Moral Responsibility

Advanced artificial agents and large-scale human institutions increasingly face the same structural dilemma: systems optimized for control and stability tend to stagnate, while systems that permit creativity and exploration often destabilize. Existing approaches to alignment, governance, and innovation typically address this tension at the level of behavior, outputs, or policy, but fail to explain how generative capacity can be sustained safely as systems become more autonomous and complex. This paper argues that the problem is not creativity itself, but the absence (...) of a structural ordering that distinguishes purpose, internal stability, and generative pressure. We introduce a unified framework for generativity under constraint, integrating three complementary components: Teleological Alignment (TA), which fixes the long-horizon direction of an intelligent system toward explanation rather than domination; Coherence-Based Alignment (CBA), which preserves internal consistency across beliefs, reasoning, actions, and values under autonomy; and Paradigm Shift Readiness (PSR), a capacity metric measuring a system’s ability to generate paradigm-level novelty through volatility, permeability, risk tolerance, explanatory acceleration, and export power. The central claim is that generativity becomes productive rather than dangerous only when PSR is subordinated to teleological orientation and coherence, and that misordering these elements reliably produces either stagnation or instability. The paper develops this ordering principle, analyzes characteristic failure modes when creativity, coherence, or purpose are improperly sequenced, and anticipates common objections concerning safety, control, and metric gaming. Finally, it proposes an operational evaluation scheme combining teleological orientation, coherence integrity, and paradigm shift readiness to assess both artificial systems and human institutions without relying on output metrics alone. The framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, offering a structural account of how systems can remain creative, coherent, and safe as autonomy and scale increase. (shrink)

Moral failure in societies and institutions is commonly attributed to weak belief, declining virtue, poor leadership, or ideological disagreement. Such explanations misdiagnose the problem. Moral conviction, moral language, and moral exemplars persist across cultures and historical periods with remarkable regularity. What varies is not their presence, but whether systems remain capable of recognizing, sustaining, and integrating corrective moral signals before suppression occurs. This paper advances a structural account of moral agency under scale, arguing that moral durability is a function of (...) recognition fidelity rather than moral talent, consensus, or institutional form. I develop a diagnostic framework grounded in three core dynamics: abstraction pressure, coherence, and exemplar synchronization. As systems scale, mediation becomes unavoidable, introducing increasing distance between authority and lived reality. When mediation outpaces correction, coherence debt accumulates—unresolved contradictions between perception, value, and action that are deferred rather than resolved. Moral exemplars emerge as statistically inevitable coherence carriers under such conditions, articulating misalignment earlier and more acutely than others. Systemic failure occurs not when exemplars are wrong, disruptive, or unpopular, but when moral inertia is prevented from accumulating—when corrective signals are suppressed, fragmented, or neutralized before diffusion. The paper identifies minimal structural constraints required for moral agency to survive scale, including proximity to reality, public legibility and adjudicability of objectives, embodied cultural memory, smooth transfer of power, continuous feedback, and observer plurality. It further specifies failure signals by which moral collapse can be diagnosed. Chief among these is sustained moral silence under declared freedom of speech—a condition that cannot arise naturally in morally permeable systems and therefore constitutes a structural contradiction demanding investigation. The analysis is deliberately non-prescriptive. It does not propose moral programs, ideal institutions, or governance models. Instead, it provides a general diagnostic architecture applicable to states, corporations, religious authorities, bureaucracies, and intelligent systems. Moral systems endure not by enforcing virtue or achieving equilibrium, but by remaining capable of hearing emerging exemplars and allowing corrective moral inertia to form before domination renders recognition intolerable. (shrink)

Modern institutions increasingly generate large-scale human, social, and environmental harm without any identifiable human author. Decisions are executed through systems, procedures, and automation that dissolve responsibility rather than distribute it. This paper argues that such failures are not primarily moral or political, but architectural. -/- Using Resolution Theory, the paper develops an account of institutional coherence grounded in the binding of authorship to exposure across time. Where this binding fails, institutions become normatively incoherent “zombie systems”: entities that act without bearing (...) responsibility. The paper diagnoses this failure across governance, infrastructure, automation, and finance. -/- To address it, the paper introduces the Easton Method, a framework for top-down responsibility tracing, universal authorship logs, and bounded delegation through pre-authored resolution envelopes. The approach preserves speed and automation while rejecting unauthored exposure, and argues that insurance and accreditation mechanisms provide the most effective path to implementation in modern high-scale systems. (shrink)

Free will does not require breaking physics. It requires a place in the causal stream where a time-extended agent becomes the author of a commitment. Resolution Theory calls these junctions resolution points and treats responsibility as binary at those points, while blame remains scalar under mitigation (distortion, coercion, ignorance, constraint). The paper steelmans Pereboom and Strawson, granting that “ultimate self-origination” is impossible, and argues that this target is orthogonal to the categories needed for moral and legal life. Discriminator cases—impaired agency, (...) procedural fog in institutions, and human-in-the-loop AI—show why authorship must remain legible even when explanation is distributed. The conclusion sketches how exposure disciplines reasons over time, bridging free will to normativity. (shrink)

Moral failure in societies is often explained either through individual deficiency or through overwhelming structural constraint. Both approaches prove inadequate. This paper argues that moral breakdown is best understood as a problem of coherence between power and reality. Human beings are not merely products of their environment but are internally oriented toward alignment with truth. When political, institutional, or cultural power remains sufficiently permeable to feedback, moral correction tends to occur gradually through reform. When power becomes insulated, suppresses dissent, and (...) accumulates distortion, coherence debt builds until rupture becomes inevitable. Within this framework, moral exemplars—prophets, sages, dissidents, and unconventional figures—are not anomalous heroes but recurrent structural phenomena that emerge when internal dissonance can no longer be tolerated. Societies fail morally not because they lack such individuals, but because recognition of them would require costly realignment. Responsibility is therefore neither evenly distributed nor eliminated by constraint; it increases asymmetrically with power, duration of suppression, and resistance to correction. By dissolving the false binary between reform and rupture, this paper offers a general model of moral dynamics applicable to historical empires, modern states, institutions, and intelligent systems. Power untethered from reality does not merely err—it destabilizes the environment that sustains it. (shrink)

Artificial systems increasingly perform evaluative functions that rival or exceed human capacities: forecasting outcomes, ranking options, and optimising across vast informational domains. This paper argues that none of these capabilities constitute agency in the morally relevant sense. Evaluation is not agency. Agency requires authorised resolution under exposure to consequence—the binding of a system to a trajectory it cannot exit, such that the same continuous subject bears the downstream costs of its commitments across time. Artificial systems can be retrained, reset, replaced, (...) or insulated from consequence by design; any apparent “decision” therefore remains authored upstream by the human or institutional sponsors who authorise deployment. Responsibility cannot migrate with capability, and “human-in-the-loop” arrangements do not dissolve authorship when authority is retained. Speculation about artificial consciousness does not alter this structural account: where genuine stake is credibly suspected, precautionary constraints may be warranted, but responsibility remains non-delegable. The paper concludes that reckless pursuit of artificial emergence without enforceable guardrails constitutes a severe moral hazard and should be treated as a prohibited risk class under both moral and legal reasoning. (shrink)

Consciousness is the condition of being a continuing subject for whom resolution occurs under unavoidable exposure across time. Free will is the act of authored resolution within that exposed evaluative field. This paper argues that determinism does not negate freedom but anchors it, because responsibility and meaning require persistence: the consequences of action must return to the same subject. The account unifies debates in free will, moral responsibility, and AI ethics by treating exposure, not metaphysical indeterminacy but as the price (...) of admission for genuine agency. (shrink)

Resolution Ethics explains justice through the structure of authored resolution under exposure. When wrongdoing occurs, the ethical task is not to “balance suffering,” but to preserve civic order, repair standing, and maintain the conditions under which agents can resolve safely across time. This paper develops a telic model of justice: a two-horizon framework in which short-horizon responses establish public closure through mandatory prosecution, finite punishment, and restitution, while long-horizon responses govern the future through conditional supervision, risk reduction, and reintegration. Punishment (...) is justified only insofar as it reduces systemic noise—restoring legibility, reaffirming violated norms, and preventing private enforcement—while remaining constrained by proportionality, equal application, and due process. Victim repair and state authority are treated as distinct obligations, neither of which can substitute for the other. Telic Justice therefore rejects both retributivist excess and permissive decay, offering a structured account of punishment, repair, and forgiveness as instruments for the preservation of legitimate public order. (shrink)

Resolution Ethics grounds normativity in the structure of decision-making under exposure. It argues that ethical constraint arises not from moral facts or values, but from the conditions imposed on systems that resolve action over time while remaining exposed to the consequences of their outputs. Where resolution occurs, future action-capacity can be preserved or degraded, generating normative pressure as structural feedback. The framework applies to any system acting under agency-like conditions, including humans, institutions, and artificial systems, without granting moral status. Ethics (...) is treated as a minimal constraint on authored action under exposure. (shrink)

Resolution Theory identifies free will with evaluative resolution: conscious value-ranking that closes into action. It preserves authorship within determinism by locating choice inside time, not outside causation. Responsibility is binary (authorship), while blame is scalar and sensitive to distortion, coercion, and epistemic constraint; bypass excuses, distortion mitigates. The framework also blocks responsibility laundering in artificial systems by requiring sponsorship wherever consciousness cannot be verified, and by recommending precautionary safeguards under serious moral uncertainty.

Resolution Theory defines agency as evaluation resolving into action, preserving free will within determinism by locating choice inside time. It separates responsibility (binary authorship) from blame (scalar sanction), with distortion mitigating and bypass excusing. This glossary fixes the core vocabulary for precise criticism and application across ethics, addiction, law, culture, and AI.

There is a debate about whether hypocritical blame is wrong per se. Extant views of hypocritical blame are insufficient, I argue, because they fail to appreciate the significance of the fact that hypocrisy comes in degrees. I argue that the more hypocritical an instance of blame is, the stronger the pro tanto reason there is against blaming. My view allows us to capture the intuition that there is something problematic about hypocritical blame while avoiding the pitfall of regarding all instances (...) of hypocritical blame as equally inappropriate. I argue for a commitment-based view of hypocrisy according to which one’s blame is more hypocritical the less one is committed to the norm one blames another for transgressing. I argue that hypocrisy makes one’s blame an inaccurate signal of one’s commitments, and that the more hypocritical one’s blame is, the more inaccurate the signal. The more inaccurate the signal, the stronger the pro tanto reason against blaming. (shrink)

Many of the most persistent debates across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence are not genuine disagreements, but cases of thinkers talking past one another. This paper argues that these disputes share a single structural error: the failure to distinguish causal explanation from agential attribution. It introduces Resolution Theory, which locates agency not in causal indeterminacy, motivation, or optimisation, but in the act of resolving deliberation into action. Once this distinction is made explicit, long-standing conflicts—between determinism and free will, neuroscience (...) and responsibility, moralism and medicalisation, depth psychology and humanism, and alignment and agency in AI—largely dissolve. The result is not a new metaphysics, but a unifying clarification of where explanation ends and responsibility begins. (shrink)

Debates about addiction and compulsion often oscillate between moralism and medicalisation. Either addicted agents are treated as fully responsible despite severe impairment, or agency is said to be bypassed entirely by neurobiological or environmental causes. This paper argues that both positions rest on a structural mistake. It defends a resolutionist account of agency and applies it to addiction, distinguishing between evaluative distortion and bypass. On this view, agency consists in the resolution of deliberation into action, not in causal indeterminacy or (...) brute self-control. Addiction does not typically bypass this capacity; rather, it distorts the evaluative landscape within which resolution occurs. The paper develops this distinction by analysing the instrumental rationality often exhibited in addictive behaviour, including planning, timing, and strategic concealment. Such patterns are incompatible with bypass models, which characterise behaviour as reflexive or non-agentic. Instead, they demonstrate that resolution remains intact even where evaluation is severely skewed. This allows authorship to be preserved while responsibility is nevertheless significantly mitigated, without collapsing into either excuse or blame. The account clarifies why neuroscientific and social explanations of addiction do not undermine agency but instead map the pressures under which agency is exercised. It also explains why mitigation of responsibility is principled rather than ad hoc. By separating explanation from attribution, the paper offers a framework for understanding addiction that preserves responsibility without denying causation or compassion, and it has implications for legal responsibility, moral evaluation, and clinical intervention. (shrink)

In certain cases – Alone/Together Dilemmas, Single-Agent Dilemmas, and Actualist “Professor Procrastinate” Cases – an agent is required to perform incompatible actions, such that performing some act required of her is a way of failing to perform another act which is also required of her. The act she performs is thereby wrong – even as it is required. According to my theory, Deontic Status Tracing, whether an agent is blameworthy for such an act depends on what explains its bizarre deontic (...) status – namely, whether it is her fault that this act is simultaneously required and wrong. (shrink)

In this thesis, I aim to contribute to the reconciliation of two ways of looking at human agency—from the perspective of agents themselves, and from a detached, scientific perspective—by combining resources from the free will literature and the action theory literature. I will show that we can preserve most of our ordinary conception and intuitions about human agency rooted in common sense even if we suppose the truth of determinism and a universal event-causal framework. Below are the two key claims (...) defended in the thesis. (i.) Free Agency (which is required by moral responsibility) is the ability to respond to reasons. (ii.) To exercise free agency is to act for reasons; while acting for reasons can be captured within an event-causal framework. Accordingly, I will defend two theories concerning human agency: one is the reasons-responsiveness theory of free will and moral responsibility; the other is the causal theory of action. The first theory helps to show that free will and moral responsibility can exist in a deterministic world; while the second theory helps to resolve the tension between action and the event-causal framework. Moreover, I will integrate these two theories. This integration aims to provide a more complete picture of human agency. According to this picture, the exercising of human agency can be taken as a continuum—ranging from basic voluntary control to high-level actions which merit moral evaluation; this continuum can be captured within a unified theoretical framework, namely, the event-causal framework. That is, the important features of human agency, from basic purposive actions to free and responsible actions can be explained in terms of event-causations. In doing so, I advance a new account of reasons-responsiveness theory, deflate the problem of causal deviance by developing a novel account of control, and solve the problem of disappearing agency by developing an account of agent’s participation in her action. I will also investigate several kinds of phenomenology of agency which purportedly speak against the event-causal account of action. The integrated theory developed shows us how our agency, in all its complexity, fits into a naturalistic picture of the world. (shrink)

Debates concerning free will and normativity often assume that agency must function as an additional causal force capable of interrupting deterministic explanation. This assumption generates two persistent problems: the compatibility of choice with a deterministic world, and the derivation of normative “oughts” from descriptive facts. I argue that these problems arise from a category mistake. Agency is not a causal input but a distinct logical role: the act of practical resolution. I identify the Hindsight Fallacy—the retrospective illusion that because an (...) action is explainable after the fact, it was not a genuine choice at the time of deliberation. By recognising the temporal asymmetry between forward-looking resolution and backward-looking explanation, free will and normativity are shown to be orthogonal to, rather than in competition with, causal explanations. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary AI-driven decision systems intensify a form of algorithmic consequentialism in which legitimacy is reduced to predictive performance, while the justificatory structure of judgment is progressively displaced. Against functionalist accounts that treat morally relevant effects as sufficient for moral agency, the paper defends a stricter thesis: normative authority requires ontological vulnerability—the capacity to appropriate an act as one’s own, to answer for it through reasons, and to assume its consequences as a price of freedom. Because current (...) AI systems operate through correlation without semantic understanding, they can generate outputs but cannot sign them in the existential sense that grounds accountability. The analysis distinguishes human reason as a “glass box” (opaque in mechanism yet traceable in justification) from algorithmic “black boxes” whose opacity is constitutive rather than merely technical. To translate this diagnosis into institutional safeguards, the paper introduces the Λ (Lambda) Operator as a binary criterion of reflexive appropriation capacity and proposes a Proof of Signature (PoS) protocol requiring that any high-impact decision assisted by AI be regenerated, appropriated, and explicitly signed by a human agent with Λ = 1. The COMPAS/State v. Loomis line of cases is used to illustrate how explainability tools cannot substitute for imputability, and why a right to explanation is ultimately a right to a responsible signer. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and critically evaluates G. A. Cohen’s claim that justice is not exhausted by the design of social institutions but also depends on the choices individuals make within those institutions. Challenging John Rawls’s institutional focus, Cohen argues that formally just rules can coexist with substantive injustice when individuals exploit permissible inequalities for personal advantage. Central to Cohen’s critique is the idea of an egalitarian ethos—a shared moral commitment that governs personal conduct and aligns individual choice with egalitarian principles. (...) The paper argues that Cohen offers a powerful moral insight by exposing the limitations of purely institutional accounts of justice and highlighting the role of individual agency in sustaining inequality. At the same time, it critically examines the risks of extending justice into personal morality, including increased moral demandingness, the reintroduction of individual blame, and the potential erosion of pluralism and structural responsibility. While Cohen’s egalitarian ethos cannot serve as a comprehensive or action-guiding principle of justice, it functions as an important critical ideal that illuminates the moral compromises embedded in incentive-based inequalities. The paper concludes that Cohen’s contribution sharpens the tension between moral aspiration and institutional feasibility, clarifying the stakes of egalitarian justice without displacing the central importance of structural critique. (shrink)

Education informed by scientifically meaningful ideas is insufficient, unless the proposed scientific meaning is committed to a comprehensive web of well-evidenced, coherent, and truth-conducive explanations. Meaning without truth is potently misleading; of course, there is no simplistic way to ascertain truth, but there must be principled routes within science education to commit meaning to reality.

This article presents a philosophical and legal analysis of the transformation of the concept of responsibility in the era of cyborgization, defining the methodological foundations for a shift toward understanding the distributed agency of the augmented subject. To this end, the author first reconstructs historically developed notions of will, intention, and responsibility. Further, applying contemporary theories of "extended mind," actor-network theory, and posthumanism, the work demonstrates the possibility and necessity of rethinking the boundaries of the "self." To this end, drawing (...) on empirical cases such as neural interfaces and popular culture, the author identifies specific problematic areas for law and ethics. Methodologically, the work applies a cyborgian eclecticism approach to integrating productive approaches in an interdisciplinary analysis. The author concludes that classical foundations of responsibility lose their practical applicability when cognitive processes begin to be distributed between biological and technical categories. Given these emerging trends, there is a clear need to move from the binary logic of "guilty/not guilty" to a scale/modal model of responsibility, where responsibility is perceived within the context of the actor's contribution within a hybrid system. This article lays the conceptual foundation for practical solutions that will be presented in the second part of the study. // В статье представлен философско-правовой анализ трансформаций понятия ответственности в эпоху киборгизации, определяются методологические основания для перехода к пониманию распределенной агентности дополненного субъекта. Для этого автор, в первую очередь, реконструирует исторически складывавшиеся представления о воле, намерении и ответственности. Далее, с приложением современных теорий «расширенного разума», акторно сетевой теории и постгуманизма, в работе демонстрируется возможность и необходимость переосмыслить границы «Я», для чего, основываясь на эмпирических кейсах, таких как нейроинтерфейсы, и на образах в массовой культуре, автор выделяет конкретные проблемные точки для права и этики. Методологически в работе применяется подход киборгианского эклектизма для объединения продуктивных подходов в междисциплинарном анализе. Автор приходит к выводу, что классические основания ответственности теряют прикладную работоспособность в условиях, когда когнитивные процессы начинают распределяться между категориями биологического и технического. В условиях развития таких тенденций очевидна необходимость перехода от бинарной логики «виновен/не виновен» к шкаловой/модальной модели ответственности, где ответственность воспринимается в рамках вклада актора, существующего в гибридной системе. Данная статья закладывает концептуальный фундамент для практических решений, которые будут представлены во второй части исследования. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, there is growing consensus that while the passage of time alone does not diminish blameworthiness, it can allow agents to undergo changes that mitigate the degree to which they deserve blame and punishment. According to the dilution approach, any notable change to an agent’s psychology alters the degree to which they are blameworthy for past actions. In contrast, the decontamination approach requires agents to alter facts about themselves that are related to their culpability for past wrongs (...) to become less blameworthy. According to these views, wrongdoers must morally improve, experience guilt, and/or offer amends to mitigate their blameworthiness. In this paper, we present a study that investigates the extent to which our responsibility judgments are sensitive to dilution and decontamination changes and why these changes matter. While we found support for both dilution and decontamination approaches, decontamination had a much larger impact on a wider range of responsibility-related judgments than dilution. Our findings indicate that if you want to change people’s minds about how blameworthy you are for past wrongs, altering the facts about yourself that are related to your culpability is often the best way to mitigate the degree to which others blame you. (shrink)

This book delivers the formal resolution to philosophy's most enduring debate by proving compatibilism is the unique framework satisfying both logical coherence and empirical adequacy. Through rigorous mathematical proof and systematic elimination, I demonstrate that all competing theories fail unavoidable structural tests. Part I: The Logical Elimination of Libertarian Incompatibilism. The Fixed-Point Paradox (FPP) formalizes Aristotle's ancient Problem of Future Contingents in modal epistemic logic, proving counterfactual freedom (CFF)—"the ability to have done otherwise"—generates logical contradiction when combined with epistemic access. (...) If an agent possesses infallible knowledge of what they will do (□ₖE), this entails metaphysical necessity (□ₘE) through informational closure, making alternative possibilities (◇ₘ¬E) impossible: □ₖE ∧ ◇ₘ¬E ⊢ ⊥. Without epistemic access, CFF becomes permanently unverifiable—violating Popper's falsifiability criterion and reducing to epistemically vacuous metaphysical speculation. The Axiomatic Opacity Constraint establishes that epistemic opacity is not a contingent limitation but a structurally necessary precondition for embedded agency. Q's Gambit—a thought experiment featuring an omnipotent, atemporal hypercomputational being—demonstrates that even divine omnipotence cannot overcome this logical impossibility. The FPP is mathematically isomorphic to Turing's Halting Problem and connects to Gödelian incompleteness, revealing CFF as computationally unrealizable. This eliminates every incompatibilist theory requiring CFF, leaving only Hard Determinism and Compatibilism as logically viable positions. Part II: The Empirical Elimination of Hard Determinism. Having dispatched libertarianism through logic, the book pivots to empirical science. I establish five Minimal Empirical Adequacy Conditions (MEACs)—observable, well-documented phenomena from neuroscience and behavioral psychology that any adequate theory must explain: (1) Deliberative Sensitivity: deliberation causally affects outcomes; (2) Reason-Action Covariance: actions systematically track reasons; (3) Voluntary-Involuntary Distinction: voluntary actions are functionally distinct from reflexes; (4) Interventional Responsiveness: therapy and education modulate behavior; (5) Phenomenological Coherence: experience of agency tracks actual function. The Hard Determinist Dilemma Theorem proves Hard Determinism faces an inescapable choice: accept all five MEACs (collapsing into "Covert Compatibilism") or deny them (collapsing into "Explanatory Nihilism" that contradicts established science). Systematic analysis of contemporary hard determinists—including detailed examinations of Sapolsky and Caruso—reveals they inevitably smuggle compatibilist commitments into their frameworks while simultaneously denying human dignity and threatening the epistemic foundations of moral accountability. The position becomes self-refuting: hard determinists recognize that treating humans as "unconscious automatons" whose actions are merely mechanistic outputs would destabilize civilization, yet maintain this view requires rejecting the very deliberative structures that make rational discourse possible. As theoretical physicist Sean Carroll notes: "you are not Laplace's demon"—knowing causal determinism exists is not equivalent to possessing actual foreknowledge. Part III: The Constructive Framework. With all alternatives eliminated, the book formalizes the ρ-metric: a measurable, testable, standardizable, and cultivable index of reason-responsiveness that operationalizes compatibilist freedom as empirical phenomenon rather than metaphysical mystery. This framework enables concrete applications in ethics, criminal justice, education, clinical psychology, mental healthcare, and institutional design. Compatibilism emerges not as default position or consolation prize, but as necessary conclusion of eliminative proof. You are caused. You are free. Both are true. There is no contradiction. Crucially, epistemic opacity—the structural impossibility of perfect self-knowledge—remains even in deterministic universes, establishing that imperfect knowledge is not a bug but a necessary architectural feature of embedded agency. The epistemology of perspective is not incidental but constitutive. (shrink)

Theorists are divided concerning the productivity of angry blame. Some argue that it has tremendous instrumental values or serves crucial social functions. But some argue that it is counterproductive, and we should thereby eliminate, or drastically revise, blame as a kind of moral practice. In this paper, I raise a new counterproductivity critique of angry blame. In contrast to the existing critiques, my critique does not rely on a negative characterization of blame’s content or functionality. I suggest that angry blame (...) serves two positive social functions—a function of issuing a moral protest and a function of initiating and facilitating a moral dialogue. However, for these two functions to work optimally, they require different psychological stances in tension with each other. Angry blame is thus counterproductive, not because it is inherently bad, but because it is designed to do too much. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument presents a significant challenge to compatibilism about free will and determinism. Pereboom argues that because manipulated agents are no different in any relevant regard from ordinary causally determined agents, and because manipulated agents are not morally responsible for their actions, causally determined agents, too, are not morally responsible for their actions. In this paper, I offer a novel dispositional reply to Pereboom’s manipulation argument. Drawing on recent work in the metaphysics of dispositions, I argue that (...) manipulated agents’ rational abilities are masked—prevented from manifesting as they otherwise would—by the manipulation. I argue that masking better explains why manipulated agents are not responsible for their actions than causal determinism does, as we ordinarily take masks to explain why agents are not morally responsible for their actions or inaction. Because causal determinism is not a mask, there is a relevant difference between manipulation and causal determinism, and the four-case argument fails. (shrink)

Is there a place for blame in healthcare? An interesting exchange on this question took place between Daniel Tigard and Elizabeth Duthie, Ian Fischer and Richard Frankel in 2019. In his central appeal to self-blame, I argue that Tigard was successful—and actually did not go far enough—in identifying a place for ‘notions of blame’ in healthcare. However, I contend that his critics were right to disavow the culture of blame and his notion of taking the blame for unavoidable harm. I (...) argue that even outside a culture of blame, there can still be a (minor) place for blaming others as well as ourselves for avoidable medical errors (even the first-time unintentional ones). (shrink)

This paper investigates a type of agential impairment that has not been fully appreciated in the philosophical literature: unlearning agency, a process which undermines or destroys its victim’s sense of self and agential competence. This type of manipulation is prominent in cults and is vividly displayed by the puzzling phenomenon of cult members seeming to harm themselves despite doing what they claim they want to do, as when several men in Heaven’s Gate cult volunteered to castrate themselves in accordance with (...) their beliefs. Drawing on the literature on cults and using Heaven’s Gate as its test case, this paper distinguishes unlearning agency from other agential impairments in the philosophical literature. It then explores why unlearning agency matters. Understanding this type of agential damage not only highlights a new type of exemption from moral responsibility, but also outlines methods of rehabilitating agency. Furthermore, it provides an explanation for why cults can harm members who are doing what they want to do, without having to rely on an objective theory of well-being. Finally, this paper explores how unlearning agency can arise in other contexts besides cults. Thus, we should take this threat to agency seriously. (shrink)

One of the most contentious issues in the contemporary philosophy of luck is the account of the so-called significance condition. Consideration of the significance condition pulls in two opposite directions: either into subjectivism and relativism about luck, which may result in the admission that luck cannot have the philosophical use attributed to it, or into eliminativism about the significance condition, which may result in an account of luck that does not do justice to the common usage of the term. In (...) this paper, I discuss whether contemporary philosophers of luck can benefit from considering Aristotle’s view of luck (tyche) and offer a cautiously affirmative answer. Aristotle develops an objective account of luck that avoids problems plaguing contemporary theories, especially those concerning the significance condition. However, the use of Aristotle’s analysis in the context of current debates is limited due to at least three reasons: (1) Aristotle’s analysis depends on his peculiar understanding of teleology, which in turn presupposes a specific conception of the good that is difficult for many to accept today; (2) Aristotle’s analysis requires unexpected and sometimes strained explanations of our everyday attributions of luck; and (3) it seems that Aristotle does not treat cases of good luck and bad luck symmetrically. (shrink)

This essay addresses personal identity and its role in sustaining moral responsibility. Against reductionist accounts, namely Derek Parfit’s, which tie identity to degrees of psychological continuity, I argue that such views weaken the foundations of responsibility and risk, rendering practices like blame, praise, and obligation incoherent. If identity dissolves with psychological change, responsibility for past wrongs becomes negotiable, undermining ethical life. To respond to this danger, I develop the idea of the normative self: an identity constituted through the integration of (...) past actions, present commitments, and future aspirations within a coherent narrative. Unlike reductionist models, this account does not merely approximate but in fact captures how selfhood is lived and understood—both from the first-person perspective of individuals who take ownership of their lives and from the third-person perspective of communities that hold one another responsible. Descriptive or reductionist models, I argue, ultimately fail precisely because they cannot adequately explain this dual orientation. I conclude that it is only by conceiving the self as normative that our practices of accountability, recognition, and renewal make coherent sense. Methodologically, I combine analytic critique with narrative and phenomenological approaches, engaging Parfit and Bernard Williams and testing their theories against real and hypothetical cases of wrongdoing, reform, and accountability. The result is a conception of the self that secures responsibility as both backward- and forward-looking, grounding our moral realities in a structure that preserves stability while enabling transformation. (shrink)

I argue that agents can be praiseworthy for doing the right thing despite being unaware of their doing that thing (and not only that it is right). Differently put--contrary to a widespread assumption to the contrary-- I propose that negligence has a positive counterpart, which I dub “posigence”. To motivate this proposal, I introduce cases in which an agent has sufficient reason to act in a way that promotes her own well-being but sets back (or at least, fails to promote) (...) the interests of another, but inadvertently omits to do so, manifesting therein good quality of will. (shrink)

John Lemos argues persuasively that libertarian free will is required for moral desert, that we may have free will, and that even if we have doubts, we should retain the assumption of desert, given its importance to essential values, such as justice, dignity, love, and pride. While sharing his optimism about the possibility of free will, I challenge two claims: The claim that we can confidently attribute responsibility for actions to agents across the board on the basis that each agent (...) has some opportunity to shape their own characters, and the claim that if we cannot appeal to desert, we would have reason to lower evidentiary standards, as a way of keeping the most vulnerable safe from crime. (shrink)

This paper presents a fundamental critique of Nietzschean ethics, arguing that it fails to provide principled prohibitions against atrocities like rape, murder, and slavery, offering only aesthetic or pragmatic objections instead. The analysis demonstrates that Nietzsche’s framework collapses ethics into the solipsistic expression of individual will-to-power, thereby excluding the relational and compassionate dimensions central to ordinary moral experience. This failure is diagnosed as a metaphysical category error: Nietzsche elevates power—a transient state in the emergence-existence-dissolution cycle—to the status of ultimate value, (...) while denying the pattern-structure of reality itself. (shrink)

Entweder ist alles im Universum bestimmt vom Gefüge der Ursachen und Wirkungen oder es gibt zusätzlich noch blinde, unerklärliche Zufälle. In beiden Fällen kann niemand seine Charaktereigenschaften, Gefühle, Gedanken, Absichten und Handlungen letztlich wählen und also wollen, was er will. Dass und wie sie geschehen, ist also jenseits seines Vermögens. - Absolute Willensfreiheitist ein Selbstwiderspruch oder unverständlich. Aber für alles, buchstäblich alles, was man bewirkt, ist man auch verantwortlich. Das gehört zur Absurdität des Daseins und zum tragischen Individualismus.

The problem of free will is ubiquitously articulated in terms of the (in)compatibility of free will with laws of nature. Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Robert Kane, and nearly all other contributors to the problem of free will, conceive it as a potential conflict between the laws of nature and free will. Despite dispositional defenses of compatibilism, the putatively dispositional principle of alternative possibilities among defenders of free will, as well as increased sympathy for dispositional and agent-causation versions of source (...) incompatibilist free will, the standard debates remain beholden to a nomological definition of the free will problem. This is surprising since one of the upshots of the causal powers revolution has been the overthrow of laws of nature. Many exponents of the metaphysics of powers either reject laws of nature altogether, or regard them as abstract descriptions of the real work performed by causal powers. What remains unexplored for dispositionalists is to address the question: how to re-think about the problem of free will without the laws of nature? That is the aim of my essay. I will argue the shift to powers requires not only major revisions to the definitions of determinism, compatibilism, etc. put forth by van Inwagen and others, but also a re-thinking of the power of free will itself in light its manifestations. (shrink)

This thesis proposes the "Moral Plasticity Hypothesis" as a novel framework for understanding human nature's relationship to evil and cruelty. Rather than viewing humans as inherently good or evil, this work argues that human nature is characterized by evolved moral plasticity—an adaptive capacity for extreme behavioral flexibility that can manifest as either profound compassion or devastating cruelty depending on contextual triggers and moral foundation activation patterns. Through interdisciplinary analysis of philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscientific evidence, this thesis demonstrates that evil (...) is not a defect in human nature but an emergent property of our adaptive moral flexibility, with profound implications for understanding and preventing mass violence. -/- The research synthesizes insights from moral foundations theory [1], evolutionary psychology [2], neuroscience [3], and historical case studies of genocide and mass violence [4]. The central argument challenges both traditional philosophical dichotomies of good versus evil and contemporary psychological theories that attribute cruelty primarily to dehumanization or individual pathology [5]. Instead, the Moral Plasticity Hypothesis posits that the same psychological mechanisms that enable extraordinary altruism and cooperation also enable extraordinary cruelty and violence, depending on contextual activation patterns. -/- Key findings include: (1) Human moral intuitions are built upon evolved psychological foundations that can be activated in prosocial or antisocial directions; (2) The neural circuits underlying empathy and violence show significant overlap, creating a neurobiological basis for moral plasticity; (3) Institutional contexts serve as powerful amplifiers that can channel human moral plasticity toward either constructive or destructive outcomes; (4) Historical patterns of mass violence demonstrate consistent psychological mechanisms across different cultures and time periods, supporting the universality of moral plasticity. -/- The thesis concludes with practical implications for violence prevention, moral education, and institutional design. Rather than attempting to eliminate "evil" individuals, effective prevention strategies must focus on understanding and modifying the contextual triggers that activate antisocial moral responses. This approach offers a more nuanced and scientifically grounded foundation for addressing humanity's capacity for both extraordinary good and devastating evil. (shrink)

This book contains eighteen original essays engaging with Keith Lehrer’s contributions to philosophy. The first nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work in epistemology and philosophy of mind. These chapters examine the role of meta-justification in Lehrer’s (and Thomas Reid’s) epistemology, explore the epistemological significance of self-trust and how to restore self-trust to victims of epistemic injustice, challenge Lehrer’s solution to the hard problem of consciousness, question Lehrer’s account of the basing relation, and discuss the important role that experience and exemplarization (...) play in Lehrer’s coherence theory of justification and in philosophy of science more broadly. -/- The second nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work on freedom and determinism. These chapters explore the nuances of Lehrer’s theory of ultimate freedom, discuss the role of power preferences in his account of free choice, explore whether free choices must be explained by power preferences, discuss Lehrer’s views on scientific explanation, explore his claim that freedom of choice is consistent with determinism, challenge his response to the consequence argument, explore whether choices explained by adaptive preferences are free, and investigate whether plural subjects can choose freely. -/- The book concludes with Lehrer’s masterful responses to each of the essays. Those interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind, freedom and moral responsibility, and the intersection of these fields should find the book of great interest. (shrink)

The relationship between law and morality has been treated predominantly as a relationship of justification. In this paper, I take a different perspective. I understand law and morality as two normative orders that differ primarily in their effect on the subject. Drawing on psychological and, in particular, psychodynamic research on this topic, I attempt to determine the relationship between legal and moral norms. Building especially on Freuds distinction between external norms (authority) and internalized norms (superego), I argue that the law (...) both determines and limits the latter. Thus, while it serves to protect its subjects from excessive moral demands it also tends to stabilize problematic conditions, by guarding them against other normative orders. (shrink)

Who is responsible for extremism? It is tempting to answer that only extremists are responsible for extremism. We argue that this position is false. Neither extremism nor responsibility for extremism requires extremists. And even people who hold extremist beliefs are not exclusively responsible for those beliefs. Focusing solely on individual epistemic responsibility judgments – judgments that assign responsibility for the truth or justification of beliefs strictly to the individuals who possess those beliefs – obfuscates the extent of our social epistemic (...) dependence. Given the social nature of our cognitive lives, responsibility for all beliefs, including extremist beliefs, is socially diffuse. Rather than thinking that this blunts the force of moral responsibility for extremism, we contend that this illuminates the epistemic responsibilities we have to one another. We owe it to one another to create epistemically healthy third places that enable virtuous belief management. (shrink)

This paper examines how global manipulation, defined as long-term exposure to indoctrination that profoundly shapes an individual’s valuational structure, impacts moral and, potentially, criminal responsibility. We explore this complex issue through the real-world case of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier whose identity, values, and agency were forged within the deeply manipulative and violent environment of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen was convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in February 2021 for atrocities committed as an adult and sentenced (...) to 25 years in prison. By analyzing his trajectory, we critically assess how coercively reshaped moral understanding complicates the attribution of responsibility and challenges the moral legitimacy of punishment. We argue that Ongwen’s case exemplifies the conceptual and normative tensions between moral and criminal responsibility, raising questions about agency and blameworthiness in the aftermath of formative manipulation. (shrink)

It is widely held that whether a person is morally responsible for an outcome partly depends on whether certain causal relations obtain between that person and the outcome. This paper argues that, regardless of whether the preceding claim about moral responsibility is true, moral blameworthiness is independent of such causal considerations. This conclusion is motivated by considering cases from Carolina Sartorio and Sara Bernstein. The causal structures of these cases are complex. Sartorio and Bernstein believe that reaching conclusions about moral (...) responsibility and blameworthiness requires wading through this complexity. But it is argued here that getting clear on these causal structures does not help us assess blameworthiness (regardless of the relevance of such considerations for drawing conclusions about moral responsibility). Moral blameworthiness simply does not turn on the considerations relevant to figuring out whether an agent causally contributed to an outcome. (shrink)

Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether (...) a theory of graded causation should measure closeness to necessity or closeness to sufficiency. In this paper, we argue that we should indeed endorse a proportionality principle and that this principle supports a notion of graded causation relying on closeness to sufficiency rather than closeness to necessity. Furthermore, we argue that this insight helps to provide a plausible analysis of the so-called ‘Moral Difference Puzzle’ recently described by Bernstein. (shrink)

I argue that tracing theorists of culpability for ignorant wrongdoing should reject the widely accepted principle that culpability for ignorant wrongdoing should always be traced through culpability for the ignorance itself. Two kinds of cases are considered in which culpability for ignorant wrongdoing ultimately traces back to culpability for a benighting act, but where it appears that culpable ignorance is not part of the explanation of the ignorant wrongdoing's culpability. These are (1) cases in which the ignorant wrongdoing is a (...) foreseeable consequence of a culpable benighting act and yet the ignorance is an unforeseeable consequence of that act (making the ignorance blameless), and (2) cases in which the ignorance is the foreseeable consequence of a culpable benighting act (making it culpable) but where the connection between the ignorance and the foreseeable wrongdoing from it is itself unforeseeable. I contend that culpability for the ignorant wrongdoing in neither kind of case requires an appeal to culpable ignorance. Both kinds of cases appear to involve causal deviance. However, I draw upon recent work on causal deviance to argue that any causal deviance in these cases does not fully excuse given the lack of intervening causes. (shrink)

This thesis addresses a fundamental question in moral philosophy: What is the philosophical distinction between surrender and laziness in a universe where stability is illusory and change is inevitable? Drawing upon recent developments in ontological instability theory, fluctuational metaphysics, and fluctuational epistemology, this work develops a novel theoretical framework called "Fluctuational Ethics" that provides the first systematic philosophical distinction between surrender and laziness adequate to the reality of an unstable universe. The thesis argues that traditional ethical frameworks, grounded in assumptions (...) of stable being and fixed moral categories, cannot adequately distinguish between surrender and laziness because both appear as forms of "non-action" from the perspective of substance metaphysics. Through rigorous theoretical development, mathematical formalization, and empirical validation, this work demonstrates that surrender and laziness represent fundamentally different ontological, temporal, and ethical orientations toward instability. The framework reveals surrender as "active receptivity" involving infinite ethical responsibility and creative engagement with flux, while laziness emerges as "pseudo-passivity" characterized by denial of instability and abandonment of ethical responsibility. This distinction has profound implications for moral philosophy, existential authenticity, and political theory in an age of ontological instability. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a view that extends the range of our core agency to include contributions our actions make to public values. This Extended Range View takes seriously Simone de Beauvoir's suggestion that values are not merely handed to us but created and shaped together by our actions. If we properly appreciate the moral weight of our contributions to the value systems that we all engage in—what I will call our evaluative landscape—then we can explain how we can (...) be responsible for the free actions of others. This view significantly extends what we will need to think of as our responsibility (though not to a fully unrestricted range). I will also suggest, however, that we accept a pluralist view about responsibility on which the way that we take responsibility and hold agents responsible for these kinds of value-based contributions is different from the standard responsibility practices like blame, punishment, and guilt. (shrink)

The perennial problem of determining what constitutes moral rightness has elicited divergent responses from major figures in moral philosophy, most notably Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Kant’s deontological ethics grounds moral obligation in the universality of the Categorical Imperative, while Mill’s utilitarianism evaluates right action by its contribution to the greatest aggregate happiness. Despite their influence, both frameworks are subject to substantial critique: Kantian ethics is frequently faulted for its inflexibility in morally exigent contexts, whereas Millian utilitarianism risks subordinating (...) individual rights to collective welfare. This paper advances a synthetic framework, termed the Mint Method, which seeks to reconcile these deficiencies by integrating the Kantian demand for universally binding principles with Mill’s consequentialist sensitivity to outcomes. The Mint Method is structured around three components: (1) the preservation of universal moral prohibitions to provide rational stability, (2) the conditional allowance of exceptions in extraordinary circumstances where strict adherence would result in severe injustice, and (3) the evaluation of such exceptions through consequential considerations oriented toward human dignity and collective well-being. This synthesis aims not to dissolve the tension between deontology and consequentialism, but to exploit it productively in the service of a more resilient ethical system. The resulting framework, while concededly imperfect, aspires to be less susceptible to arbitrariness, manipulation, and moral failure than either Kantian rigorism or Millian consequentialism in isolation. (shrink)