calculable), whereas choice and constraint are determined by chance and by each other. I then integrate these tenets to form a rudimentary yet useful theory of (individual) moral responsibility, particularly referring to the iterative process of chance, choice and constraint. And then I apply this theory to three sufficiently dissimilar types of situations of ascending complexity: the responsibility of a democratically elected politician regarding his or her public communication, the responsibility of a person with psychosis regarding his or her psychosis-related behavior, and the responsibility of a parent regarding his or her dependent child’s upbringing. Finally, I summarize and attend to special and general implications of my conclusions, such as the importance of considering expected – rather than actual – impact of chance, choice and constraint, during moral deliberation for assignment of (individual) moral responsibility.

The Takings Doctrine and the Principle of Legality

The prohibitions of the criminal law promise an arena within which we may pursue our lives pretty much free of the fear of being preyed upon by our less scrupulous neighbors; but that arena of freedom can be threatened by the intrusions that the state makes use of to enforce those very prohibitions. The limits that keep the state from overstepping its bounds, traditionally thought to be called for by the notions of moral responsibility and desert, are instead called for by the promise itself of personal freedom made by the criminal law. But beyond the limits on the state's use of force, and in the absence of responsibility and desert, fairness calls for some amount of compensation for those detainees whose liberty is sacrificed to safeguard the community.

Introduction to the special issue “Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility”

In our everyday life we are holding each other responsible for what we believe and for how we form beliefs. Since there are many similarities between holding an agent responsible for her actions and holding an agent responsible for her beliefs, some epistemologists think that we can model epistemic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for a belief, along the lines ofmoral responsibility, i.e., responsibility for performing an action. Research onmoral responsibility suggests that a person can be held responsible for an action she has performed only if she had control over performing that action. Even though our practice of holding each other responsible for our beliefs is similar to our practice of holding each other responsible for our actions, our formation of a belief appears to be different to our performance of an action when it comes to our capacity to exercise control over it. Beliefs are mostly taken to be more or less passive responses to how the world appears to us, while in performing an action we shape the world, often as we intend it to be. This difference between actions and beliefs raises a problem when it comes to establishing a viable notion of epistemic responsibility along the lines of the notion of moral responsibility. Thus, we need to rethink our notion of epistemic responsibility, the kind of control necessary for responsibility, as well as the connection between epistemic responsibility and doxastic control. This special issue partially documents results of the two-day workshop “Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Responsibility” which took place at the Ruhr University Bochum in June 2014. It addresses questions such as: do we have the same kind of control over our doxastic attitudes as we have over our actions, what kind of control do we have over our doxastic attitudes and how is epistemic responsibility related to notions such as epistemic justification and practical responsibility?Most of the authors

The issue of a responsible agent in technological civilization

In our days, responsibility has become the most problematic aspect of almost all human actions, including influencing nature, scientific prognostication, and simulation of the future. The problem of responsibility is a sign of the crisis which we experience now, resulting from the gap between activities and knowledge about their consequences. Human activity has a mediated and collective nature, which makes it difficult to name the subject of responsibility. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the subjective aspect of responsibility related to the technological activity and conditions in which such liability may be plausibly attributed to any subject. Scientific and technological rationality is not a sufficient approach to face new problems ahead of us. Technological progress and moral crisis make us realize that we need a new moral system. Particularly, the idea of moral responsibility can be represented as a filter for technological innovations. However, the notion of moral responsibility has some restrictions when we attempt to apply it for technological activities. Analyzing the functions of multiform subjects of responsibility is a prerequisite to our understanding of the way in which scientific and technological progress shapes the contemporary society. We are trying to focus on the complicated notion of Collective Responsibility, which is, on the one hand, needs some philosophical implications due to appearance of new social changes and, on the other hand, analyzes the idea which allows reconstructing the whole discussion context. First of all, the authors attempt to show the main issues, which appear when researchers use this idea in their investigations. Simultaneously, the article describes the state of moral responsibility in Philosophy on the whole, where the authors define the Individual notion of responsibility, which is deeply rooted in the Western philosophical way of thinking.

The Abandonment of Hope: Curriculum Theory and White Moral Responsibility

In this article, I suggest that an ideology of hope, even “educated” (Giroux, 2003) and “radical” (Farley, 2009) conceptualizations, might be problematic for curriculum theory because it operates to reinscribe White privilege and perpetuate the assumption that Whites can transcend the critique of Whiteness (Applebaum, 2010). The call for an abandonment of hope not only relinquishes the possibility for White moral innocence but also challenges traditional notions of moral responsibility that “not only fail to expose white complicity but also contribute to the normalization of denials of complicity that protect systemic racism from being challenged” (Applebaum, 2010, p. 5). Drawing from Gaztambide-Fernández’ (in press) critique of the humanist foundations of curriculum theory, as well as the assertion that curriculum is fundamentally a colonizing enterprise (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), I examine the work of Paulo Freire (1970) toward a critique of hope as a humanist endeavor, and, as such, a racial project (Murad, 2010, 2011). Then, by engaging Levinas’ (1998) concept of “useless suffering,” I explore how an abandonment of hope might allow White curriculum scholars to enact Applebaum's (2010) rearticulated notion of moral responsibility that calls for “uncertainty, vulnerability, and vigilance” (p. 5). While such a position accepts White moral innocence as a hopeless impossibility, it offers, through acceptance of that impossibility, an opening for White people to act ethically within the context of White complicity.

Our Brain “Kant” Tell Us? A Kantian Perspective of how Neuroscience Challenges our Notions of Moral Responsibility and the Legal Implications

Neuroscientific research has not only proved to be vital in our increasing understanding of human nature, but has also led to much normative discourse revolving around morality and law. There has been much work done regarding how neuroscience should inform us on issues regarding moral responsibility. In this paper, I propose to employ a Kantian moral framework to consider these issues more carefully. I argue that generally, neuroscience cannot undermine the concept that rational beings are morally responsible for their actions. However, within the same Kantian moral philosophical framework, I will consider how it is that certain individuals can be excused for their actions or have their responsibility mitigated. This will be done by focusing on the interaction between neuroscientific evidence and the capacity of certain individuals to engage with categorical and hypothetical imperatives. I will consider how it is that neuroscientific evidence can serve as an a priori excusing condition for moral responsibility, and equally importantly, when it cannot. I then go on to explore how our understanding of the workings of the brain can improve legal doctrine. I suggest that neuroscience can help to demonstrate that certain psychological criteria underlying particular legal doctrine might be inaccurate, and to improve our sentencing policies in order to better fulfil both retributive and rehabilitative aims and the criminal law.

Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: A Case Study

Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes (e.g., someone being harmed), the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there are circumstances in which the agent is entirely and fully responsible for the bad outcome (and deserves to be punished accordingly) and circumstances in which the agent is not at all responsible for the bad outcome (and thereby the agent does not deserve to be punished).

Moral responsibility for unprevented harm

That we are morally responsible for what we do willingly and knowingly is a commonplace. That our moral responsibility extends as far as to cover at least the intended consequences of our voluntary actions and perhaps also the ones we did not intend, but could or did foresee, is equally beyond dispute. But what about omissions? Are we, or can we be, (equally) morally responsible for the harm that has occured because we did not prevent it, even though we could have done so? Say, for all the enormous suffering, caused daily by famine, deprivation and curable diseases in the Third World countries? Moral intuitions and practices that one could consult in this matter seem to leave us in the dark. We regularly ascribe responsibility to people for harms resulting from their negligence or failure to fulfill professional duties. On the other hand, we tend to think that unless there is some evidence of the causal contribution that agents made to a harmful event and/or state, it is not really fair to blame it on them. And finally, to complicate things even more, most of us deny that omissions could effect anything (any change) in the world and consequently regard them as causally impotent (as well as possibly harmless). Most of the proposed solutions to this perplexing issue simply take negative moral responsibility for granted and then either try to revise our ordinary notion of causation accordingly or, alternatively, weaken the conditions for holding someone morally responsible. In the paper I present and defend the relative merits of the third approach, one sceptical of the notion of moral responsibility for the ‘outcomes’ of omissions. I try to show that for some identifiable core notion of moral responsibility and paradigmatic cases of omissions, the prospects for a happy marriage are rather slim.

Theorizing the Good Society: Hermeneutic, Normative and Empirical Discourses

Abstract: This paper examines two fundamentally different ways that recent philosophical thinkers have theorized the good society and demonstrates that each tradition has engaged in revisionist efforts that brings it toward its rival tradition. Rawls and Habermas represent the of this contemporary effort, establishing neo-Kantian positions in the sixties and seventies that represent an initial effort at theorizing the good society in terms of an historically unsituated, free floating universalism. The contemporary versions of the hermeneutic, communitarian approaches emerge in response, with thinkers like Walzer, Boltanski and Thevenot, Taylor, and Young arguing for the situated self, community based standards, cultural specificity, and relativism. It is demonstrated, however, that within each of these works there is a decisive space that is, or must be, given to some more universalizing sphere of justice. Responding to this possibility, against these communitarian and hermeneutic approaches, there developed internal revisions of the neo-Kantian, externalist approach, beginning with the large shift manifest in the Rawls of Political Liberalism. Similar changes are demonstrated in the works of thinkers like Benhabib, Honneth, and even in Habermas himself. Just as the communitarians move back, with difficulty, toward universalism, so do these universalists seek to move back, with difficulty, to particularism. In the concluding section of this paper, I argue that if we look empirically at the actual nature of the discourses about the good society that circulate in Western societies, we will see both of these discourses, the universalist and the particular, acting side by side. I try to explain how they actual intertwine in a systematic way, as what I call a binary discourse of civil society. Resume: Ce document examine deux manieres fondamentalement differentes que les philosophes d'aujourd'hui utilisent pour elaborer des theories sur la societe ideale. Ce document demontre aussi que chaque tradition a adopte des vues revisionnistes qui la rapproche de sa rivale traditionnelle. Rawls et Habermans representent la base de cet effort contemporain quia jete les assises des positions neo-kantiennes dans les annees soixante et soixante-dix, marquant un premier effort de theories sur la societe ideale dans le cadre d'un universalisme libre et non situe dans l'histoire. Des versions contemporaines de cette demarche hermeneutique et communautarienne surgissent alors avec des penseurs tels que Walzer, Boltanski et Thevenot, de meme que Taylor et Young qui defendent le sol localise, les normes axees sur les collectivites, la specificite culturelle et le relativisme. On prouve par ailleurs que dans chacun de ces travaux, il existe un espace decisif qui doit, ou devrait, etre laisse a une justice plus universelle. Reagissant a cette possibilite, a l'encontre des demarches communautariennes et hermeneutiques, des revisions internes de la demarche externaliste neo-kantienne sont apparues en commencant par le manifeste radical du Everywhere we look today, certainly in philosophy and even in a great deal of social science, we see a decided turn to ethical and moral concerns, not only as an empirical object but as a practical goal towards which empirical and theoretical investigations aim. It has not always been so. In the two decades after World War II, it was widely believed that morality -- value orientation in Weber's influential formulation -- did not need to, and should not be allowed to, play a direct role in social science or even in much of philosophy. In social science, it seemed possible to uphold this position because the moral seemed imminent to the progressively unfolding historical progress that functionalists called modernization and Marxists called socialism or the welfare state. In the decades preceding the Second World War, of course, this optimism would have seemed totally absurd. In the unstable and threatening time between the two world wars, philosophers and sociological theorists struggled to expand their understandings of action and order so that notions of moral responsibility could become more central and the relation of theorizing to political action more concrete. …

Safety and Aircraft Maintenance: A Moral Evaluation

In this article I will discuss the construction of safety in high reliability organizations. This construction is then evaluated from a moral point of view. I will argue that accidents happening to high reliability organizations make clear that we have to reconceptualize our notion of moral responsibility.