Moral Responsibility and Consciousness

King, Matt; Carruthers, Peter

doi:10.1163/174552412x625682

Cited by 31 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Identifying the downstream effects of various ways of conceptualizing our biases is ultimately an empirical question, about which I say more in Madva, ms. See also Scaife et al,ms. 8 Perhaps none of our attitudes are directly introspectible (King and Carruthers, 2012), and all self-knowledge of attitudes is indirect or inferential. If so, this research suggests that our capacities to infer the contents of our implicit and explicit attitudes are surprisingly comparable.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

Madva

2017

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, 'introspectively inaccessible' attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals' moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals' partial awareness of their implicit biases makes them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps none of our attitudes are directly introspectible (King and Carruthers, ), and all self‐knowledge of attitudes is indirect or inferential. If so, this research suggests that our capacities to infer the contents of our implicit and explicit attitudes are surprisingly comparable.…”

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confidence: 99%

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

Madva

2017

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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“…One important focus in this line of research also involves the possibility that implicit attitudes predict or explain our beliefs and real-world behavior. For example, one central question in this line of research is whether agents can be morally responsible for discriminatory behaviors when those behaviors are caused by implicit attitudes (Brownstein 2016;Brownstein and Saul 2016;Holroyd 2012;Kelly and Roedder 2008;King and Carruthers 2012;Levy 2014Levy , 2017Washington and Kelly 2016). Is an agent morally responsible for a mistaken shooting, for instance, if this action was caused by attitudes that are beyond their ability to control?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit attitudes and the ability argument

Buckwalter¹

2018

Philos Stud

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According to one picture of the mind, decisions and actions are largely the result of automatic cognitive processing beyond our ability to control. This picture is in tension with a foundational principle in ethics that moral responsibility for behavior requires the ability to control it. The discovery of implicit attitudes contributes to this tension. According to the ability argument against moral responsibility, if we cannot control implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes cause behavior, then we cannot be morally responsible for that behavior. The purpose of this paper is to refute the ability argument. Drawing on both scientific evidence in cognitive science and philosophical arguments in ethics and action theory, I argue that it is invalid and unsound because current evidence is insufficient to establish the premises that (1) implicit attitudes are uncontrollable, (2) that they significantly cause behavior, (3) that responsibility always requires ability, and (4) that even if uncontrollable attitudes did fully cause behavior, this entails that the behavior they cause is uncontrollable. The rejection of the ability argument questions the priority of the unconscious over the conscious mind in cognitive science, deprioritizes ability in theories of moral responsibility in ethics, and provides a strong reason to uphold moral responsibility for implicitly biased behavior.

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“…This is not entirely clear, though, because Levy does not distinguish between different kinds of awareness, and at some points talks of awareness of a 'gut instinct' which is not obviously an implicit association. Moreover, he is working within a framework that requires that we assume (for the sake of argument with King & Carruthers, 2012) that introspective access to our attitudes (implicit or explicit) is not possible. In contrast, I am not ruling out the possibility of introspective access to some attitudes, and hence the contrast between introspection of some attitudes, and observational awareness of implicit attitudes, is available here.Levy's argument against moral responsibility rests not on awareness -he acknowledges that individuals may have (observational?)…”

Section: A Normative Epistemic Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit bias, awareness and imperfect cognitions

Holroyd

2015

Consciousness and Cognition

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Are individuals responsible for behaviour that is implicitly biased? Implicitly biased actions are those which manifest the distorting influence of implicit associations. That they express these 'implicit' features of our cognitive and motivational make up has been appealed to in support of the claim that, because individuals lack the relevant awareness of their morally problematic discriminatory behaviour, they are not responsible for behaving in ways that manifest implicit bias. However, the claim that such influences are implicit is, in fact, not straightforwardly related to the claim that individuals lack awareness of the morally problematic dimensions of their behaviour. Nor is it clear that lack of awareness does absolve from responsibility. This may depend on whether individuals culpably fail to know something that they should know. I propose that an answer to this question, in turn, depends on whether other imperfect cognitions are implicated in any lack of the relevant kind of awareness. In this paper I clarify our understanding of 'implicitly biased actions' and then argue that there are three different dimensions of awareness that might be at issue in the claim that individuals lack awareness of implicit bias. Having identified the relevant sense of awareness I argue that only one of these senses is defensibly incorporated into a condition for responsibility, rejecting recent arguments from Washington & Kelly for an 'externalist' epistemic condition. Having identified what individuals should - and can - know about their implicitly biased actions, I turn to the question of whether failures to know this are culpable. This brings us to consider the role of implicit biases in relation to other imperfect cognitions. I conclude that responsibility for implicitly biased actions may depend on answers to further questions about their relationship to other imperfect cognitions.

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Moral Responsibility and Consciousness

Cited by 31 publications

References 6 publications

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

Implicit attitudes and the ability argument

Implicit bias, awareness and imperfect cognitions

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