Epistemic Concerns in the Second-Person Perspective for the Moral Responsibility

Abstract

The conditions under which an agent can be considered morally responsible for her actions raise epistemic concerns like, for instance, whether an agent needs to know what she is doing, and if she must know the moral meaning of what she’s doing to be hold responsible. We’ll see that these epistemic concerns appear in theories which focus on the second-person perspective. The concern about the question whether the agent knows what she does is less controversial, but the one about the knowledge of the moral meaning generates different answers according to each theory. Furthermore, it is important to examine either, if some epistemic concern constitutes a condition independent from other conditions for the agent, in the production of the action, be morally responsible, or if the epistemic concerns are already addressed in the conditions to produce the action. The independency is defended by Mele, and we agree with him on that score.