Responsibility, History, and Authenticity

Abstract

There is a debate in the literature on free will and responsibility regarding whether responsibility is historical. The focus is on what makes one’s values, desires, beliefs, and other springs of action authentic or “truly one’s own”, and what effect, if any, past manipulation has on authenticity. In this thesis, I present and attempt to clarify fundamental concepts, and give a critical account of prominent theories and motivating cases. I propose constraints on theories of responsibility, including a generalized regress problem affecting “positive” historical theories, and argue for a characterization of springs on which springs of the same type are treated as identical. I conclude by presenting a sketch of a historical theory of responsibility which conforms to my proposed constraints.