Everything about Moral Agent totally explained
Moral agency is a person's capacity for making
moral judgments and taking actions that comport with morality.
Development and analysis
Most
philosophers suggest that only rational beings, people who can reason and form self-interested judgments, are capable of being moral agents. Some suggest that those with limited rationality (for example, people who are mildly
mentally disabled) also have some basic moral capabilities.
Determinists argue that all of our actions are the product of antecedent causes, and some believe this is
incompatible with
free will and thus claim that we've no real control over our actions.
Immanuel Kant argued that whether or not our
real self, the
noumenal self, can choose, we've no choice but to believe that we choose freely when we make a choice. This doesn't mean that we can
control the effects of our actions.
It is useful to compare the idea of moral agency with the
legal doctrine of
mens rea, which means guilty mind, and states that a person is legally responsible for what he does as long as he
should know what he's doing, and his choices are deliberate. Some theorists discard any attempts to evaluate mental states and, instead, adopt the doctrine of
strict liability, whereby one is liable under the law without regard to capacity, and that the only thing is to determine the degree of
punishment, if any. Moral determinists would most likely adopt a similar point of view.
Distinction between moral agency and eligibility for moral consideration
Many, perhaps even most philosophers, tend to view morality as a transaction among rational parties, for example, among moral agents. For this reason (for example, Kant), they'd exclude other animals from moral consideration. Others state that one must draw a distinction between moral agency and being subject to moral considerations, and that too much emphasis is placed on
rationality as a requirement for being part of the moral realm.
Utilitarian philosophers like
Jeremy Bentham and
Peter Singer have argued that the key to inclusion in the moral community isn't rationality — for if it were, we might have to exclude some disabled people and infants, and might also have to distinguish between the degrees of rationality of healthy adults — but that the real object of moral action is the avoidance of suffering.
Sources
- Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation, 1975.
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