Consciousness and Moral Responsibility
Neil Levy
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0198704631
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Neil Levy presents an original theory of freedom and responsibility. Cognitive neuroscience and psychology provide a great deal of evidence that our actions are often shaped by information of which we are not conscious; some psychologists have concluded that we are actually conscious of very few of the facts we respond to. But most people seem to assume that we need to be conscious of the facts we respond to in order to be responsible for what we do. Some thinkers have argued that this naive assumption is wrong, and we need not be conscious of these facts to be responsible, while others think it is correct and therefore we are never responsible. Levy argues that both views are wrong. He sets out and defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues this account entails that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. We exercise sufficient control over the moral significance of our acts to be responsible for them only when we are conscious of the facts that give to our actions their moral character. Further, our actions are expressive of who we are as moral agents only when we are conscious of these same facts. There are therefore good reasons to think that the naive assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true. Levy suggests that this entails that people are responsible less often than we might have thought, but the consciousness condition does not entail that we are never morally responsible.
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Consciousness is the kind of consciousness with a qualitative feel to it. An agent is phenomenally conscious of some thing (a taste, a sensation, a sound) when their mental state has such a qualitative character: the apparently ineffable qualities we feel when we perceive colors, or taste wine, or hear the soft pattering of rain. The phenomenal character of conscious states is often (though of course this is controversial) taken to exceed, or at any rate be irreducible to, the representational.
Advantage for unconscious thought (Acker, 2008). However, a rival meta-analysis by members of Dijksterhuis’s laboratory, including unpublished stud ies unavailable to Acker, purports to find a significant advantage of unconscious thought (Strick et al., 2011). There is at least some reason to think that the apparent conflict between the evidence that non conscious processes are relatively insensitive to logical relations and the evidence from Dijksterhuis’s laboratory is a puzzle in need of a.
Processes, makes a difference to our behavior. But while the claim that consciousness of information makes it available for deliberation is widely accepted, the claim that awareness makes an important difference to behavior in the absence of deliberation is more controversial. In this section, I will discuss some reasons why it might be rejected. Consider Jesse Prinz’s view. According to Prinz (2005, 2011, 2012) phenomenal consciousness arises when agents attend to intermediate-level.
That utterance. These outputs of consuming systems serve as inputs into the GWS and are subsequently broadcast again. These reactions may generate does not require that all thought, or even every aspect of any thought, be fed to a com parator. The model is meant to explain how domain-general thinking gets going: how an imagistic representation is initially fed to the GWS. For that purpose, all that is required is that some components or accompaniments of thoughts are fed to a com parator.
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