Owning Intentions and Moral Responsibility

The article argues that there is a specific role for narrative consciousness in our understanding of justified responsibility ascription. Starting from a short review of empirical findings that suggest that we do not consciously control our actions, the article proceeds to spell out a concept of willed actions that does justice to the scientific results, conceptual requirements, and our most important intuitions on the ascription of responsibility. In order to do this, the article develops a concept of how narrative monitoring can be said to control actions that are performed on very small time scales. This concept understands narrative monitoring as the self interpretation and disambiguation of complex cognitive systems. Finally, consequences of this concept for the ascription of responsibility are explored.