Conscience plays a central role in our moral lives. We have all felt the pangs of conscience when we fail to obey it; we are terrified by those who lack it; and we look to it as a moral guide, often using it to justify our actions. Yet there is little understanding of what it is, how it operates, and what justifications we have for obeying it.

The aim is to provide one plausible account of the nature and authority of conscience, that of Adam Smith. According to Smith, conscience, or what he calls `the supposed impartial spectator', is the moral agent judging herself from the situation of an impartial spectator, just as she would judge others. Under this account, conscience is not an ideal or prototypical judge, but rather the agent judging as she would judge others. As a result, conscience is liable to all the same errors that any spectator is, especially partiality. Thus, there is a need to cultivate our conscience. We do so, I will argue, primarily through encountering diversity, which leads to disagreements, which prompt us to reevaluate how we judge others. Furthermore, Smith also claims that conscience has authority in virtue of the respect we give it. Our respect for conscience is rooted in our recognition that conscience is a better moral judge, demonstrated by our appeal to conscience to correct for our immediate, unreflective moral judgments. However, this account fails to capture a key feature of our phenomenological experience of conscience: conscience presents itself as the moral authority, not merely a helpful moral guide. I argue that Smith's theory, though not Smith himself, provides an alternative account of the authority of conscience: because conscience is our judging ourselves using our own faculties, we are committed to the accuracy of conscience's judgments the same way we are committed to the accuracy of all of our judgments.

In this dissertation, I defend an answer to the following question in the diachronic personal identity debate: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for our persistence over time? Two popular approaches to answering this question are the psychological and the somatic approach. On the former approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of psychological continuity. So, some proponents of the psychological approach think that we cease to exist if we lose certain features of our psychology such as our memories, beliefs, and rationality. On the latter approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of physical continuity. Eric Olson defends a version of the somatic approach called animalism. On his view, we are numerically identical to biological organisms and we persist if and only if the organisms we are persist. Although Olson’s animalism has some benefits, it also faces some challenges. For example, many people would say that we go wherever our brains go (if we go anywhere at all) because our brains (more specifically, our cerebra) realize the aspects of our psychology traditionally associated with persons, such as memories, beliefs, rationality, and self-awareness. But on Olson’s animalism, our psychology has nothing to do with our persistence and we go wherever our bodies go rather than our cerebra. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, I lay out an animalist view of our persistence called hylomorphic animalism. On this view, we are numerically identical to rational animals, which are living bodies composed of prime matter and a rational soul. Furthermore, we persist if and only if the composite of matter and rational soul persists. I claim that hylomorphic animalism makes better sense of certain contemporary personal identity thought experiments than Olson’s animalism. For example, contra Olson, I argue that our psychology does have something to do with our persistence and that we go wherever our brains go.

Under what conditions is a person morally responsible for something they have done? Two conditions commonly endorsed as requirements for moral responsibility are freedom and knowledge. The person must have acted freely, and they must have known what they were doing. Corresponding to the two main requirements are excusing conditions. They absolve agents of moral responsibility for what they have done. A common excuse condition on the freedom side is external causal forces. If a strong gust of wind blows my car door into someone thereby injuring them, then I am not morally responsible for injuring them. I did not have the right sort of control over the car door hitting them to be responsible for injuring them. A common excuse condition on the knowledge side is ignorance. If I did not know that I was spooning cyanide instead of sugar into someone’s coffee, then I am not morally responsible for poisoning them. But, there’s a catch. External forces and ignorance fail as excuses when I am culpable for the forces having their influence or for putting myself in a position to be ignorant. In this dissertation, I focus on whether ignorance is an excuse. This move is strategic. Under the influence of the perennial free will debate, most of the focus in the literature on moral responsibility has been on the freedom or control condition. This is unfortunate. It has left the knowledge or epistemic condition massively underdeveloped by comparison. My dissertation aims to contribute to rectifying this imbalance in the literature.

In the introductory chapter, I clarify the concept of moral responsibility at issue. It involves holding people morally responsible for bad behavior because they deserve blame for what they have done. Deserving blame is a matter of it being appropriate to target the person with certain reactions. These reactions are attitudes, such as being indignant or resentful that the person performed the bad action. On this model, moral responsibility is a decidedly social concept and is reflected in our everyday practices of judging people blameworthy for bad behavior. I round out this chapter looking at the nature of ignorance and the skeptical challenge that is the motivator for searching for a better characterization of the epistemic condition.

The first chapter presents the skeptical challenge. It claims that we are never warranted in judging with sufficient confidence that someone is morally responsible. This is troubling because our ordinary practices assume that we can form warranted or justified judgments of responsibility. If we cannot judge with reasonable confidence that a person is blameworthy for bad behavior in any specific case, this undermines a foundational way that we conduct ourselves morally. We regularly and naturally respond to bad behavior with reactive attitudes. This dissertation fleshes out a reasonable and permissive epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that we are warranted in our ascriptions of responsibility in all sorts of cases, even when a person is ignorant that bad behavior is in fact morally bad.

Chapter two gets into the nitty gritty of the literature on the epistemic condition. In this chapter I defend a position called “externalism” from an objection. I argue that culpable ignorance (i.e. ignorance that does not excuse) originates not just in an act whereby a person knowingly did not do something they thought they should do, such as knowing they should investigate something but failing to do so. The origin of culpability is also found in acts of vice, even if a person does not think of their vices as vices. And, acts of vice afford warranted ascriptions of responsibility.

In the third chapter, I embrace a view of moral responsibility that supports the thesis that moral ignorance never exculpates. I consider a defense of this thesis by Elizabeth Harman. However, Harman’s view is subject to a counterexample. I accept this counterexample and propose my own modified position. This position supports the thesis that moral ignorance never exculpates. Thus, this chapter is a further widening of the conditions under which the epistemic condition is satisfied, and this affords another avenue for justified ascriptions of responsibility.

The final chapter considers a counterexample to the view of moral responsibility developed in chapter three. Given that the concept of moral responsibility at issue is constituted by our ordinary practices of judging people blameworthy for their bad behavior, I look at an empirical study indicating how people ascribe responsibility in relation to the supposed counterexample. This neutralizes the counterexample, and it leads me to develop my own principle capturing the epistemic condition on moral responsibility. Then, I show the theoretical utility of my epistemic condition on moral responsibility by showing how it affords a novel approach to the problem of moral luck.

In this paper, I oppose the widespread acceptance of no-belief norms due to the fact that they would have a detrimental effect on the field of academic philosophy, because these norms allow the assertion of philosophical views based on doxastic attitudes that are weaker than belief. I also contend that conciliationist norms are not applicable to many cases of philosophical disagreement; therefore, we should not be required to give up our beliefs in contentious philosophical matters if we accept these norms.

Disagreements continue over the most basic epistemic questions. Which logic is correct? What makes an argument good? We need a theory that can both explain the prevalence of such disagreements and evaluate the conduct and characters of those who participate in them. I argue that formal theories cannot supply this need. Circular arguments demonstrate the failure of formal approaches. Circular arguments are often impeccable from a formal perspective, but circular argumentation is almost always criticizable. A skilled arguer does not dismiss other viewpoints out of hand. Instead, to reason with those who reject our most basic assumptions about the logic of argumentation itself or the norms we assume when evaluating arguments for cogency or coherence we must break out of the circle of our own opinions. We must exercise a capacity for cognitive empathy.

In chapter zero, I develop a virtue-theoretic account of argumentation centered around the virtue of open-mindedness. I analyze open-mindedness in Aristotelian fashion as the mean between skepticism and dogmatism. Open-mindedness consists in the skillful deployment of empathic ability, which is in turn understood as the capacity to simulate the perspective of another. I use this same framework to analyze two more specific applications of cognitive empathy: sincerity and creativity, which are both essential to responsible argumentation. Responsible argumentation requires sincerity in our forms of expression and creativity in our efforts to resolve those disagreements we must resolve for pragmatic reasons. When it is understood as a "master virtue," open-mindedness is a way of utilizing sincerity and creativity for appropriate ends, and it is the surest route to epistemic progress.

In chapter one, I apply my virtue-theoretic account of argumentation to a dispute over the fallacy of begging the question. According to Robinson (1971), question-begging is not fallacious because it's fine from a formal perspective. Sorensen (1996) replies that question-begging is fallacious because it compromises the rationality of whoever is begging the question. By advancing the dialectic between Sorensen and Robinson, I aim to show that our argumentative practices must take the perspectives of others seriously, whether or not those perspectives are rational. When you beg the question against someone you fail to empathize with her. A tendency towards circularity of various sorts might be inevitable, but it needn't compromise open-mindedness.

In chapter two, I examine the connection between dogmatism and disagreement to address ongoing debates over the proper response to peer disagreement. How should we respond when we find ourselves disagreeing with a colleague or epistemic peer? According to the "equal weight view," we should suspend belief in this kind of case. I defend this ideal from two charges: (1) that it is self-undermining, and (2) that it renders its adherents "spineless." Even widespread disagreement amongst peers wouldn't force those who endorse the equal weight view into persistent agnosticism. We needn't compromise conciliation and cooperation, even when we find ourselves arguing with dogmatists who reject these cognitive virtues.