Are YOU morally responsibile for the Immoral behaviour in your dreams?

 

Immorality and moral responsibility in dreams

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams.

 For Augustine (Confessions) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer.

Assuming  moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. 

Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors.

Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions.