Moral Responsibility in Crisis: From Collapse to Epistemic Agency and the Islamic Philosophical Tradition

Recent philosophical debates describe moral responsibility as being in crisis. This crisis is articulated through arguments claiming that responsibility collapses under metaphysical, normative, and psychological examination; agents lack ultimate self-determination, desert appears unjustifiable, and responsibility practices are said to rely on unrealistic, God-like conceptions of human agency. At the same time, contemporary philosophy is marked by an internal tension between the denial of responsibility and its expansion. It is simultaneously extended into the epistemic and doxastic domain, where agents are held responsible for ignorance, belief-formation, and epistemic conduct. The coexistence of collapse claims and the expansion of responsibility constitutes the core of the contemporary responsibility crisis.

Through a comparative conceptual analysis, this study argues that the crisis arises not from any incoherence in moral responsibility itself, but from contingent philosophical assumptions about agency that demand total control, self-creation, or ideal epistemic access. Drawing on analytic accounts of epistemic responsibility, the paper defends a reconceptualization of responsibility grounded in diachronic non-ideal epistemic agency rather than metaphysical ultimacy. On this view, ignorance does not undermine responsibility but becomes one of its central sites. The paper concludes by turning to the Islamic philosophical tradition. Despite its Aristotelian foundations, this tradition exhibits no pressure toward responsibility collapse. By scaling responsibility to intention, rational governance, and finite human capacities, Islamic philosophers provide a stable account of moral responsibility, demonstrating that responsibility need not be absolute to remain coherent and defensible.