ABSTRACT
We have proposed that there is a requirement of authenticity for moral responsibility. We have developed a relational account of authenticity, traced its implications for cases involving manipulation, compared these implications with the pertinent implications of prominent rival approaches (in Appendix A), and defused (in the previous chapter) an argument that directly questions whether authenticity is a condition on responsibility. These endeavors should go some way toward allaying those skeptical of responsibility’s having any such requirement that the requirement is a bona fi de one. We argued that our relational account generates intuitively satisfactory results in a wide range of cases including cases such as Psychohacker, and it helps to assess (and defl ate) what appear to be potent objections against compatibilist and incompatibilist views of freedom. We believe that these advantages of our account contribute to substantiating the view that authenticity is a condition of responsibility. As we explained previously, the rational credentials of an account are strengthened, other considerations remaining equal, to the extent that the account is theoretically or explanatorily illuminative. In this chapter, we advance further considerations to show that our account enjoys these features. We invoke the relational view of authenticity to resolve two distinct but related problems in the philosophy of education: the problem of indoctrination and the problem of educational authenticity. We begin by commenting briefl y on various links between the metaphysics of responsibility (and free action) and the philosophy of education.
