Responsibility and Control

Abstract There has been much work in the past two decades on the concept of moral responsibility and its conditions of application. This chapter gives an overview, inevitably synoptic and not comprehensive, of some of the most important contributions to this literature. Topics include the concept of moral responsibility, the relationships between causal determinism (and indeterminism) and moral responsibility, the different kinds of free will and their relationships to moral responsibility, and salient challenges to both compatibilism and libertarianism. For compatibilism, challenges include manipulation arguments, and for libertarianism these include the luck problem. It is argued that moral responsibility only requires acting freely (or “guidance control”) and not freedom to do otherwise (or “regulative control”). This opens up possibilities for defending compatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility, as well as indeterminism and moral responsibility. The responses are importantly similar.