Responsibility for Extreme Beliefs and Behaviors

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This volume explores various issues in the relations between extreme beliefs and extreme behavior, on the one hand, and responsibility, on the other. The first part concerns the issue of who is responsible. Potential subjects here are individuals, groups, the community, institutions, and, perhaps, even structural factors. It also addresses how individual responsibility relates to group responsibility. The second part concerns agency and various kinds of responsibility. It studies to what extent we can ascribe agency, both moral and epistemic, to extremists. It explores how epistemic agency depends on cognitive and affective capacities, self-knowledge, and intellectual self-trust, self-esteem, and self-respect. It studies which environments foster extreme beliefs and behavior and how legal, moral, and epistemic responsibility relate to each other with respect to extreme beliefs. It also considers whether extremists and terrorists can be described as evil and how that bears on responsibility. The third and final part investigates when responsibility attributions are appropriate. It looks at various excusing or exculpating conditions of individual or group responsibility for extreme belief. It studies indoctrination and how much room it leaves for responsibility. It considers factors such as experiencing peer pressure, being in an epistemic bubble or echo chamber, and living in a society dealing with fake news and propaganda, and to what extent such factors can provide an excuse. In doing so, it takes not only the legal but equally the moral and epistemic dimensions of responsibility into account and how these relate to one another.</jats:p>