ABSTRACT
A seemingly powerful rationale for the proposal that one of education’s guiding, overarching aims is to turn our children into morally responsible agents is that moral responsibility is of paramount importance in our lives. This rationale resonates with the views of both compatibilists and libertarians. Though they disagree over whether determinism undermines free action or moral responsibility, advocates of either orientation are generally united in the belief that were the world devoid of moral responsibility, our lives would be seriously morally impoverished. For example, Fischer and Ravizza (1998, p. 3), both compatibilists, contend that, if you were to discover the startling fact that the deliberations, choices, and actions of your best friend are all the product of secretive neuronal manipulation on the part of evil neuroscientists, your most basic attitudes toward your friend would change: your friend would no longer appear to be an appropriate object of such attitudes as respect, gratitude, indignation, and resentment. A lack of moral responsibility seems to threaten some of the moral sentiments and morally reactive attitudes, and in so doing, appears to threaten central interpersonal relationships we greatly value. Fischer and Ravizza (1998, p. 4) additionally theorize that almost everyone would fi nd a life devoid of the morally reactive responses cold and alienating.
