RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT FREEDOM AND THE BURDEN OF PERSONHOOD.

Responsibility is a trait constitutive of personliood. A mature person is someone who can be held responsible for their actions. In the prevailing moral tradition, responsibility is dependent on freedom, understood in the strong Kantian sense. The aim of this paper is to disentangle responsibility from freedom in that Kantian sense without weakening the concept of personhood. Therefore, this paper aims to show that responsibility can be understood in naturalistic and immanent terms, i.e. in consonance with the spirit of much of contemporary science, especially the neurosciences. It begins by rejecting freedom as a form of transcendent causality and by placing the debate beyond the dichotomy of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It goes on to describe the evolutionary roots of the human brain's ability to take norms into account in the decisionmaking process. I finish by applying a naturalistic concept of responsibility to some borderline cases. The main thesis of this paper is that persons are responsible if they can respond in accordance with the social demands, a trait which also constitutes one of the central burdens of personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]