2012-03-24
18 分钟This is philosophy bites, with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
If you do something unconsciously, say, while sleepwalking, can you be held morally responsible for it?
Neil Levy, director of research at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and head of neuroethics at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes in Melbourne, believes that consciousness is a precondition for responsibility.
But this is a position under challenge, for there's growing empirical evidence that many of our actions and beliefs are driven by unconscious mechanisms.
Neil Levy, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thanks, Nigel.
The topic we're going to focus on is moral responsibility and consciousness.
I think it's probably quite useful just to get clear what we mean by both those terms at the start of this.
So let's start with moral responsibility.
What's that?
Well, as I use moral responsibility, it's the property that makes agents appropriate targets of blame and praise and maybe even punishment and perhaps benefit.
An agent is morally responsible if they've performed an action and they deserve some kind of treatment on that basis, not on the basis of consequentialist considerations, not because it's good for society or good for anybody else, but because they deserve it.
Great.
So that's a fairly standard view of moral responsibility.
Now, consciousness, many people think of consciousness as the feel of experience, what it's like to experience things in a certain sort of way.
Is that how you see it?
Well, that's a perfectly good sense of consciousness.