Reconsidering Human Freedom and Moral Responsibility in Contemporary Philosophical Thought

Abstract

Human freedom and moral responsibility have been among the most controversial in modern philosophy due to their implications in metaphysics, ethics, moral psychology, law, neuroscience and social theory. The question was debated in traditional terms as a struggle between free will and determinism: When all actions are caused by previous actions and natural laws, do agents seem to have no choice but to act as they do, making them not morally responsible for their actions? But today's thinking in philosophy has transcended this dichotomy. The compatibilists would claim that freedom is not a metaphysical independence from cause, but rather the capacity to be affected by one's reason, to act in accord with one's evaluations, and to act from the point of view of one's own evaluation. In compatibilists and free-will skeptics counter that even this may not be enough to make for the basic desert for blame and punishment. Meanwhile, the study of neural processing of unconscious decision preparation and the study of folk intuitions about agency and responsibility, in the experimental philosophy tradition, have changed the interpretation of agency and responsibility. It proposes a non-absolutist self-construction model, and a non-causal model of authorship, instead of simply causal authorship and self-construction, it sees that moral responsibility is a graded and socially embedded model of answerability, which is based on rational capacities, moral understanding, reasons-responsiveness, and interpersonal accountability.