This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

If you do something unconsciously, say while sleepwalking, can you be held morally responsible for it? Neil Levy, Director of Research at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics

and Head of Neuroethics at the Flory Neuroscience Institutes in Melbourne, believes

that consciousness is a precondition for responsibility, but this is a position under believes that

many of our consciousness is a precondition for responsibility.

For there's growing empirical evidence

that many of our actions and beliefs

are driven by unconscious mechanisms.

Neil Levy, welcome to philosophy bites.

Thanks Nigel.

The topic we're going to focus on is moral responsibility and

I think it's probably quite useful just to get clear what we mean by both those terms at the start of this

so let's start with moral responsibility what's that?

Well as I use moral responsibility it's the property that makes agents appropriate targets of blame and praise and maybe even punishment and perhaps benefit. agent is morally responsible if they

perform an action and they deserve some kind of treatment on that basis not

on the basis of consequentialist considerations not because it's good

for society or good for anybody else but because they deserve it.

Great so that's a fairly standard view of moral responsibility.

Now consciousness many people think of

...