This essay critically examines whether ethical naturalization - understood as the grounding of moral inquiry in empirical sciences - can resolve enduring normative disputes. Focusing specifically on the conflict between retributivist and consequentialist justifications of punishment, we investigate whether naturalistic approaches (drawing on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics), in addition to explaining the origins and persistence of moral intuitions and practices, can also justify their normative authority. Scientific naturalists seek to reduce or replace normative ethics with descriptive accounts, often deploying evolutionary debunking arguments to challenge moral realism. Liberal naturalists, by contrast, integrate empirical insights without eliminating irreducible normativity. Through analysis of punishment theories, this article argues that, while naturalization sheds light on the evolutionary roots of retributive intuitions (e.g. adaptive cooperation mechanisms) and highlights neuroscientific challenges to free will, thus reinforcing consequentialist explanations, it nevertheless fails to adjudicate which theory is morally superior, since empirical explanations do not bridge the is-ought gap (Hume's problem). The resulting stalemate highlights naturalization's explanatory adequacy but normative insufficiency. The essay concludes by advocating a pluralistic integration in line with liberal naturalism, where science informs, but does not replace, philosophical reflection on ethical justification.

The sense of agency is the subjective feeling of control over one's own actions and the associated outcomes. Here, we asked whether and to what extent the reasons behind our choices (operationalized by value differences, expected utility, and counterfactual option sets) drive our sense of agency. We simultaneously tested these three dimensions during a novel value-based decision-making task while recording explicit (self-reported) and implicit (brain signals) measures of agency. Our results show that choices that are more reasonable also come with a stronger sense of agency: humans report higher levels of control over the outcomes of their actions if (1) they were able to choose between different option values compared to randomly picking between options of identical value, (2) their choices maximizes utility (compared to otherwise) and yields higher than expected utility, and (3) they realize that they have not missed out on hidden opportunities. EEG results showed supporting evidence for factors (1) and (3): We found a higher P300 amplitude for picking than choosing and a higher Late-Positive Component when participants realized they had missed out on possible but hidden opportunities. Together, these results suggest that human agency is not only driven by the goal-directedness of our actions but also by their perceived rationality.

This article defends the centrality of practical wisdom in medical practice by building on a monistic view of moral virtue, termed the "Aretai model," according to which possession of practical wisdom is necessary and sufficient for virtuousness, grounding both moral growth and effective moral behavior. From this perspective, we argue that practical wisdom should be conceived as a cross-situational ethical expertise consisting of four skills:moral perception, moral deliberation, emotion regulation, and moral motivation. Conceiving of practical wisdom as both overall virtuousness and ethical expertise makes it possible to deal adequately with the uniqueness of concrete ethically relevant situations. We contend that this becomes particularly evident in the context of medical practice, both in terms of decision-making and action-taking, especially in the most challenging or contentious clinical cases. We conclude the article by suggesting the potential implications of the Aretai model for continuing education in medical and healthcare professions.

This paper explores whether individuals can be held morally responsible for actions influenced by implicit biases, i.e., automatic, unconscious attitudes that perpetuate social stereotypes. Using racial bias as a central example, it argues that such dispositions challenge traditional accounts of moral responsibility, which typically rely on reflective awareness and volitional control. By distinguishing among attributability, accountability, and answerability, the paper critically examines existing approaches and develops an ecologically grounded framework that situates responsibility within the cognitive, environmental, and institutional contexts shaping agency, understanding implicit biases and biased behaviors through the lens of habitual cognition. This framework supports a nuanced conception of moral responsibility that incorporates both accountability and answerability, emphasizing moral self-cultivation alongside the transformation of the social conditions that sustain biases.

Free will, famously described by David Hume as "the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science", has long been a subject of intense debate, particularly regarding its compatibility with a deterministic universe and its implications for ethical questions, notably moral responsibility. Moritz Schlick, a leading figure in the Vienna Circle and the neopositivist movement, challenges the validity of this debate, asserting that it arises from linguistic and semantic confusions surrounding terms like 'freedom', 'determinism', and 'will'. Reflecting the neopositivist disdain for metaphysics and normative ethics, Schlick posits that once these concepts are properly defined, the problem of free will dissolves, though addressing it may be necessary when discussing moral and legal responsibility. This paper aims to elucidate Schlick's perspective on free will and responsibility, placing it within the early 20th-century debate, and highlighting his efforts to reconcile these concepts with the principles of physics while avoiding theoretical ambiguities.

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the discussion about moral expertise.

The sense of agency (SoA)—a matter that is the subject of lively debate across the philosophy and the cognitive (neuro)science of action—describes the subjective experience and judgement of controlling one's intentional actions and their effects on the outside world. As such, it can be regarded as a fundamental underpinning of moral responsibility for the consequences of one's behaviour. Empirical evidence has shown that the SoA, and consequently our subjective sense of responsibility, tends to be modulated by contextual or external factors such as the fluency of the action selection process and the outcome valence. Crucially, it is also influenced by the presence of other interacting human agents. In addition to these more traditional research topics, recent attention has been directed towards exploring interactions with artificial devices, sometimes perceived as having their own intentionality. This is particularly true for devices that are equipped with forms of artificial intelligence. This perception can also affect the human SoA and responsibility for action. In this chapter, I review this evidence and discuss the conceptual and empirical implications of this line of research.

Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that moral responsibility judgments activate the social cognition network, presumably reflecting mentalising processes. Conceptually, establishing an agent’s intention is a sub-process of responsibility judgment. However, the relationship between both processes on a neural level is poorly understood. To date, neural correlates of responsibility and intention judgments have not been compared directly. The present fMRI study compares neural activation elicited by third-party judgments of responsibility and intention in response to animated pictorial stimuli showing harm events. Our results show that the social cognition network, in particular Angular Gyrus (AG) and right Temporo-Parietal Junction (RTPJ), showed stronger activation during responsibility vs. intention evaluation. No greater activations for the reverse contrast were observed. Our imaging results are consistent with conceptualisations of intention attribution as a sub-process of responsibility judgment. However, they question whether the activation of the social cognition network, particularly AG/RTPJ, during responsibility judgment is limited to intention evaluation.

In this article, we take the case of racism in contemporary Italy as a starting point for a discussion about moral responsibility for racism in cases where ignorance is involved. We focus on the issue of the normalization of racism and its contribution to different forms of ignorance to assess the extent to which these might potentially mitigate judgments of responsibility for racism, thereby grounding an Exculpatory Stance. After illustrating the phenomenon of the normalization of racism and offering an outline of how the normalization of racism contributes to ignorance, we argue against the Exculpatory Stance by appealing to a socially situated variety of capacitarian approach to the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. This approach provides us with the tools to claim that the moral ignorance favored by the normalization of racism does not mitigate judgments of individual responsibility. Finally, we point out that the interdependence of individual responsibility and the social environment is such that, in addition to backward-looking individual responsibilities for racism, there are also forward-looking, both individual and shared, responsibilities to counter racism in its various manifestations and the increased risk of moral ignorance connected to its normalization.

Feasting on a plethora of social media platforms, news aggregators, and online marketplaces, recommender systems (RSs) are spreading pervasively throughout our daily online activities. Over the years, a host of ethical issues have been associated with the diffusion of RSs and the tracking and monitoring of users’ data. Here, we focus on the impact RSs may have on personal autonomy as the most elusive among the often-cited sources of grievance and public outcry. On the grounds of a philosophically nuanced notion of autonomy, we illustrate three specific reasons why RSs may limit or compromise it: the threat of manipulation and deception associated with RSs; the RSs’ power to reshape users’ personal identity; the impact of RSs on knowledge and critical thinking. In our view, however, notwithstanding these legitimate concerns, RSs may effectively help users to navigate an otherwise overwhelming landscape. Our perspective, therefore, is not to be intended as a bulwark to protect the status quo but as an invitation to carefully weigh these aspects in the design of ethically oriented RSs.

In the past decades, research on implicit mechanisms has attracted attention both in the philosophy and the cognitive science of action. However, systematic attempts to clarify the nature of the action-relevant implicit mechanisms and why they matter to specific action-types are still missing. The chapter aims to provide an overview of selected action-related research topics, notably goal-directedness, action correction, and the sense of agency, where implicit mechanisms have proven productive. With respect to these domains, three different notions of implicitness will be examined. First, implicit mechanisms have been referred to in terms of a range of automatic or unconscious processes that run independently of volitional, top-down control and are inaccessible to introspective awareness. Second, implicitness can characterise the information kind, as non-conscious or non-amenable to verbal reports but still able to influence behaviours. Third, the notion of implicit is also associated with specific measures, i.e., readouts of objective performance parameters, used to assess people’s attitudes. As the provided examples will prove, these different senses of implicitness come together insofar as implicit measures are used to evaluate whether an action-related process runs implicitly or whether a piece of action-relevant information is implicitly stored.

In recent years, several national and international reports have highlighted an increase in episodes of xenophobic and racist violence in Italy, accompanied by a growing attitude of acceptance of racism. Based on the Italian case, we show how this attitude represents in itself a manifestation of racism and how its spread constitutes a case of shared ignorance. While not constituting an excuse for judgments of individual responsibility, such shared ignorance nevertheless implies that the measures necessary to undermine the socio-cultural mechanisms underlying the acceptance of racism are a matter of shared and future-looking responsibility.

Reasoning about underlying causal relations drives responsibility judgments: agents are held responsible for the outcomes they cause through their behaviors. Two main causal reasoning approaches exist: dependence theories emphasize statistical relations between causes and effects, while transference theories emphasize mechanical transmission of energy. Recently, pluralistic or hybrid models, combining both approaches, have emerged as promising psychological frameworks. In this paper, we focus on causal reasoning as involved in third-party judgments of responsibility and on related judgments of intention and control. In particular, we used a novel visual paradigm to investigate the combined effects of two well-known causal manipulations, namely omission and preemption, on these evaluations. Our findings support the view that people apply a pluralistic causal reasoning when evaluating individual responsibility for negative outcomes. In particular, we observed diminished responsibility when dependence, transference, or both fail, compared to when these mechanisms are upheld. Responsibility judgment involves a cognitive hybrid of multiple aspects of causal reasoning. However, important differences exist at the interindividual level, with most people weighting transference more than dependence.

Experimental findings on the neurobiological roots of free will, pioneered by Benjamin Libet’s work in the 1980s, have been met with a mixture of acceptance and controversy. Discussions in both philosophy and cognitive neuroscience have indeed generated an active and at times polarized debate on whether such findings successfully disprove free will, which is the issue that is customarily considered to be at stake. In our view, this polarization often comes at the expense of genuine cross-disciplinary fertilization, which may turn into a mere attempt at bringing others round to one’s own positions. In this chapter, we argue for an alternative approach. In the first place, we claim that, in themselves, these findings do not address the problem of whether free will, as intended in the philosophical tradition, is illusory or not. However, we also claim that they should be taken as a valuable asset within a more comprehensive theory of human action, aiming to explain how individuals navigate the environment by means of a wide repertoire of more or less complex, flexible, and intelligent behaviors.

In recent years, several national and international reports have highlighted an increase in episodes of xenophobic and racist violence in Italy, accompanied by a growing attitude of acceptance of racism. Based on the Italian case, we show how this attitude represents in itself a manifestation of racism and how its spread constitutes a case of shared ignorance. While not constituting an excuse for judgments of individual responsibility, such shared ignorance nevertheless implies that the measures necessary to undermine the socio-cultural mechanisms underlying the acceptance of racism are a matter of shared and future-looking responsibility.