Many views of moral agency include, implicitly or explicitly, a consciousness requirement—namely, the claim that phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of moral agency. This paper casts doubt on the consciousness requirement. I argue that consciousness is not necessary for instantiating four key capacities necessary for moral agency: action, moral concept possession, responsiveness to moral reasons, and moral understanding. I defend my picture of nonconscious moral agency as a plausible account of an entity that can act for moral reasons and can be morally responsible. Lastly, I discuss broader implications of my argument, especially on the possibility of artificial moral agency.

This article examines whether artificial intelligence (AI)-driven harm can be classified as moral or natural evil, or whether a new category – artificial evil – is needed. Should AI’s harm be seen as a product of human design, thus maintaining moral responsibility for its creators, or whether AI’s autonomous actions resemble natural evil, where harm arises unintentionally? The concept of artificial evil, combining elements of both moral and natural evil, is presented to better address this dilemma. Just as AI is still a form of intelligence (albeit non-biological), artificial evil would still be evil in the sense that it results in real harm or suffering – it is just that this harm is produced by AI systems rather than by nature or human moral agents directly. The discussion further extends into the realm of defence or theodicy, drawing parallels with the Free Will Defence, questioning if AI autonomy may be justified even if it results in harm, much like human free will. Ultimately, the article calls for a re-evaluation of our ethical frameworks and glossary of terms to address the emerging challenges of AI autonomy and its moral implications.

The chemistry of combining the simulation hypothesis (which many believe to be a modern variation of skepticism) and manipulation arguments will be explored for the first time in this paper. I argue: If we take the possibility that we are now in a simulation seriously enough, then contrary to a common intuition, manipulation very likely does not undermine moral responsibility. To this goal, I first defend the structural isomorphism between simulation and manipulation: Provided such isomorphism, either both of them are compatible with moral responsibility, or none of them is. Later, I propose two kinds of reasons – i.e., the simulator-centric reason and the simulatee-centric reason – for why we have (genuine) moral responsibilities even if we are in a simulation. I close by addressing the significance of this paper in accounting for the relevance of artificial intelligence and its philosophy, in helping resolve a long-locked debate over free will, and in offering one reminder for moral responsibility specialists.

The most popular position in the moral luck debate is to reject resultant moral luck while accepting the possibility of other types of moral luck. But it is unclear whether this position is stable. Some argue that luck is luck and if it is relevant for moral responsibility anywhere, it is relevant everywhere, and vice versa. Some argue that given the similarities between circumstantial moral luck and resultant moral luck, there is good evidence that if the former exists, so does the latter. The challenge is especially pressing for the large group that exclusively deny resultant moral luck. I argue that rejecting resultant moral luck alone is a stable and plausible position. This is because, in a nutshell, the other types of luck can but the results of an action cannot affect what makes one morally responsible.

Response-dependence about moral responsibility argues that someone is morally responsible if and only if, and because, they're an appropriate target of reactive attitudes. But if we can be partially morally responsible, and if reactive attitudes are too coarse-grained to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents, then response-dependence is false. Shawn Wang dubs this the “Granularity Challenge.” This article rejects the second premise of the Granularity Challenge. Human emotions are fine-grained enough to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents. One illustrative example of this, I argue, is how children gradually emerge as partially responsible agents.

This paper seeks to challenge principles of culpability transfer as they appear in both criminal law and moral philosophy. I begin by discussing the legal doctrine of substituted mens rea, focusing on Section 33.1 of Canada’s Criminal Code. I argue that this doctrine violates the principle of contemporaneity, which there are sound philosophical reasons to accept. I then argue that the same reasons apply to tracing accounts of moral responsibility. Finally, drawing on the moral luck literature, I argue that cases of extreme intoxication are better analyzed in terms of harm-causation than culpability-transfer.

Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God create a world with so much evil? Some theologians suggest that God permits evil for the sake of moral goodness. Because an act cannot be good unless it is freely performed, God could not create a world with moral goodness without giving us the freedom to perform both good and evil acts. But is this a wise trade-off for God to make? Or is evil too steep a price to pay for moral significance?

The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.

Intelligent machines – from automated robots to algorithmic systems – can create images and poetry, steer our preferences, aid decision making, and kill. Our perception of their capacities, relative autonomy, and moral status will profoundly affect not only how we interpret and address practical problems in world politics over the next 50 years but also how we prescribe and evaluate individual and state responses. In this article, I argue that we must analyse this emerging synthetic agency in order to effectively navigate – and theorise – the future of world politics. I begin by outlining the ways that agency has been under-theorised within the discipline of International Relations (IR) and suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts prevailing conceptions. I then examine how individual human beings and formal organisations – purposive actors with which IR is already familiar – qualify as moral agents, or bearers of duties, and explore what criteria intelligent machines would need to meet to also qualify. After demonstrating that synthetic agents currently lack the ‘reflexive autonomy’ required for moral agency, I turn to the context of war to illustrate how insights drawn from this comparative analysis counter our tendency to elide different manifestations of moral agency in ways that erode crucial notions of responsibility in world politics.

This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire for and expectation of innocence, in the face of structural injustices such as settler colonialism, are illusionary and that complicity is widespread. In contrast, I follow Iris Marion Young's focus on political responsibility, but I argue that public collective actions need not be as centred as she suggests. Given the nature of settler colonialism and of coloniality, I argue for the acknowledgment of the political significance of daily individual acts and for the cultivation of dispositions that disrupt unjust structures, such as a disposition to transgress.

This article examines a construal of the doctrine of original sin which affirms the cognitive corruption of human faculties but denies that humans carry original guilt for Adam's fall or for cognitive corruption. All humans require Christ's atonement, because they either inevitably commit at least one sin or are rejected by God for other reasons. We go on to identify three problems with this account. The first problem is the ‘inevitability’ of sinning. Here, the defender is forced either to accept a compatibilist analysis of responsibility or provide a libertarian-friendly analysis of ‘inevitability’. The latter option contradicts the Augustinian contention that it is impossible for sinners to lead a life of virtue and holiness. The second problem has to do with the mechanics of the cognitive effects of sin. The cognitive effects of original sin make it very difficult or inevitable for humans to perform meritorious actions and very easy or inevitable for them to commit sinful actions. If the sinner's degree of control over her sinful actions is so low, it seems that she does not deserve divine blame and punishment for failing to commit meritorious actions. Finally, we raised some problems regarding the fate of the non-culpable sinners.

Menges (2022) seeks to identify the kind of blame that should be at issue in debates between skeptics and anti-skeptics about responsibility. Menges argues that such blame is constituted by responses that the target has a claim against, and by the blamer’s thought that they have forfeited this claim due to their bad action and state while engaged in that action. I identify a class of blame responses that Menges mistakenly excludes and offer an alternative, more general, account in which the distinctive feature of controversial blame isn’t claim forfeiture, but the defeat of reasons grounded in the target’s interests.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Ada Agada argues that the problem of evil is relevant not only to those who consider God to hold the Omni-properties but also to those who understand God as a limited deity. He rightly points out that the limited-God literature in the African philosophy of religion has neglected to address the problem of evil by too quickly dismissing it. Agada then argues that the reason why the problem of evil is philosophically relevant for the limited-God view is that He, as the creator, has sufficient powers to address evil and, thereby, moral responsibility regarding the evil in the world. In this reply, I uphold that although Agada is correct to affirm that the problem of evil is relevant for the limited-God view, he is mistaken to contend that the reason is that God is the creator. I contest this view and argue that Agada has not given enough reasons to believe that God has moral responsibility over evil in the world. However, I illuminate how Agada can develop this argument in the future.

Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action; I call this competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility: it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well because of how much it matters to us that we are able to live and work together successfully.

I argue against the idea of basic desert. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. The starting point is to note that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations appeals to the idea of complicity. I argue that the idea of basic desert cannot give a good explanation of this connection. I propose that it is rather dissociation that is explanatorily basic. I further argue that dissociation is an expressive action. Dissociation from wrongdoing—expressed as distancing from the wrongdoer—is an expressive attempt to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing in a way analogous to the expressive attempt to thank someone adequately for doing you a favor. I draw on the idea of dissociation as an expressive action to explain why it should be that a failure to dissociate is a source of complicity.