Moral responsibility
Agents have the capability to reflect upon their situation, to form intentions about how they will act, and then to carry out that action.
The notion of free will has become an important issue in the debate on whether individuals are ever morally responsible for their actions and, if so, in what sense.
[11] Metaphysical libertarians think actions are not always causally determined, allowing for the possibility of free will and thus moral responsibility.
All libertarians are also incompatibilists; for they think that if causal determinism were true of human action, people would not have free will.
Accordingly, some libertarians subscribe to the principle of alternate possibilities, which posits that moral responsibility requires that people could have acted differently.
[15][16] In law, there is a known exception to the assumption that moral culpability lies in either individual character or freely willed acts.
It is therefore argued that it is doubtful that one can praise or blame someone for performing an action generated randomly by his nervous system (without there being any non-physical agency responsible for the observed probabilistic outcome).
[20] Hard determinists (not to be confused with fatalists) often use liberty in practical moral considerations, rather than a notion of a free will.
Indeed, faced with the possibility that determinism requires a completely different moral system, some proponents say "So much the worse for free will!".
For example, damage to the frontal lobe reduces the ability to weigh uncertain risks and make prudent decisions, and therefore leads to an increased likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime.
He says it is wrong to ask questions of narrow culpability, rather than focusing on what is important: what needs to change in a criminal's behavior and brain.
To Eagleman, it is damaging to entertain the illusion that a person can make a single decision that is somehow, suddenly, independent of their physiology and history.
[29] Eagleman also warns that less attractive people and minorities tend to get longer sentencing – all of which he sees as symptoms that more science is needed in the legal system.
Pereboom conceives of free will as the control in action required for moral responsibility in the sense involving deserved blame and praise, punishment and reward.
Without libertarian agent causation, Pereboom thinks the free will required for moral responsibility in the desert-involving sense is not in the offing.
For instance, causally determined agents who act badly might justifiably be blamed with the aim of forming faulty character, reconciling impaired relationships, and protecting others from harm they are apt to cause.
[32] Pereboom proposes that a viable criminal jurisprudence is compatible with the denial of deserved blame and punishment.
In addition, just as we should do what we can, within reasonable bounds, to cure the carriers of the Ebola virus we quarantine, so we should aim to rehabilitate and reintegrate the criminals we incapacitate.
Krishna's admonition is intended to get Arjuna to perform his duty (i.e., fight in the battle), but he is also claiming that being a successful moral agent requires being mindful of the wider circumstances in which one finds oneself.
[34] Paramahansa Yogananda also said, "Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits.
[37] His paper "Freedom and Resentment," which adduces reactive attitudes, has been widely cited as an important response to incompatibilist accounts of free will.
[38] Other compatibilists, who have been inspired by Strawson's paper, are as follows: Gary Watson,[39] Susan Wolf,[40] R. Jay Wallace,[41] Paul Russell,[42] and David Shoemaker.
One may not be blamed even for one's character traits, he maintains, since they too are heavily influenced by evolutionary, environmental, and genetic factors (inter alia).
[46] This move goes against the commonly held assumption that how one feels about free will is ipso facto a claim about moral responsibility.
[52] In recent years, research in experimental philosophy has explored whether people's untutored intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility are compatibilist or incompatibilist.
The emergence of automation, robotics and related technologies prompted the question, 'Can an artificial system be morally responsible?
[62][63] The questions arguably adjoin with but are distinct from machine ethics, which is concerned with the moral behavior of artificial systems.
Second, that there are increasing 'layers of obscurity' between manufacturers and system, as hand coded programs are replaced with more sophisticated means.
[66] A more extensive review of the arguments may be found in Patrick Hew's 2014 article on artificial moral agents.
