Abstract

This is a dissertation about moral responsibility, whether we have it in the sense we ordinarily suppose, and what alternatives are available to us given that we lack it. ;The dissertation comes in two main parts. The first part defends a particular kind of error theory about the folk concept of moral responsibility. That is, given a roughly scientific picture of the world, it is likely that our commonsense beliefs about responsible agency are systematically mistaken. The second part of the dissertation develops a strategy for resolving the folk conceptual error theory. I call the general strategy revisionist, and recommend pursuing a particular research program under the title "moderate conceptual revisionism." The central idea is that by eliminating a metaphysically-demanding freedom condition on moral responsibility, we can revise our concept in such a way that it recognizes the limitations of our psychology and respects what is justifiable in our practices, without violating our expectations about the natural world. If successful, what makes this approach moderate is that it preserves the bulk of the beliefs, attitudes, and practices characteristic of responsibility. ;There are two chief advances of the dissertation. First, it provides a diagnosis of the apparent intractability of the current debate between standard philosophical positions. Second, it proposes an approach that provides a way out of that debate by developing a new class of responsibility theories: non-eliminativist folk conceptual error-theories