Tony Soprano, Compartmentalized: an Achilles’ Heel in the Deep Self View
摘要
Standard deep self views of moral responsibility contend that we are responsible for what we do if and only if our actions issue from our deep selves. This suggests that responsible agency is unified in a crucial sense. In this paper, I identify a tension between a special phenomenon of compartmentalization and unified responsible agency, and elaborate a novel criticism of the deep self view. Given the deep self view’s requirement for unified responsible agency, a severely compartmentalized evildoer is at least less responsible. However, I argue that the reason such an agent is deemed less responsible within the deep self picture commits deep self theorists to judging that all compartmentalized wrongdoers are likewise less responsible. This significantly undermines the plausibility of their views.