Concurrent Session 5a: Emotions, the Self and Moral Responsibility

Chair: xxx(University)

Emotions and Moral Responsibility

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel

The spontaneous nature of emotions leads people to argue that we are not responsible for them and hence emotions are irrelevant to the moral domain. This view is flawed as it assumes an overly simplistic view of both responsibility and emotions.

Responsibility may be described as having two major aspects: causality and praiseworthiness (or blameworthiness). Moral responsibility is hardly concerned with causal responsibility but mainly with responsibility related to praise or blame. In addition responsibility can be direct or indirect and full or partial.

Paradigmatic cases of direct responsibility encompass (a) intending to do and doing X freely, (b) the ability to avoid X, and (c) the ability to foresee the consequences of X. These factors are important in describing the ideal situation for direct and full responsibility.

Responsibility is also assigned when these three factors are clearly absent at the time at which we perform the particular deed, but when they have been present at some time in the past. Here we assign indirect responsibility. Indirect responsibility is assigned when we are responsible for cultivating the circumstances that gave rise to the blameworthy deed or attitude.

Moral responsibility may also be divided into full and partial responsibility. Provocation, for example, may reduce full responsibility to a partial one, as it involves the other’s behavior which reduces the agent’s responsibility.

Emotional responsibility is mainly indirect and partial.

The view that denies our responsibility for our emotions encompasses a narrow picture of emotions. Emotions are reduced to fleeting, unreliable feelings over which we have no responsibility. Contrary to this view, emotions are complex phenomena involving intentional components, and sometimes even intellectual deliberations; this enables us to impute responsibility for emotions.

Both moral responsibility and emotions are complex phenomena admitting various degrees of intensity. Although emotional behavior bears less personal responsibility than intellectual behavior does, we still have some moral responsibility over our emotional behavior.

Subjects of Responsibility and Theories of Personal Identity

Ruth Boeker
School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies
University of St Andrews, UK

In this paper I argue that there is an interesting conception of a subject of responsibility which is to be distinguished from the conception of a human  being. Moreover, I argue that there may be more than one interesting moral characterization of a person and hence it is important to acknowledge subjects of responsibility and not merely moral beings. The ideas for this view can be found in Locke’s account of personal identity. In my view Locke’s account is to be understood from his claim that ‘person’ is a forensic term. This means that his account of personal identity is not psychological per se, but rather on the basis of his particular understanding of responsibility and reward and punishment it can be explained as to why he takes the ontological nature of subjects of responsibility to be grounded in psychology. On the basis of Locke’s theory I develop a general philosophical framework which distinguishes between a characterization of a person, on the one hand, and the ontological nature of a person and ontological criteria of personal identity, on the other hand. This framework allows me to argue that  there may be more than one interesting moral characterization of a person  and that the ontological nature of a subject of responsibility may differ from  the ontological nature of a being worthy of compensation. If this is correct  then moral rather than metaphysical considerations are the starting point for an account of a person, more precisely, subject of responsibility.