Victor Caston and Daniel W. Graham
Ashgate
Hardback
362
2002
This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent?s epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions, attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning, a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times, an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility, and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues.
Ashgate
Hardback
362
2002
This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent?s epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions, attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning, a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times, an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility, and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues.