Abstracts
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at AAP 2013. If you've just submitted an abstract, it may take a few days to appear.
| Name: Associate Professor Neil Levy |
| Institution: Florey Neuroscience Institutes |
| Title: Consciousness and moral responsibility |
| Abstract: There has been a lively debate recently centring on whether some empirical findings regarding the causal role of conscious states undermine agents' freedom and responsibility. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these findings raise no important challenges to our moral responsibility. I suggest we should focus on a distinct question, concerning the functional role of the informational content of mental states: might agents be morally responsible for actions in the absence of consciousness of that content (as philosophers like Scanlon and Arpaly contend)? I defend an account of the functional role of conscious states, and on that basis argue that conscious of the contents of the states that cause our action is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. |
| Keywords: Consciousness; neuroscience; moral responsibility. |
