The idea of "person" as fundament for the free will and moral responsibility

• Grant number: 11/17361-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: November 01, 2011
• End date: October 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Jonas Gonçalves Coelho
• Grantee: Jonas Gonçalves Coelho
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Artes e Comunicação (FAAC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

My purpose is to analyze the use of the notion of "person" to make compatible the free will and moral responsibility with some of the contemporary results of behavioral neuroscience. I privilege the Lynne Rudder Baker compatibilist view, inspired in Harry Frankfurt, who define "person" in terms of the mental capacity of self-consciousness or strong first person perspective. I will show what I consider the virtues and also the limits of this approach which I thought are derived from the fundamental contradiction of assuming that mental processes and the actions related to them are a result of the brain activity although irreducible to them. From this point of view I will reflect about the problem of free will and moral responsibility from an idea of "person" which includes seriously the brain, that is, that not consider it as distinct from the "I thought", although not reducing one to another. According to this view I will argue that it is necessary to differentiate the situations in which the decisions result from the normal work of the brain from the situations in which the decisions are strongly influenced by abnormal brain events, such as, that related to unknown use of chemical substances, brain diseases or brain manipulations. (AU)