Responsibility for believing

1 Robert Adams argues against this assumption, providing counter-examples, in “Involuntary Sins,” Philosophical Review 94 (1985): 3–31. For a more recent argument against the assumption, see Angela M. Smith, “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115 (January 2005): 236–71. The assumption seems to appear in the opening of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that feelings and actions “receive praise or blame if they are voluntary, but pardon, sometimes even pity, if they are involuntary.” Contemporary thinkers typically endorse this claim while remaining puzzled by Aristotle’s notion of voluntariness. I will try to articulate a more modern notion of voluntariness, arguing that this more modern notion is not required for responsibility.