Automatic Behavior and Moral Agency: Defending the Concept of Personhood from Empirically Based Skepticism

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-24-2015

Department

Philosophy and Religion

School

Humanities

Abstract

Empirical evidence indicates that much of human behavior is unconscious and automatic. This has led some philosophers to be skeptical of responsible agency or personhood in the moral sense. I present two arguments defending agency from these skeptical concerns. My first argument, the “margin of error” argument, is that the empirical evidence is consistent with the possibility that our automatic behavior deviates only slightly from what we would do if we were in full conscious control. Responsible agency requires only that our actions more or less express our conscious goals and values. My second argument is a non-realist defense of moral agency. If we are willing to reject metaethical realism about agents, then there may be good reasons why we should retain the concept of agency in our moralizing, even if automaticity undermines the belief that we are really in conscious control of our behavior. We can do this by adopting a “reactive attitudes” approach to moral responsibility. On this view, agency is determined not by actual features of human psychology but by the attitudes and practices (such as praise and blame) that we ought to adopt in response to the actions and motivations of individuals.

Publication Title

Acta Analytica

Volume

30

Issue

2

First Page

193

Last Page

209

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