Description
Taylor & Francis The Mental Basis of Responsibility 2002 Edition by Walter Glannon
This work is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent's epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions; attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning; a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times; an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility; and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues. Table of Contents : The concept of responsibility: Individual responsibility; Causal control; Multiple causes; Moral luck; Alternative accounts; Causal versus moral responsibility; Summary. Normative competence: Outline of a theory of action; Cognition and emotion; Excuses; When the will is free; Psychopathy; Summary. Personhood, personal identity, and moral responsibility: Persons, sources, and resources; Theories of personal identity; A pragmatic conception of personal identity; Psychological disconnectedness and discontinuity; Responsible behaviour; Character and action; Summary. Cognitive control and content: Types of control; Frankfurt and alternative possibilities; Reasons for revising PAP'; Responsibility for failures; Ability and time; Remote causal control; Responsibility for consequences; Summary. The freedom we need to be responsible: Arguments for incompatibilism; Two senses of "choice"; Mind and brain; Two objections; Libertarianism and moral significance; Summary. Conclusion.