IB Philosophy 1.4.3 Moral Responsibility Notes

1. Topics 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 examined self-consciousness and agency as features of personhood.
2. This final topic in the personhood sub-theme asks whether moral responsibility is the truly defining feature. If being a person means being answerable for one's actions, then the concept of personhood is inseparable from ethics.
3. The IB syllabus poses a provocative question: "Is being morally responsible the defining feature of being human?" This goes beyond asking whether humans happen to be morally responsible. It asks whether moral responsibility is what makes us persons in the first place.
4. If the answer is yes, then beings who lack moral responsibility (however defined) would fall outside the category of personhood.
5. Immanuel Kant offered the strongest version of this claim.
6. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant argued that persons are rational moral agents: beings who can understand the moral law and act according to duty.
7. For Kant, it is precisely this capacity for moral autonomy (the ability to give yourself moral rules through reason, rather than being driven by instinct or desire) that gives persons their unique dignity and separates them from mere things.
8. On the Kantian view, moral responsibility requires three conditions:
   1. the agent must act freely (not under external compulsion),
   2. must possess knowledge of what they are doing, and
   3. must have the capacity to have done otherwise.
   4. If any of these conditions is absent, the agent cannot be held fully morally responsible for their actions.

The Kantian and Aristotelian Accounts

1. Consider two cases of theft: a person who steals bread because they are starving, under duress with no alternatives, and a person who steals a luxury item out of greed while fully aware it is wrong.
   1. Kant’s three conditions for moral responsibility (freedom to act otherwise, knowledge of right and wrong, capacity for rational self-governance, meaning the ability to control your actions through reason rather than impulse) are met in the second case but arguably not the first.
2. Moral responsibility, for Kant, requires that the agent could have chosen differently through the exercise of reason.
3. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, developed an earlier account of moral responsibility.
4. Aristotle argued that we are responsible for actions that are voluntary: those performed with knowledge and without external compulsion. Actions done in ignorance or under coercion are involuntary, and the agent deserves either pardon or pity rather than blame.
5. Aristotle's own example from the Nicomachean Ethics makes the distinction vivid: a sailor caught in a storm throws cargo overboard to save the ship. The action is voluntary in one sense (the sailor chose it) but involuntary in another (no one would choose it under normal circumstances).
6. Aristotle concludes it is a mixed action, voluntary in the particular circumstances. This careful analysis of when actions are truly voluntary underpins his account of when we can rightly hold someone responsible.
7. The connection between moral responsibility and personhood raises the overarching Unit 1 question, "What does it mean to be human?" If moral responsibility is the defining feature, then being human is fundamentally an ethical condition: we are the beings who can be praised or blamed, who bear the weight of our choices, and who must justify our actions to others.

Existentialist Responsibility and the Broader Context

1. Jean-Paul Sartre pushed this idea to its limit in Existentialism is a Humanism. Sartre argued that because human beings are radically free, they are radically responsible: responsible not only for their individual actions but for the kind of person they choose to become.
2. There is no human nature that excuses us, and we are what we make of ourselves. Sartre's position becomes vivid through the example of a person who claims 'I had no choice, my upbringing made me this way.' For Sartre, this is bad faith: even acknowledging the influence of one's past is a choice, and the decision to treat that influence as determining is itself a free act.
3. A person raised in poverty who chooses to steal is responsible not because their circumstances are irrelevant, but because they remain free to interpret and respond to those circumstances differently.
4. However, not all philosophers agree that moral responsibility is the defining feature of personhood. Some argue that self-consciousness (as discussed in 1.4.1) or agency (as discussed in 1.4.2) are more fundamental, and that moral responsibility is a consequence of these capacities rather than the defining criterion itself.