ABSTRACT
A person is causally responsible for the mental states and events from which his actions issue if he acquires them without any delusion or manipulation from an external source. A person’s normative competence and moral responsibility include the capacity for reactive attitudes of shame, pride, regret, or remorse toward oneself, and to be an appropriate object of reactive attitudes of praise, blame, gratitude, or resentment from others in response to one’s behavior. Personal identity conceived of as consisting in a low threshold of psychological connectedness is closely related to the concept of responsible behavior. Causal determinism does not undermine moral responsibility. Presumably, it threatens responsibility by ruling out alternative possibilities of choice and action. Brain and mind are two aspects of a nested hierarchy in which causation operates in not one ‘bottom-up’ direction but in two directions, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ from the physical to the mental, and vice versa.
