Free will, agency and responsibility: a social cognitive learning perspective
Recent neuroscience seems to imply the a priori impossibility of free action, while law, clinical and criminological psychology start from the assumption that persons are basically free to choose how to act, and so are responsible for their actions. In this paper I argue that the social-cognitive model of personality functioning and its underlying concept of agency can show a way out of the free/unfree will debate, and open up a scientifically sound way to think about responsibility and accountability.