Tese
Aprimorar a responsabilidade: direções para uma investigação interdisciplinar
Fecha
2018-02-23Autor
Fischborn, Marcelo
Institución
Resumen
Responsibility practices that are part of our daily lives involve, among other things, standards
about how one should praise, blame, or punish people for their actions, as well as particular
acts that follow those standards to a greater or lesser extent. A classical question in philosophy
asks whether human beings can actually be morally responsible for what they do. This dissertation
argues that addressing this classical question is insufficient if one wants the investigation
of moral responsibility to serve the goal of improving ordinary responsibility practices.
As an alternative, I offer directions for an interdisciplinary investigation that I take to be in a
better position to promote that goal. My argument is developed in five articles and a discussion
section. The first four articles describe limitations of skeptical views, which deny the existence
of moral responsibility. The first article assesses a skeptical argument based on results
from neuroscience that intends to show that there is no free will. I argue that a premise in the
argument—which says that choices are determined by events in the brain—is not supported
by the available results. The second article argues that, despite the fact that existent results do
not show that choices are determined by brain events, further studies in neuroscience could in
principle do that. The third article begins the discussion of limitations that concern the implementability
of some of the changes in responsibility practices recommended in skeptical approaches.
Specifically, I describe challenges that attempts to reduce the severity of legal punishment
are likely to face due to psychological facts about belief in free will and desire to
punish. The forth article presents results from an original experiment that sought to test a hypothesis
about the workings of belief in free will and the desire to punish, namely the hypothesis
that the desire to punish causally affects beliefs about free will. Results failed to support
the hypothesis. Finally, the fifth article presents what I call the enhancement model, i.e., a proposal
about how to structure an interdisciplinary investigation that can promote the enhancement
of ordinary responsibility practices. The final discussion section shows how the enhancement
model overcomes some of the limitations of recent discussions about the existence
of moral responsibility, which includes not just the skeptical views considered in earlier articles,
but also views that affirm the existence of moral responsibility and free will. The central
claim of this dissertation, therefore, is that the investigation of moral responsibility can be rearranged
so as to further the goal of improving ordinary responsibility practices.