Rearranging the just summarized results about responsibility and freedom, one might differentiate three groups of mechanisms: A. Unconscious influences on our actions already known before 1980: 1.2. by M. Gregor and J. Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).]. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1, 9–37. (2014d). Nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners. The death instincts include such things as thoughts of aggression, trauma, and danger. PLoS One 7:e29081. Influence of dynamically unconscious motives on conscious decisions curtails freedom of decision; and these influences can eliminate responsibility entirely or reduce it considerably; but because this mechanism is known and often we can take measures against its influence we can be indirectly responsible for the respective actions. And the aim is to show that these mechanisms are much more conscious than Bargh assumes and thus mostly leave room for agency, responsibility and freedom. The deliberations are unconscious and very simple but still function in the way of searching for advantages and disadvantages of options and aggregating them to optimality judgments – even if only two options with one advantage or disadvantage are considered. (1996). In this experiment the priming does not alter the intention – probably there is only the intention to walk to the next station in the course of experiments but no intention to walk slowly or like an elderly person –; the priming alters only the intention’s execution. Science 329, 47–50. (2013, 1–30) radicalize it.] Koch, C., and Crick, F. (2001). The primitiveness of completely unconscious deliberations is, of course, due to the limited abilities of the unconscious; in particular, due to modularization and the lack of access to the universal workplace, it cannot consider much more alternatives and consequences than just described. Soc. That’s why habits, when repeated enough number of times, become automatic. But this simple interpretation relieves the subject of responsibility too quickly. And as long as the distortions of the holistic judgment of optimality remain within the scope of the usual, the rationality of the decision is not called into question by the unconscious influences. C1. Is unconscious belief or intention sufficient for knowingness or intentionality? Soc. Freedom of decision: Decisions based on unconscious deliberation are neither autonomous nor authentic nor rational, above all because there is insufficient access to the available information on relevant consequences and to the pertinent evaluation bases, and the ability to integrate greater amounts of information is also lacking. Soc. A large part of human behavior is driven by unconscious motives and goals that we aren’t generally aware of. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Awareness is the key to change. J. Pers. Philosophical (in contrast to economic) theories of subjective rationality also require that desires be critically filtered in one way or another (e.g., Brandt, 1979, 10–16; 70–89; 110–129; Lumer, 2000/2009, 241–427; 521–548; Lumer, 1998). Then, in the second part of the article (sections 5–9), I will give an overview of the three mentioned groups of unconscious phenomena in action (1. unconscious influences on conscious decisions, 2. unconscious alterations in the action execution, and 3. unconscious decisions), systemize and explain them, and assess whether and how they contribute to the four challenges. The term "Freudian slip" refers to the manifestation of these unconscious impulses. 74, 865–877. Elbow-Room. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(00)02561-7. Or in Werkausgabe, Vol. But these curtailments vary in degree according to the case; with the president, they are so severe that they even impede reaching the conscious goal. Hence, in the case of socially very harmful actions, culpable ignorance alone is sufficient for responsibility. Behav. doi: 10.1007/s10670-004-7682-2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Consider this example: A sniper is to eliminate a terrorist with an unexpected shot. Basic evidence and a workspace framework. What does this analysis of the functioning of unconsciously primed conscious decisions imply for the four challenges? D3: Determine probabilities: The probability of these possible consequences must be determined. Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics. In addition, these researchers presuppose that discrepancies between implicit motives and explicit goals can compromise wellbeing, … vii. Incompatibilists generally see indeterminacy as a necessary but not sufficient condition for freedom of decision. These motives or desires which are repressed by our conscious remain in our unconscious and will be influencing our behaviour. Psychol. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. In the case of wine theft, these distortions are so great that not even awareness of the forbiddance of his actions and the known threat of punishments prevent the perpetrator from his action. Responsibility: With respect to responsibility it is important that the decision process be conscious and hence under critical supervision. Baars, B. J. Agency and intentionality: The resulting behavior is an action in the broad sense caused by a respective intention. The unconscious influences on our decisions and actions mentioned above may also impair or even nullify our freedom of decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What is particularly interesting in the context of the discussion of the significance of unconsciousness for responsibility, – after excluding responsibility for merely unconsciously aspired or believed consequences (R3) – is mainly: If unconscious assumptions of consequences, which per se are not morally or legally relevant, massively influence the agent in his conscious decision and mislead him, so that the conscious integration of decision-relevant information is wrong, does this reduce his soundness of mind? (1998). Philosophia 36, 213–221. Group C therefore contains the newly discovered, actually critical unconscious mechanisms. Only the conscious search for and construction of flexible alternatives with the help of the global workspace can then initiate the adequate coping with the situation. Such actions are possibly not intentional, perhaps not even actions in the strict sense, and we might not be responsible for them. Soc. Optimality judgment theory of deliberation and intention: Again the just given explanations are compatible with the optimality belief theory and intentional causalism since these theories require neither that an action be determined in all details by the respective intention – which by the way would be impossible –, nor that the execution mechanism work perfectly. The unconscious will: how the pursuit of goals operates outside of conscious awareness. What was the motivation behind Andy’s behaviour? Whether the resulting behavior would still be an action is debatable; in any case it would not be an action in the emphatic sense since it would not be controlled by our conscious ego. This explanation does not presuppose that the subject strives for achievement in a narrow sense, i.e., wants to be the best and to follow the most effective strategy; but the achievement atmosphere lets effective search strategies come to mind first, as if the subject had the achievement goal and had sought for effective search strategies. (Different explanation: Gendler, 2008). Whether or not we have free will is not the topic of my discussion but rather I’d like to throw some light on the nature of unconscious goals and motives so that you may be able to become more conscious of them. Although Freud analyzes many expressions of unconscious influences, in particular Freudian slips and neurotic symptoms, most of them are not really intentional; they do not result from unconscious deliberation and decision but are mainly failures of automatisms due to (sometimes motivated) lack of attention.9 However, some of them seem to be intentional actions. Science 313, 760–761. He was emotionally wounded and his self-esteem got damaged. The conditions for responsibility for omissions and for events which could have been prevented by omitted actions are also missing here. Even if most incompatibilists do not specify sufficient conditions, the most plausible proposals for this, again, go in the direction of the just-outlined compatibilist theories. This is an association or inspiration task. (This numbering refers to the list at the beginning of section 5). There are now three views of unconscious: 1) Freudian unconscious, 2) the adaptive unconscious, and 3) implicit motivation. The advantage of such actions is their efficiency in not using the scarce resources of consciousness; their general disadvantage, however, is the increased risk of overlooking better alternatives and, still more important, significant negative consequences because the action proposal is not exposed to the critical examination of consciousness. R2: Attenuated principle of alternate possibilities: s could have acted otherwise (namely, if a is immoral or forbidden s could have performed a morally better/permitted action b), if s had not been prevented from doing so by over-determination. Which of them are artifacts cannot be established at this point. Automatic actions – agency, intentionality, and responsibility. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has added to this a number of phenomena (the “new unconscious”) in which behavior is completely unconscious or in which the decision or its execution is influenced by unconscious factors: priming, automatic behavior, habitualized behavior, actions based on plain unconscious deliberations, intrusion of information from the dorsal pathway, etc. Comments on George Sher. Because the president has not complied with this duty of care before, her later voting action is a culpably ignorant wrongdoing (R3.5). I distinguish three main groups of such influences according to the stage when this influence applies. R5: No shielding of responsibility by other persons’ responsibility: s’ decision for a was not so pre-structured by others – by a structuring of 1. the decision situation or 2. the internal conditions of the decision: evaluations, factual assumptions, assumptions about alternatives – that it was subjectively imperative for s. 1. Furthermore, conscious and unconscious processes predict different behaviors. doi: 10.1007/s11098-012-0048-8. Psychol. The decision itself is conscious. ii. Such actions, while being unconsciously initiated and of modest complexity, probably are not yet automatic routine actions triggered by the perception of a certain stimulus because the situation is too singular for being the trigger of an already learned fitting routine. However, in philosophy of action there is hardly any further elaborated empirical deliberation model, and the sketched model will be sufficient. The influence of dynamically unconscious motives on conscious decisions more or less severely curtails freedom of decision, because these motives are excluded from being assessed by the ego, so that they cannot possibly be filtered out critically. Move on he did, but not his unconscious mind. This discussion follows immediately. To what extent do these phenomena C1. In order to be an action also in a narrow, emphatic sense, the intention, additionally, has to be “really ours,” namely volitive, i.e., a (in principle) rationalizable integration of our conscious attitudes towards the action (Lumer, 2013). The value of good decisions is that they identify and implement the really best action. Sleepwalking: Typical sleepwalking consists of the sleepwalker getting up from bed, walking through the house open-eyed but with a rigid gaze, e.g., to the toilet, then returning to bed and continuing to sleep. Freedom: If actions are not consciously chosen on the basis of our reasons for action, or if their selection no longer depends on what we consider important, then it could be that we do not even have a compatibilist freedom of decision (in the sense of a rational, authentic or autonomous decision), and perhaps not even freedom of action in the conditional sense.1 So the mentioned discoveries are not only challenges for the traditional conception of action but also for our legal and everyday handling of responsibility and freedom. So we can limit the further discussion to these three theories. Unconscious Deliberations and Decisions, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/, http://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-29983/Proceeding_GAP7_Nachdenken_Vordenken.pdf, http://repositorium.uni-muenster.de/document/miami/bd61528b-3047-42ff-9b00-88d655375c28/artikel_lumer_2014.pdf, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Politiche e Cognitive, Università degli Studi di Siena, Siena, Italy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. So, according to this strategy, the nature of the priming effects is taken seriously – but not necessarily the individual example –; and the mechanisms behind them are accepted as challenges requiring discussion and comment from an action-theoretical and ethical point of view. Wolf, S. (1990). The primed walking speed instead is not intended and, according to the simple view about intentionality (Adams, 1986), is a fortiori not intentional. Every information that we got exposed to since the time of our birth up until this moment is stored in our unconscious mind and based on this information our unconscious mind has created some beliefs and needs. The existence and knowledge of these phenomena could imply several theoretical and practical problems or challenges. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/ (accessed January 30, 2013). The fact that these motives are delicate and, therefore, have been consciously criticized in some way, then suppressed and may again be criticized if getting conscious is the reason why they can express themselves and have successful actional consequences only in unconsciously deliberated actions. Even much more spectacular failures mean that the execution is defective but they do not exclude that the resulting behavior is an action. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Automatic and habitualized behaviors, i.e., learned, schematic and automatically triggered and executed behaviors, are also unconscious but make up a big separate and particular group. Our irrational behaviour, the slip of tongue, slip of pen, amnesia, multiple personality, somnambulism, etc., are some examples of such behaviours for which we do not have answers apparently. Mind Lang. Plain unconsciously deliberated action: The most basic form of actions based on unconscious decisions are plain unconsciously deliberated actions: Elementary deliberations on a sophistication level of Aristotelian practical inferences (“I have aim e. My doing a is a (sufficient) means to e. Therefore, I do a.”) are simple enough to be processed unconsciously, however, with the risk of overlooking consciously recognizable problems of the chosen option. Unconscious Motivation Michael Karson Ph.D., J.D. Andy didn’t know how to deal with his situation but his unconscious mind was secretly working on a defence plan. They change very little with respect to the question of the agential character of and responsibility for our actions as well as freedom of decision. Also, the integration of the information into the optimality judgment (D5) is always distorted, thus impairing rationality. (2012). The automated will. *Correspondence: Christoph Lumer, lumer@unisi.it, Front. What are the relative advantages of consciousness? Given the widely expressed worries about curtailments of freedom and responsibility by “the new unconscious,” this result of our discussion is most surprising. Freedom of decision in the sense of rationality is lacking in unconscious decisions and decisions with unconscious components, because the criteria for rational decisions are only met by coincidence; most detailed deliberations with all steps D1 to D5 cannot be made unconsciously anyway. 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