Doing without deliberation: Automatism, automaticity, and moral accountability

Abstract

Actions performed in a state of automatism are not subject to moral evaluation, while automatic actions often are. Is the asymmetry between automatistic and automatic actions justified? In order to answer this question we need a model of moral accountability that does justice to our intuitions about a range of modes of agency, both pathological and non-pathological. Our aim in this paper is to lay the groundwork for the development of such a model.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless

wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

Plato, The Republic