Results for 'Moral Agency'

968 found
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  1.  69
    Locke on Freedom, Moral Agency, and the Space of Reasons.Valtteri Viljanen - forthcoming - Locke Studies.
    This paper argues that what interests Locke most is not whether we are free to suspend desire but the nature of the liberty that suspension grants us, and that Lockean liberty is essentially about deliberation that takes place in what has nowadays come to be called the space of reasons. This allows me to offer a novel and balanced account that carefully designates both causal and rational elements of Locke’s theory of moral agency: after having reached judgment concerning (...)
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  2. Towards Enhancing Moral Agency through Subjective Moral Debiasing (Eastern APA, 2020).Mark H. Herman - unknown
    The capacity to act in accordance with one’s morality (broadly construed) is constitutive of moral agency. This capacity can be undermined—in whole or in part—by for instance, hypnosis, addiction, or obsessive-compulsion. Another way this capacity can be undermined is through poor moral reasoning. Moral irrationality can frustrate one’s capacity to act in accordance with one’s morality and in turn, stunt one’s moral agency. In a similar respect, improving moral rationality can strengthen this capacity (...)
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  3. Moral Agency Under Oppression.Sukaina Hirji - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    In Huckleberry Finn, a thirteen-year old white boy in antebellum Missouri escapes from his abusive father and befriends a runaway slave named Jim. On a familiar reading of the novel, both Huck and Jim are, in their own ways, morally impressive, transcending the unjust circumstances in which they find themselves in to treat each other as equals. Huck saves Jim’s life from two men looking for runaway slaves, and later Jim risks his chance at freedom to save Huck’s friend Tom. (...)
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  4. Kantian Moral Agency and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.Riya Manna & Rajakishore Nath - 2021 - Problemos 100:139-151.
    This paper discusses the philosophical issues pertaining to Kantian moral agency and artificial intelligence. Here, our objective is to offer a comprehensive analysis of Kantian ethics to elucidate the non-feasibility of Kantian machines. Meanwhile, the possibility of Kantian machines seems to contend with the genuine human Kantian agency. We argue that in machine morality, ‘duty’ should be performed with ‘freedom of will’ and ‘happiness’ because Kant narrated the human tendency of evaluating our ‘natural necessity’ through ‘happiness’ as (...)
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  5. Moral Encounters of the Artificial Kind: Towards a non-anthropocentric account of machine moral agency.Fabio Tollon - 2019 - Dissertation, Stellenbosch University
    The aim of this thesis is to advance a philosophically justifiable account of Artificial Moral Agency (AMA). Concerns about the moral status of Artificial Intelligence (AI) traditionally turn on questions of whether these systems are deserving of moral concern (i.e. if they are moral patients) or whether they can be sources of moral action (i.e. if they are moral agents). On the Organic View of Ethical Status, being a moral patient is a (...)
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  6. Moral Agency and the Paradox of Self-Interested Concern for the Future in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya.Oren Hanner - 2018 - Sophia 57 (4):591-609.
    It is a common view in modern scholarship on Buddhist ethics, that attachment to the self constitutes a hindrance to ethics, whereas rejecting this type of attachment is a necessary condition for acting morally. The present article argues that in Vasubandhu's theory of agency, as formulated in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary), a cognitive and psychological identification with a conventional, persisting self is a requisite for exercising moral agency. As such, this identification is essential for (...)
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  7. Morality, Agency, and Other People.Kenneth Walden - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    Constitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that’s not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivism: the (...)
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  8. Moral Agency in Artificial Intelligence (Robots).Saleh Gorbanian - 2020 - Ethical Reflections, 1 (1):11-32.
    Growing technological advances in intelligent artifacts and bitter experiences of the past have emphasized the need to use and operate ethics in this field. Accordingly, it is vital to discuss the ethical integrity of having intelligent artifacts. Concerning the method of gathering materials, the current study uses library and documentary research followed by attribution style. Moreover, descriptive analysis is employed in order to analyze data. Explaining and criticizing the opposing views in this field and reviewing the related literature, it is (...)
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  9. Moral Agency, Commitment, and Impartiality.Neera K. Badhwar - 1996 - Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1):1-26.
    Communitarians reject the impartial and universal viewpoint of liberal morality in favor of the "situated" viewpoint of the agent's community, and elevate political community into the moral community. I show that the preeminence of political community in communitarian morality is incompatible with concern for people's lives in the partial communities of family, friends, or others. Ironically, it is also incompatible with the communitarian thesis about the situated nature of moral agency. Political community is preeminent in communitarianism because (...)
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  10. Breaking Good: Moral Agency, Neuroethics, and the Spontaneity of Compassion.Christian Coseru - 2017 - In Jake H. Davis (ed.), A Mirror is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist Ethics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-128.
    This paper addresses two specific and related questions the Buddhist neuroethics program raises for our traditional understanding of Buddhist ethics: Does affective neuroscience supply enough evidence that contempla- tive practices such as compassion meditation can enhance normal cognitive functioning? Can such an account advance the philosophical debate concerning freedom and determinism in a profitable direction? In response to the first question, I argue that dispositions such as empathy and altruism can in effect be understood in terms of the mechanisms that (...)
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  11. Moral Anxiety and Moral Agency.Charlie Kurth - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 5:171-195.
    A familiar feature of moral life is the distinctive anxiety that we feel in the face of a moral dilemma or moral conflict. Situations like these require us to take stands on controversial issues. But because we are unsure that we will make the correct decision, anxiety ensues. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, surprisingly little work has been done either to characterize this “ moral anxiety” or to explain the role that it plays in our (...)
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  12. From Moral Agency to Collective Wrongs: Re-Thinking Collective Moral Responsibility.Marion Smiley - 2010 - Journal of Law and Policy (1):171-202.
    This essay argues that while the notion of collective responsibiility is incoherent if it is taken to be an application of the Kantian model of moral responsibility to groups, it is coherent -- and important -- if formulated in terms of the moral reactions that we can have to groups that cause harm in the world. I formulate collective responsibility as such and in doing so refocus attention from intentionality to the production of harm.
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  13. Nonhuman Moral Agency: A Practice-Focused Exploration of Moral Agency in Nonhuman Animals and Artificial Intelligence.Dorna Behdadi - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, (...)
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  14. Distributed cognition and distributed morality: Agency, artifacts and systems.Richard Heersmink - 2017 - Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (2):431-448.
    There are various philosophical approaches and theories describing the intimate relation people have to artifacts. In this paper, I explore the relation between two such theories, namely distributed cognition and distributed morality theory. I point out a number of similarities and differences in these views regarding the ontological status they attribute to artifacts and the larger systems they are part of. Having evaluated and compared these views, I continue by focussing on the way cognitive artifacts are used in moral (...)
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  15. Moral Agency.Timothy Nailer - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Adelaide
    While there is a vast philosophical literature exploring the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold individuals morally responsible for their actions, relatively little attention has been paid to the related question of which kinds of individuals merit these responsibility ascriptions. Under normal circumstances, typical adult human beings are held morally responsible for their behaviour but infants and nonhuman animals are not. In this thesis, I aim to account for this difference. That is, I aim to give an analysis (...)
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  16. Kant on Moral Agency and Women's Nature.Mari Mikkola - 2011 - Kantian Review 16 (1):89-111.
    Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of (...)
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  17. Varieties of Artificial Moral Agency and the New Control Problem.Marcus Arvan - 2022 - Humana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (42):225-256.
    This paper presents a new trilemma with respect to resolving the control and alignment problems in machine ethics. Section 1 outlines three possible types of artificial moral agents (AMAs): (1) 'Inhuman AMAs' programmed to learn or execute moral rules or principles without understanding them in anything like the way that we do; (2) 'Better-Human AMAs' programmed to learn, execute, and understand moral rules or principles somewhat like we do, but correcting for various sources of human moral (...)
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  18. A Practice‐Focused Case for Animal Moral Agency.Dorna Behdadi - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (2):226-243.
    Considerations of nonhuman animal moral agency typically base their reasoning and (very often negative) verdict on a capacity‐focused approach to moral agency. According to this approach, an entity is a moral agent if it has certain intrapersonal features or capacities, typically in terms of conscious reflection and deliberation. According to a practice‐focused notion of moral agency, however, an entity is a moral agent in virtue of being a participant of a moral (...)
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  19. A Normative Approach to Artificial Moral Agency.Dorna Behdadi & Christian Munthe - 2020 - Minds and Machines 30 (2):195-218.
    This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally (...)
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  20. Might stimulant drugs support moral agency in ADHD children?Steven Edward Hyman - 2013 - Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (6):369-370.
    Stimulants have been shown to be safe and effective for reduction of the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Despite much debate, however, there has been little empirical evidence as to whether stimulants affect authenticity and moral agency in children. Singh presents evidence that stimulants do not undercut children's' sense of self and increase their experience of agency. These findings are consistent with laboratory evidence that stimulant drugs in therapeutic doses improve cognitive control over thought and behavior.
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  21. Kant on Moral Agency: Beyond the Incorporation Thesis.Valtteri Viljanen - 2020 - Kant Studien 111 (3):423–444.
    This paper aims to discern the limits of the highly influential Incorporation Thesis to give proper weight to our sensuous side in Kant’s theory of moral action. I first examine the view of the faculties underpinning the theory, which allows me to outline the passage from natural to rational action. This enables me to designate the factors involved in actual human agency and thereby to show that, contrary to what the Incorporation Thesis may tempt one to believe, we (...)
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  22. ETHICA EX MACHINA. Exploring artificial moral agency or the possibility of computable ethics.Rodrigo Sanz - 2020 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 3 (2):223-239.
    Since the automation revolution of our technological era, diverse machines or robots have gradually begun to reconfigure our lives. With this expansion, it seems that those machines are now faced with a new challenge: more autonomous decision-making involving life or death consequences. This paper explores the philosophical possibility of artificial moral agency through the following question: could a machine obtain the cognitive capacities needed to be a moral agent? In this regard, I propose to expose, under a (...)
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  23. Moral Patiency Partially Grounds Moral Agency.Dorna Behdadi - manuscript
    This paper argues that, although moral agency and moral patiency are distinct concepts, we have pro tanto normative reasons to ascribe some moral agency to all moral patients. Assuming a practice-focused approach, moral agents are beings that participate in moral responsibility practices. When someone is a participant, we are warranted to take a participant stance toward them. Beings who lack moral agency are instead accounted for by an objective stance. As (...)
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  24.  97
    Relational Moral Agency: Beyond Constructivism and Naturalism.Suvielise Nurmi - 2011 - In Heather Eaton & Sigurd Bergmann (eds.), Ecological Awareness: Exploring Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics. Studies in Religion and the Environment –Series, vol 3. LIT-Publishing. pp. 176–192.
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  25. Verbeek on the Moral Agency of Artifacts.Ehsan Arzroomchilar & Daniel D. Novotný - 2018 - Organon F. Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 25 (4):517–538.
    One of the important questions discussed by philosophers of technology has to do with the moral significance of artefacts in human life. While many philosophers agree that artefacts do have moral significance attached to them, opinions vary as to how it is to be construed. In this paper we deal with the approach of the influential Dutch philosopher of technology Peter Paul Verbeek. He criticizes traditional ethical theories for assuming that whatever relevancy artefacts have for morality is entirely (...)
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  26. Preserving a combat commander’s moral agency: The Vincennes Incident as a Chinese Room.Patrick Chisan Hew - 2016 - Ethics and Information Technology 18 (3):227-235.
    We argue that a command and control system can undermine a commander’s moral agency if it causes him/her to process information in a purely syntactic manner, or if it precludes him/her from ascertaining the truth of that information. Our case is based on the resemblance between a commander’s circumstances and the protagonist in Searle’s Chinese Room, together with a careful reading of Aristotle’s notions of ‘compulsory’ and ‘ignorance’. We further substantiate our case by considering the Vincennes Incident, when (...)
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  27. Personal Identity, Moral Agency and Liangzhi: A Comparative Study of Korsgaard and Wang Yangming.Chang Tzuli - 2015 - Comparative Philosophy 6 (1):03-23.
    Christine Korsgaard bases her interpretation of personal identity upon the notion of moral agency and thereby refutes the Reductionist thesis of Derek Parfit. Korsgaard indicates that actions and choices, from the practical standpoint, must be viewed as having agents and choosers. This is what makes them our own actions and choices as well as contributes to the process of self-constitution. Personal identity manifested as the chooser of our desires and author of our actions can be viewed as the (...)
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  28. Locke on Education, Persons, and Moral Agency.Ruth Boeker - 2023 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (2):1-9.
    In her book Experience Embodied Anik Waldow devotes a chapter to “Locke’s Experimental Persons.” Her chapter aims to show how Locke’s views on persons, personal identity, and moral agency in his Essay concerning Human Understanding build on his esteem-based approach to education that he develops in Some Thoughts concerning Education. After outlining main contributions that Waldow makes in her chapter, I turn to three issues that in my view deserve further consideration. First, I draw attention to the question (...)
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  29. Neuroethics, Moral Agency, and the Hard Problem: A Special Introduction to the Neuroethics Edition of the Journal of Hospital Ethics.Christian Carrozzo - 2017 - Journal of Hospital Ethics 4 (2):47-52.
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  30. Human Resource Management in a Compartmentalized World: Whither Moral Agency[REVIEW]Tracy Wilcox - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 111 (1):85-96.
    This article examines the potential for moral agency in human resource management practice. It draws on an ethnographic study of human resource managers in a global organization to provide a theorized account of situated moral agency. This account suggests that within contemporary organizations, institutional structures—particularly the structures of Anglo-American market capitalism— threaten and constrain the capacity of HR managers to exercise moral agency and hence engage in ethical behaviour. The contextualized explanation of HR management (...)
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  31. Psychopathy, Autism and Questions of Moral Agency.Mara Bollard - 2013 - In Christopher D. Herrera & Alexandra Perry (eds.), Ethics and Neurodiversity. Cambridge Scholars University. pp. 238-259.
    In recent years, philosophers have looked to empirical findings about psychopaths to help determine whether moral agency is underwritten by reason, or by some affective capacity, such as empathy. Since one of psychopaths’ most glaring deficits is a lack of empathy, and they are widely considered to be amoral, psychopaths are often taken as a test case for the hypothesis that empathy is necessary for moral agency. However, people with autism also lack empathy, so it is (...)
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  32. Gandhi and Moral Agency: A Study of Political Literature.Samiksha Goyal - 2022 - American Philosophical Association Studies, Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies 22 (1):15-20.
    Despite decades of writings on Gandhi’s moral and political thought, some of Gandhi’s philosophical moral concepts are still not theoretically articulated. One such concept is Gandhi’s idea of moral agency. I critically engage with some recent political-historical literature on Gandhi to extract philosophical discussions in the vicinity of moral agency. For this, I take two related steps. First, I argue that even though this literature presents considerable theoretical discussion of Gandhi’s ideas, when considered individually, (...)
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  33. Moral Agency as Cognitive Agency: Recovering Kant’s Conception of Virtue. [REVIEW]Jessica Tizzard - 2020 - Con-Textos Kantianos 1 (11):481-491.
    Review of: Merritt, M., Kant on Reflection and Virtue, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 219 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-42471-4.
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  34. Manufacturing Morality A general theory of moral agency grounding computational implementations: the ACTWith model.Jeffrey White - 2013 - In Computational Intelligence. Nova Publications. pp. 1-65.
    The ultimate goal of research into computational intelligence is the construction of a fully embodied and fully autonomous artificial agent. This ultimate artificial agent must not only be able to act, but it must be able to act morally. In order to realize this goal, a number of challenges must be met, and a number of questions must be answered, the upshot being that, in doing so, the form of agency to which we must aim in developing artificial agents (...)
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  35. Moral Agents or Mindless Machines? A Critical Appraisal of Agency in Artificial Systems.Fabio Tollon - 2019 - Hungarian Philosophical Review 4 (63):9-23.
    In this paper I provide an exposition and critique of Johnson and Noorman’s (2014) three conceptualizations of the agential roles artificial systems can play. I argue that two of these conceptions are unproblematic: that of causally efficacious agency and “acting for” or surrogate agency. Their third conception, that of “autonomous agency,” however, is one I have reservations about. The authors point out that there are two ways in which the term “autonomy” can be used: there is, firstly, (...)
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  36. Shifting the Moral Burden: Expanding Moral Status and Moral Agency.L. Syd M. Johnson - 2021 - Health and Human Rights Journal 2 (23):63-73.
    Two problems are considered here. One relates to who has moral status, and the other relates to who has moral responsibility. The criteria for mattering morally have long been disputed, and many humans and nonhuman animals have been considered “marginal cases,” on the contested edges of moral considerability and concern. The marginalization of humans and other species is frequently the pretext for denying their rights, including the rights to health care, to reproductive freedom, and to bodily autonomy. (...)
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  37. Ape Autonomy? Social norms and moral agency in other species.Kristin Andrews - 2013 - In Petrus Klaus & Wild Markus (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Animals: Mind, Ethics, Morals. Transcript. pp. 173-196.
    Once upon a time, not too long ago, the question about apes and ethics had to do with moral standing—do apes have interests or rights that humans ought to respect? Given the fifty years of research on great ape cognition, life history, social organization, and behavior, the answer to that question seems obvious. Apes have emotions and projects, they can be harmed, and they have important social relationships.
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  38. A Phenomenological Theory of Ecological Responsibility and Its Implications for Moral Agency in Climate Change.Robert H. Scott - 2018 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (6):645-659.
    In a recent article appearing in this journal, Theresa Scavenius compellingly argues that the traditional “rational-individualistic” conception of responsibility is ill-suited to accounting for the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for both contributing to the causes and, proactively, working towards solutions for climate change. Lacking an effective moral framework through which to make sense of individual moral responsibility for climate change, many who have good intentions and the means to contribute to solutions for climate (...)
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  39. Las Casas' Articulation of the Indians' Moral Agency: Looking Back at Las Casas Through Fichte.Rolando Perez - 2020 - Ethnic Studies Review 43 (2):77-93.
    This article deals with Bartolome´ de Las Casas’ contribution to the notion of universal human rights. Though much study has been devoted to Las Casas’ work, what remains understudied is the Spanish philosopher’s conception of religion, which in many ways resembles what Kant called “the religion of reason.” For Las Casas, then, Christianity was conceived more as a rational system of ethics than as a compendium of Biblical and scholastic dogmas. Like the later Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Las Casas (...)
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  40. Moral ignorance and the social nature of responsible agency.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5):821-848.
    In this paper I sketch a socially situated account of responsible agency, the main tenet of which is that the powers that constitute responsible agency are themselves socially constituted. I explain in detail the constitution relation between responsibility-relevant powers and social context and provide detailed examples of how it is realized by focusing on what I call ‘expectations-generating social factors’ such as social practices, cultural scripts, social roles, socially available self-conceptions, and political and legal institutions. I then bring (...)
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  41. Relational Agency: Yes—But How Far? Vulnerability and the Moral Self.Nicolae Morar & Joshua August Skorburg - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (2):83-85.
    Peer commentary on: Goering, S., Klein, E., Dougherty, D. D., & Widge, A. S. (2017). Staying in the loop: Relational agency and identity in next-generation DBS for psychiatry. AJOB Neuroscience, 8(2), 59-70.
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  42. Moral Advice and Joint Agency.Eric Wiland - 2018 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8. Oxford University Press. pp. 102-123.
    There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to (...)
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  43. Blame, Communication, and Morally Responsible Agency.Coleen Macnamara - 2015 - In Randolph K. Clarke, Michael McKenna & Angela M. Smith (eds.), The Nature of Moral Responsibility: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 211-236.
    Many important theorists – e.g., Gary Watson and Stephen Darwall – characterize blame as a communicative entity and argue that this entails that morally responsible agency requires not just rational but moral competence. In this paper, I defend this argument from communication against three objections found in the literature. The first two reject the argument’s characterization of the reactive attitudes. The third urges that the argument is committed to a false claim.
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  44. Moral Distress: What Are We Measuring?Laura Kolbe & Inmaculada de Melo-Martin - 2022 - American Journal of Bioethics 23 (4):46-58.
    While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the (...)
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  45. Animals and the agency account of moral status.Marc G. Wilcox - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1879-1899.
    In this paper, I aim to show that agency-based accounts of moral status are more plausible than many have previously thought. I do this by developing a novel account of moral status that takes agency, understood as the capacity for intentional action, to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of moral status. This account also suggests that the capacities required for sentience entail the possession of agency, and the capacities required for (...)
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  46. Libertarian Agency and Rational Morality: Action-Theoretic Objections to Gauthier's Dispositional Soution of the Compliance Problem.Duncan MacIntosh - 1988 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):499-525.
    David Gauthier thinks agents facing a prisoner's dilemma ('pd') should find it rational to dispose themselves to co-operate with those inclined to reciprocate (i.e., to acquire a constrained maximizer--'cm'--disposition), and to co-operate with other 'cmers'. Richmond Campbell argues that since dominance reasoning shows it remains to the agent's advantage to defect, his co-operation is only rational if cm "determines" him to co-operate, forcing him not to cheat. I argue that if cm "forces" the agent to co-operate, he is not acting (...)
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  47. Thin as a Needle, Quick as a Flash: Murdoch on Agency and Moral Progress.Jack Samuel - 2021 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (2):345-373.
    Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch (...) progress depends on transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)
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  48. Moral Enhancement, Self-Governance, and Resistance.Pei-Hua Huang - 2018 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (5):547-567.
    John Harris recently argues that the moral bioenhancement proposed by Persson and Savulescu can damage moral agency by depriving the recipients of their freedom to fall (freedom to make wrongful choices) and therefore should not be pursued. The link Harris makes between moral agency and the freedom to fall, however, implies that all forms of moral enhancement, including moral education, that aim to make the enhancement recipients less likely to “fall” are detrimental to (...)
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  49. Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence.Christian List - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology (4):1-30.
    The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even (...)
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  50. Inadequate Agency and Appropriate Anger.Daphne Brandenburg - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1):169-185.
    Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts (...)
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