Belief in moral responsibility enjoys widespread support, both among philosophers and in popular culture. Moral responsibility for our characters and our acts is often regarded as beyond doubt or question, and, although the belief seems to be a cultural universal, it is particularly powerful in the USA and the UK. This book explores the deep psychological factors at the source of the profound commitment to belief in moral responsibility. Philosophers have developed legions of arguments in support of moral responsibility, but even philosophical champions of those arguments acknowledge that they are not conclusive and certainly not strong enough to account for the powerful belief in moral responsibility; and because those philosophical arguments are not widely known, they cannot be the source of the popular belief in moral responsibility. Belief in moral responsibility is rooted in forces that run much deeper than justifications favored by both philosophers and the layperson. This book is a quest to uncover those deeper sources, showing that the roots of the common belief in moral responsibility run deep, and they include powerful factors that rarely rise to consciousness.

This dissertation is a collection of essays under the theme of moral responsibility 'at the margins'. I investigate a number of examples of disordered agency and cognition -- self-deception, delusion, and addiction -- through the lens of a so-called `reasons-responsiveness' theory of morally responsible agency, employing the theory to examine the extent to which agents in those conditions are morally responsible, and in virtue of what this is so. In Chapter 2, after a brief introductory chapter, and before getting into the individual disordered phenomena, I develop and defend the reasons-responsiveness theory of responsible agency to which I will appeal in later chapters. Such theories -- according to which responsible agency is based in an agent's capacity for recognizing and responding to reasons for action -- are not entirely new. However, developed in the right way, they are also well-equipped to respond to a kind of skeptical challenge to morally responsible agency that has somewhat recently come into vogue. This skeptical challenge is motivated by recent findings in social and cognitive psychology that seem to show that much of human behaviour is motivated by considerations which are, from the perspective of justifying action, irrelevant. For example, contributions to a communal office coffee fund can as much as triple when the instructions are accompanied with a pair of watchful 'eyes'. I argue that of all mainstream theories of agency, the reasons-responsiveness theory is least threatened by results such as these. I further respond by addressing a dispute between reasons-responsiveness theorists themselves: what is required for someone to count as responding to reason? I argue for a liberal interpretation of this requirement on independent grounds, and note that such a version of the theory is even better equipped to respond to the skeptic, yielding a theory of agency which is actually enhanced by appeal to the empirical results. In Chapters 3 and 4 I develop a novel account of self-deception and use that account to address the question: Are some delusional subjects responsible for their delusions? The central difficulty for the philosophical theory of self-deception has been to yield a psychologically plausible description of its dynamics. Self-deception is also paradigmatically intentional behaviour for which agents are typically blameworthy. I argue that no extant account of self-deception can capture both of these features. On my account, what makes a state a self-deceptive one is not determined by how it comes about. Rather, it is determined by how that belief is maintained. Self-deception, on this view, is willful failure, a refusal, to meet epistemic requirements for motivationally biased reasons. Thus, self-deceivers are typically responsible for their self-deception. I further argue that if this account is correct, there will be at least some cases of delusion (e.g., the Reverse Othello and Capgras delusions) for which agents are, in some sense, responsible. Appealing to the distinction between blameworthiness and (what I shall call) 'attributability', I claim that this leads us not to the conclusion that delusional subjects should be blamed, but instead to a more nuanced understanding of the kind of agency involved in the dynamics of delusion, and of the reasons these subjects are excused. The final chapter is about addiction. Perhaps the central question raised by addiction is: to what extent are addicts responsible agents? Theorists notoriously oscillate between two extreme positions: (1) that addicts are just like unimpaired agents and are fully responsible and (2) that addicts helplessly suffer a condition that leaves them utterly without self-control. I argue against both extreme positions, engaging with current science at both turns. Against (2), I argue that there is no satisfactory understanding of the 'brain disease theory' of addiction that entails that addicts are not responsible agents. I then argue against (1) by considering addicts at different stages of addiction -- those who are aware of their predicament vs. those who are not (although they should be). With respect to the unaware, I argue that they share some features with the self-deceived which explains their insensitivity to a rationally circumscribed body of evidence. Concerning the aware, I appeal to empirical work on `ego-depletion' and willpower -- and to Chapter 2's theory of responsibility -- to argue that these addicts suffer a graded impairment of the will, one that partially excuses them from blameworthiness.

Poverty is not accident, but design. We are not all equal before the law. And the central message of contemporary ethics is that only some people matter.

Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to be a God explores the hidden corridors of the moral responsibility system to discover why that system is so widely accepted and passionately defended. The moral responsibility system has obvious charms: it provides justification for our powerful strike-back motives, transforms selfishness into the virtuous defense of our justly deserved special benefits, draws a radical distinction between humans and the other species we exploit, and protects our nonconscious belief in a just world. Those charms notwithstanding, the resilience and endurance of the moral responsibility system indicates a hidden force that not only binds together the pieces of the system but also motivates our stubborn devotion to that system. That hidden force is a nonconscious desire to be a god: a desire that afflicts both believers and atheists, and that is almost universally denied (Nietzsche being a special exception). That desire can be found throughout the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to the present. It is also manifested in myths and a variety of religious practices and teachings. The breadth, power and harm of nonconscious “apotheosis aspiration” is the focus of this study.

Delusions play an important and fascinating role in philosophy and are a particularly fertile area of study in recent years, spanning philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology, ethics, psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Delusion explores the conceptual and philosophical issues in the study of delusion and is the first major reference source of its kind. Comprising 38 chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into six clear parts: The Nature of Delusion Delusion in Disorders Epistemology of Delusion Delusion’s Place in the Mind Delusion Formation Responsibility, Culture, and Society. Within these sections, key topics are discussed including delusions and wellbeing, delusions as they occur in wider mental disorder, the epistemic profile of delusions (evidence, justification, rationality), how delusions are formed, delusions and folk psychology (how they relate to belief, self-deception, imagination, and so on), and delusions in the wider social and cultural context. An outstanding resource for both students and researchers, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Delusion is essential reading for those working on delusion in philosophy departments, and also suitable for those in related disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science.

Individuals are generally considered morally responsible for their actions. Who or what is responsible when those individuals become part of business organizations? Can we correctly ascribe moral responsibility to the organization itself? If so, what are the grounds for this claim and to what extent do the individuals also remain morally responsible? If not, does moral responsibility fall entirely to specific individuals within the organization and can they be readily identified? A perennial question in business ethics has concerned the extent to which business organizations can be correctly said to have moral responsibilities and obligations. In philosophical terms, this is a question of "corporate moral agency." Whether firms can be said to be moral agents and to have the capacity for moral responsibility has significant practical consequences. In most legal systems in the world, business firms are recognized as "persons" with the ability to own property, to maintain and defend lawsuits, and to self-organize governance structures. To recognize that these "business persons" can also act morally or immorally as organizations, however, would justify the imposition of other legal constraints and normative expectations on organizations. In the criminal law, for example, the idea that an organized firm may itself have criminal culpability is accepted in many countries (such as the United States) but rejected in others (such as Germany). This book collects new contributions by leading business scholars in business ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines to extend our understanding of the "moral responsibility of firms."

The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of delusions. It brings together recent work in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and psychiatry, offering a comprehensive review of the philosophical issues raised by the psychology of normal and abnormal cognition.