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28 Med., Health Care & Phil. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/medhcph28 and id is 1 raw text is: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (2025) 28:1-2 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/s 11019-025-10255-w EDITORIAL New frontiers in the moral responsibility debate Bert Gordijn' • Henk ten Have 23 Published online: 21 January 2025 ©The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025 The issue of conceptualising moral responsibility and identi- fying its necessary and sufficient conditions is a fundamental problem in philosophy. It touches on several philosophical sub-disciplines, including ethics, philosophical anthropol- ogy, epistemology, political philosophy and metaphysics. The earliest systematic account of this issue in the Western tradition can be found in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle's account Despite the absence of a precise Greek equivalent of the expression 'moral responsibility' in the Nicomachean Eth- ics, the text develops an elaborate analysis of a closely related question: namely, what it means for an individual to deserve praise or blame for their actions. Aristotle's anal- ysis distinguishes between actions that are voluntary and those that are not. In general, those that are voluntary are deserving of praise and blame, while those that are not are deserving of pardon and pity. The latter are due to a lack of knowledge or overwhelming external force (Brown 2009, p. 38-41, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 111.1). Aristotle is well aware of the grey area between voluntary and involuntary actions, the realm of 'mixed actions', and he analyses various examples of such actions. He also distin- guishes between actions born of ignorance, where the agent is not pained by them, i.e. non-voluntary actions, and actions that cause the agent distress or regret, i.e. involuntary actions (Brown 2009, p. 38-41, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 111.1). Furthermore, if the ignorance relates to purpose and what is to one's advantage, this qualifies the agent as wicked. If the ignorance relates to universals, the agent is to be blamed. It is only in the case of ignorance pertaining to the E Bert Gordijn bert.gordijn@dcu.ie Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland 2 Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA 3 Anahuac University, Mexico City, Mexico particulars of a situation that involuntary actions can be attributed, where pardon and pity are appropriate. Voluntary actions are performed by agents who know the relevant par- ticulars and act from a moving principle within themselves (Brown 2009, p. 38-41, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 11I.1). This is how Aristotle patiently proceeds in Book III of his Nicomachean Ethics, carefully making distinctions and considering counter-arguments and special cases. This com- prehensive analysis ultimately culminates in the notion that virtues and vices are voluntary, since human beings contrib- ute to the development of their states of character. (Brown 2009, p. 46-49, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 111.5). Contemporary debate Aristotle laid the foundations for thinking about moral responsibility. Whilst the virtue ethics dimension of his anal- ysis has not been universally accepted, the current debate still largely revolves around the two necessary conditions for moral responsibility first put forward by him, namely the control (or freedom) condition and the epistemic condition, as they are now usually referred to. For a long time, most philosophical discussion focused on the first condition and its relation to freedom, free will, and determinism (see Tal- bert 2024). More recently, there has also been a lively debate about the epistemic condition (see Rudy-Hiller 2022). The present issue features two papers that aim to contribute to these ongoing discussions. Borderline personality disorder While there are many clear-cut cases in which an agent sat- isfies both the control condition and the epistemic condi- tion of moral responsibility, cases that are more problematic can prove to be very challenging and thus serve as a test of the universal applicability of the two necessary condi- tions approach. Baehni (2025) focuses on the extent to which people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) e_ Springer