Self-determination and moral responsibility
Item
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Title
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Self-determination and moral responsibility
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:e061e5ef2ddf:10997
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identifier
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10496
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Creator
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Fried, Ezra,
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Contributor
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Peter Simpson | Stefan B. H. Baumrin
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Ethics | Freedom | Free Will | Moral Responsibility | Self-Determination
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Abstract
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"Self-Determinism" is the claim that we can originate acts---that someone can be the first source of his act. It is often thought that freedom and moral responsibility require the ability to originate acts. I argue that this is not so. However, there is a special kind of moral responsibility that we can have for an act only if we have originated it or might have originated another. Someone has this "pure" moral responsibility for his act just in case he deserves that we take the purely moral attitude toward him of liking or disliking him as a person in considering the act, as opposed to our also considering and explaining his performance of it in an objective, scientific way. I argue that the origination of an act can be understood in a way that preserves the dominant view of causation according to which events (including acts) are always caused by other events. A beginning-less series of originative acts terminates in the final originated act. This is an origination because the agent is the subject of every act in the series. I advocate a moderate, moral self-determinism according to which an agent's personality restricts the range of acts that he can originate, and according to which he originates them only for the sake of their rightness.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Philosophy
