The Relationship Between Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

Usually when people talk about moral responsibility they don't go into questions about consciousness at all. They seem implicitly to have assumed that agents need to be conscious. There's a big debate about whether that's also accompanied by the kind of phenomenal feeling that you mentioned before. So now what is the relationship between these two things? Most people assume that robots couldn't be morally responsible and any scientific research which shows we're a bit like robots in some respects chips away at our responsibility effectively so the research must be wrong.