Philosophical zombies are beings that look exactly like humans and behave in the same way as humans do. The only difference between humans and philosophical zombies is that philosophical zombies lack consciousness. This means that they can complain, cry, laugh and say that they are in pain. However, emotionally, they will never experience these feelings. Philosophical zombies have no desires, no values, and no empathy. Despite philosophical zombies lacking all these qualities, the question can be raised whether, if they were to exist in our world, would they have any moral responsibility? This question becomes pressing because even though philosophical zombies feel nothing and lack consciousness, they are still capable of doing harm and able to act immorally. By using David Shoemaker's (2015) 'Tripartite Theory of Responsibility', I will in this essay analyse whether philosophical zombies are eligible for moral responsibility, and if so what type of moral responsibility they would be eligible for, i.e., whether it would be attributability, answerability or accountability. Furthermore, this essay will discuss if philosophical zombies and psychopaths are similar, and whether they are meant to be qualified for the same moral responsibility types, and if so, which type that would be. Additionally, this essay will discuss the dilemma that might arise if philosophical zombies are not suitable of being moral agents and bring up the debate of the moral agency of AI's. Thereby coming to the point if philosophical zombies are not fit to be held morally responsible.

There is a conceptual knot at the intersection of moral responsibility and action theory. This knot can be expressed as the following question: What is the relationship between an agent's openness to moral responsibility and the intentional status of her behaviour? My answer to this question is developed in three steps. I first develop a control-backed account of intentional agency, one that borrows vital insights from the cognitive sciences – in the form of Dual Process Theory – in understanding the control condition central to the account, and demonstrate that this account fares at least as well as its rivals in the field. Secondly, I investigate the dominant positions in the discussion surrounding the role of control in moral responsibility. After consideration of some shortcomings of these positions – especially the inability to properly account for so-called ambivalence cases – I defend an alternative pluralist account of moral responsibility, in which there are two co-extant variants of such responsibility: attributability and accountability. The latter of these will be shown to have a necessary control condition, also best understood in terms of a requirement for oversight (rather than conscious or online control), and in terms of the workings of the dual system mechanism. I then demonstrate how these two accounts are necessarily related through the shared role of this kind of control, leading to my answer to the original question: if an agent is open to moral accountability based on some activity or outcome, this activity or outcome must necessarily have positive intentional status. I then apply this answer in a consideration of certain cases of the use of the Doctrine of Double Effect.