Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

Abstract

Whenandunderwhat circumstances arewe responsible for our actions?What roledoes conscious awareness of one’s actions play in the assessment and ascription of responsibility? To answer these questions, Neil Levy has written a provocative and interesting account of the necessary role of consciousness in the assessment of responsibility for action. In an economical 150 pages, Levy makes the case for ‘the consciousness thesis’, the idea ‘that consciousness of some of the facts that give our actions their moral significance is a necessary condition for moral responsibility’ (p. 1). Neil Levy is well known among the increasing number of philosopherswriting in the burgeoning field of ethics and neuroscience. He has deep knowledge of brain science and its role in arguments about mind, brain, and morality, and he is keen to bring the science to the forefront of his argument in favor of the consciousness thesis. His view is one he describes as ‘very significantly empirical’ (p. vi). The nerve of the theory is the idea that consciousness functions principally in the integration of information. It is with respect to the top-down (i.e., prefrontal executive functions) utilization of integrated information to generate behavior that wemake decisions, thereby reflecting our agency and, ultimately, locating the basis of moral responsibility. After describing the key features of Levy’s position, I will take upwhatmight be seen as a challenge to Levy’s thesis: the law. Although he makes much of the importance of science, specifically our knowledge of the science of consciousness in assessing responsibility, it turns out the really important questions are not scientific at all. Rather, they are normative. Levy clearly wants to show that themore you know about the science of the brain the better able you are to motivate claims about agency and responsibility. In this, he is mistaken. Levy sets out to defend the consciousness thesis (CT), that is, the idea that ‘consciousness of at least some of the facts that give our actions or omissions their moral significance is a necessary condition ofmoral responsibility’ (p. vii). His argumentative strategy is to get as clear as possible about what consciousness is andwhat is involved in conscious (and unconscious) awareness. Levy believes that the more we know about