It Is Impossible to be Morally Responsible for Irrationality: An Epistemic Regress Argument

Chandra Sripada, the Theophile Raphael Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, will be presenting the keynote lecture for the 17th Annual Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. 

In his talk, "It Is Impossible to be Morally Responsible for Irrationality: An Epistemic Regress Argument," he will argue people sometimes act as their own worst enemy in that they engage in irrational actions that hinder achievement of their own (sincerely held) aims. Additionally, it is widely thought, “aims-irrationality” of this kind is something for which people can be held morally responsible and blamed. It is here argued that, given a certain picture of human motivational architecture that is strongly supported in contemporary computational cognitive science, we must reject the second claim. I formulate an epistemic regress argument in which aims-irrational actions are necessarily accompanied by a certain serious form of ignorance, and, furthermore, this ignorance cannot be something for which the agent is culpable. It follows from this argument that if we come to believe that a person is acting in a genuinely aims-irrational way, we should next conclude that the irrationality of what they do is not something for which they are morally responsible.