Victoria McGeer

In ‘Freedom and Resentment’, P.F. Strawson famously marks a distinction between agents who are proper targets of our reactive attitudes and practices and those who are not. Agents in the first category are responsible, though sometimes excused, for their (putative) wrongdoings; agents in the second category are not responsible and thereby exempted from ordinary reactive attitudes and practices. Basic as this distinction is to Strawson’s general line on responsible agency, it is, as he acknowledges, a murky one. Not only is the division between responsible and non-responsible agents presumed to be fuzzy, Strawson further suggests that the appropriate treatment of agents in this shadowy zone is correspondingly complex. This chapter explores a distinctive line on the nature of responsible agency, as well as our reactive attitudes and practices that indicates how and why they may be appropriately directed to a range of agents typically relegated to the exempted side of this putative divide. While this may seem to run contrary to Strawson’s general approach to responsible agency, the chapter argues that it does not; in fact, it makes good sense of the suggestive and sketchy remarks he makes regarding how agents transit out of this ‘borderline penumbral area’ into full-blown responsible agency.

This chapter revisits the arguments of “Freedom and Resentment” in order to challenge the dominant non-consequentialist reading of Strawson’s account of responsibility. On the interpretation offered here, there are three mutually reinforcing prongs to Strawson’s argument: his naturalism (i.e. his resistance to a metaphysical picture of human freedom); his pragmatism (i.e. his emphasis on everyday attitudes and practices of “holding responsible”); and his consequentialism (i.e. his normative concern with what ultimately justifies our adherence to these attitudes and practices). The first two prongs of Strawson’s view have been widely recognized and discussed; the third has been overlooked. This chapter's aim is to show why the consequentialist elements in Strawson’s view not only strengthen his overall position against persistent critical challenges; they also point us towards an under-appreciated and independently attractive account of responsibility.

According to standard versions of reason-responsiveness agents are fit to be held responsible for a failure to act as reasons require when they had the capacity to act in that way, there were no excuses available to hinder the exercise of that capacity, and still they failed to exercise it. But this analysis suggests that such a failure has to be a fluke that is due to sheer chance or an unknown glitch. And in that case there is no obvious reason to blame the agent for the failure. This chapter seeks to recast the reason-responsiveness approach so that it can deal with this crucial problem.

Drawing on the mindshaping view of social cognition, Haslanger makes a compelling case that understanding the depth of human enculturation is critical for remedying social injustice: specifically, for understanding the resilience of practices of injustice, as well as developing better strategies for resisting and rectifying them. In these comments, I focus on: (1) reviewing key features of the enculturation hypothesis that support Haslanger’s insights; (2) highlighting three observations she makes regarding our cultural practices that should encourage and guide theorists/ activists in working towards justice-engendering social reform; and (3) emphasizing, in particular, Haslanger’s endorsement of securing protected spaces in which heterodox cultural practices that potentially challenge unjust orthodox practices can themselves develop and thrive. I close by raising three questions for further discussion that together stress a complementary theme for promoting social justice: the importance of enculturating conversational practices that can reach across ideological divides.

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way.

This paper investigates the nature of dispositional properties in the context of artificial intelligence systems. We start by examining the distinctive features of natural dispositions according to criteria introduced by McGeer (2018) for distinguishing between object-centered dispositions (i.e., properties like ‘fragility’) and agent-based abilities, including both ‘habits’ and ‘skills’ (a.k.a. ‘intelligent capacities’, Ryle 1949). We then explore to what extent the distinction applies to artificial dispositions in the context of two very different kinds of artificial systems, one based on rule-based classical logic and the other on reinforcement learning. Here we defend three substantive claims. First, we argue that artificial systems are not equal in the kinds of dispositional properties they instantiate. In particular, we show that logical systems instantiate merely object-centered dispositions whereas reinforcement learning systems allow for the instantiation of agent-based abilities. Second, we explore the similarities and differences between the agent-centered abilities of artificial systems and those of humans, especially as relates to the important distinction made in the human case between habits and skills/intelligent capacities. The upshot is that the agent-centered abilities of truly intelligent artificial systems are distinctive enough to constitute a third type of agent-based ability — blended agent-based ability — raising substantial questions as to how we understand the nature of their agency. Third, we explore one aspect of this problem, focussing on whether systems of this type are properly considered ‘responsible agents’, at least in some contexts and for some purposes. The ramifications of our analysis will turn out to be directly relevant to various ethical concerns of artificial intelligence.

In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices

This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms, arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; it argues that our folk-psychological expertise is not only socially scaffolded in development, it continues to be socially supported and maintained in maturity, thereby presenting a radically different picture of what mature folk-psychological competency amounts to; it provides grounds for resisting a recent trend in theoretical explanations of quotidian social interaction that downplays the deployment of sophisticated mentalizing resources in understanding what others are doing.

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On the ‘Scaffolding View’ I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. While this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is providing a plausibly defensible account of how so-called responsible agents genuinely deserve to be treated as such.

A currently popular view traces autistic cognitive abnormalities to a defective capacity for theorizing about other minds. Two prominent researchers, Uta Frith and Francesca Happé, extend this account by tracing further autistic abnormalities to impaired self-consciousness. This paper argues that Frith and Happé's account requires a treatment of autistic self-report that is problematic on both methodological and philosophical grounds. However, the philosophical problems point to an alternative account of self-awareness and self-report in normal individuals; and this account gives us a methodologically more attractive approach to explaining autistic abnormalities.

In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’ could bolster philosophical resistance to the tempting view that the human mind is possessed of metaphysically ‘occult’ powers and properties. This temptation is powerful in the context of accounting for the special qualities of responsible agency. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of strategies. One recent strategy, reminiscent of Ryle’s, is to exploit a more sophisticated understanding of dispositional properties to account for these qualities. But ‘new dispositionalists’ run up against a ‘hard problem’ that threatens the approach. This paper argues that the threat may be averted by embracing a yet more radical ‘Rylean’ view of the distinctive dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’.

Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment ofmoral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged.

In the philosophies of language and mind, "externalists" argue that the meanings of words and the contents of beliefs are determined by factors external to individual agents. "Social" externalists emphasize that the meaning-determining features of an individual's environment include what others say and do. "Physical" or "perceptual" externalists disagree, arguing that basic constraints on meaning are set by an individual's history of causal interactions with her physical environment. Communication is explained by a radical interpreter's ability to discern the causes of a speaker's utterances and, thereby, the contents of her beliefs. Shared meanings are inessential, and languages are best understood as theories adequate for interpreting individual speakers. ;My aim is to defend a thoroughgoing social externalism. In Chapters I and II, I review Putnam's original Twin Earth thought experiment, considering how externalists divide on the relationship suggested between meaning and belief. In Chapter III, I concentrate on what externalist thought experiments imply about how we can go wrong in what we think and about what we mean. My conclusion is that the thought experiments supporting perceptual, but not social, externalism are fundamentally misconceived. ;In Chapter IV, I examine what some so-called social externalists must share with perceptual externalists in order to endorse the thought experiments I reject. I claim it is a "realist" vision of language use. Such a vision is fundamentally compatible with the idiolects framework of linguistic analysis, but, ultimately, it cannot be defended. Yet, without this realist foundation, the idiolects picture of language is as counter-intuitive as the positivist account it was supposed to replace. ;My proposed alternative, discussed in Chapters IV and V, denies the priority of individual speaker meaning. Meaning is an essentially social concept, describing the stable linguistic practices of a community of speakers. This genuinely social picture of language allows for two things: reintroducing normativity as an essential feature of meaning, thereby making philosophical sense of our common sense notions of error; and recognizing the fact philosophers too often ignore, that natural languages are also dynamic "living" languages, evolving as a consequence of our changing interests, knowledge and abilities

The broad issue in this paper is the relationship between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. That issue arises particularly sharply for cognitive neurospsychology, some of whose practitioners claim a methodological autonomy for their discipline. They hold that behavioural data from neuropsychological impairments are sufficient to justify assumptions about the underlying modular structure of human cognitive architecture, as well as to make inferences about its various components. But this claim to methodological autonomy can be challenged on both philosophical and empirical grounds. A priori considerations about (cognitive) multiple realisability challenge the thesis on philosophical grounds, and neuroscientific findings from developmental disorders substantiate that challenge empirically. The conclusion is that behavioural evidence alone is inadequate for scientific progress since appearances of modularity can be thoroughly deceptive, obscuring both the dynamic processes of neural development and the endstate network architecture of real cognitive systems

What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The article concludes with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level.

Ian Hacking proposes that ways of talking about autistic experience can shape, or even transform, what it is like to be autistic. I explore the grounds for two nonexclusive interpretations of this thesis. The informative interpretation holds that, because nonautistics cannot read mental states into autistic behaviour as they normally do with one another, autistic self‐narratives give nonautistics unique insights into what it is like to be autistic. This in turn affects how nonautistics interact with autistic individuals, enriching their social environment in various ways. The more radical, transformative interpretation holds that autistic experience is itself moulded under the influence of developing a language‐game for talking about autistic experience. I endorse both theses, albeit with some cautionary remarks.

Two arguments are famously held to support the conclusion that consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical or functional terms – hence, that physicalism is false: the modal argument and the knowledge argument. While anti‐physicalists appeal to both arguments, this paper argues there is a methodological incoherence in jointly maintaining them: the modal argument supports the possibility of zombies; but the possibility of zombies undercuts the knowledge argument. At best, this leaves anti‐physicalists in a considerably weakened rhetorical position. At worst, it shows that commonsense intuitions on which anti‐physicalists rely mislead us about the true nature of conscious experience.

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view”. On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and the problem of “reactive..