In this seminar, we will examine two ways in which recently collected experimental results have been claimed to be relevant to central questions concerning intentional action and moral responsibility.  The first way begins with attempts to test some of the so-called "armchair" claims of philosophers about what is intuitive concerning intentional actions and actions for which we are responsible.  The results are sometimes surprising, and have been thought to undermine some of the major assumptions made by most philosophers working on these issues.  For example, contrary to common opinion among philosophers on all sides of the debate about responsibility, some data points to the conclusion that people are not "natural" incompatibilists about responsibility (that is, it appears that we don't implicitly assume that determinism would preclude our being responsible for anything).  We will evaluate the experiments and results for ourselves, and try to answer these questions: What can they tell us about our intuitions or our concepts or the nature of responsibility?   

 

    A second way that experimental results have been thought to have implications for responsibility is based on a body of literature collectively known as "situationist".  A variety of well-known experiments (including Milgram's electric shock experiments and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiments) have been read as supporting the conclusion that our actions are better explained by situational factors than by traditional personality traits.  A common reaction to the sometimes shocking results (no pun intended!) of these experiments is that they show that people are not really free and responsible agents.  This issue arose recently in the public sphere in connection with American soldiers' behavior at Abu Ghraib, which bore an almost eery similarity to that of the participants in the Stanford Prison experiments.  Do the experimental results undermine our responsibility judgments?  What do they show about the extent to which we are responsible agents, and can they shed light on the nature of responsibility?  We'll make it our task to answer these questions, as well.