Consciousness, Implicit Attitudes and Moral Responsibility

What role, if any, does consciousness of our reasons for acting play in settling whether we may justifiably be held responsible for our actions? Most philosophers, and ordinary people, seem to assume that consciousness of this kind is essential for moral responsibility: if an agent fails to be conscious of their reasons for acting (and they are not responsible for that fact), they ought to be excused responsibility. Recently, however, this assumption has been rejected by researchers in a variety of disciplines, from philosophers (for example Arpaly 2002; Sher 2009; Suhler & Churchland 2009) to cognitive scientists (Wegner 2002). In this paper, I want to make a start on defending the assumption. I will not address the arguments of these researchers directly. Rather, I will set out a case for thinking that consciousness of our reasons for acting is morally significant, in a manner that at least typically entails a difference in whether agents are morally responsible for their actions. I will frame the argument by way of responding to a recent challenge from two philosophers, Matt King and Peter Carruthers. Marshalling evidence from cognitive science, King and Carruthers (forthcoming) have recently argued that there are good reasons to think that consciousness of the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, and so forth) which cause our actions cannot distinguish morally responsible actions from those for which we ought to be excused, because there are good reasons to think that there are no conscious attitudes. In the light of this claim, they challenge us to justify or abandon the claim that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility. I will argue that even if there are no conscious attitudes, nevertheless coming to be aware of the content of the propositional attitudes that cause our actions makes a difference to the moral status of those actions, a difference significant enough to distinguish between actions for which we are rightly held responsible and those for which we ought to be excused. I will go on to show, however, that consciousness of the content of our attitudes plays this role only with regard to some of our attitudes: becoming conscious of the content of our implicit attitudes fails to play the role in our agency that makes consciousness of (some of) our explicit attitudes so morally significant. Getting clear on the distinction between, and the functional role of, implicit and explicit attitudes, will enable us to come to have a clearer idea of the conditions under which consciousness of our attitudes plays a role in moral agency.