Philos Psychol - The Consciousness Library

Consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility: Taking the folk seriously.

Philos Psychol October 3, 2014 Joshua Shepherd 33 citations

Folk views of free will and moral responsibility center on consciousness, not on whether actions align with an agent's long-standing values, motivations, or character traits. Experiments show that people consider conscious action production far more important for free will than concordance with the agent's deep self. When behaviorally identical agents differ only in consciousness, most participants attribute free will to conscious agents but not to nonconscious ones. These findings challenge leading philosophical theories—Deep Self and Reasons-Responsive Views—to develop a substantive account of the connection between consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility that takes ordinary intuitions seriously.

DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2014.962018 Full text

Silence, depression, and bodily doubt: toward a phenomenology of silence in psychopathology.

Philos Psychol May 20, 2024

This philosophical paper argues that silence in depression is not merely an absence of speech but a profound alteration of lived experience. Drawing on phenomenology, the author contends that depressive silence reflects a fundamental disruption of bodily certainty and self-presence, where the body becomes an object of doubt rather than a medium of engagement with the world. The analysis proposes that understanding silence as an expression of bodily doubt can deepen clinical approaches to depression by attending to the embodied and existential dimensions of the condition.

DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2024.2354447 Full text

Papers

Consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility: Taking the folk seriously.

Silence, depression, and bodily doubt: toward a phenomenology of silence in psychopathology.