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Moral agency
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This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on
the talk page.
• It is missing citations or footnotes. Please help improve it by adding inline
citations. Tagged since July 2010.
• It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since July
2010.
• It relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Tagged since July 2010.
• It may not present a worldwide view of the subject. Tagged since July 2010.

This article cites its sources but does not provide page references. You can help to
improve it by introducing citations that are more precise.
For other senses of the word "agency", see Agency (disambiguation) and Free agency
(disambiguation).
Moral agency is a person's responsibility for making moral judgments and taking actions that
comport with morality[citation needed].
A Moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong" [1]

Contents
[hide]
• 1 Development and analysis
• 2 Distinction between moral agency and eligibility for moral consideration
• 3 Sources
• 4 Notes
• 5 See also

[edit] Development and analysis

Most philosophers suggest only rational beings, people who can reason and form self-
interested judgments, are capable of being moral agents. Some suggest those with limited
rationality (for example, people who are mildly mentally disabled) also have some basic
moral capabilities. In Judaism, moral agency is restricted to sane adults, but deaf-mutes are
excluded from this, as Jewish law forbids legal cases - and hence culpability and contractual
rights - without verbal communication between the involved parties.
Determinists argue all of our actions are the product of antecedent causes, and some believe
this is incompatible with free will and thus claim that we have no real control over our
actions. Immanuel Kant argued that whether or not our real self, the noumenal self, can
choose, we have no choice but to believe that we choose freely when we make a choice. This
does not mean that we can control the effects of our actions. Some Indeterminists would
argue we have no free will either. If, with respect to human behaviour, a so-called 'cause'
results in an indeterminate number of possible, so-called 'effects', that does not mean the
person had the free-thinking independent will to choose that 'effect'. More likely, it was the
indeterminate consequence of his chance genetics, chance experiences and chance
circumstances relevant at the time of the 'cause'.
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 is 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.
[edit] Distinction between moral agency and eligibility for
moral consideration
Many philosophers, such as Kant, view morality as a transaction among rational parties, i.e.,
among moral agents. For this reason, they would exclude other animals from moral
consideration. Others, such as Utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer
have argued the key to inclusion in the moral community is not 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 the real object of moral
action is the avoidance of suffering.
[edit] Sources
• Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation, 1975.
[edit] Notes
1. ^ Websters Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

[edit] See also

• Ethics
• Fiduciary
• Free will
• Medical ethics
• Moral agency in Judaism
• Morality
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_agency"
Categories: Core issues in ethics
Hidden categories: Articles with unsourced statements from July 2010 | All articles with
unsourced statements | Articles lacking reliable references from July 2010 | Articles with
limited geographic scope | Articles lacking page references | Articles with unsourced
statements from March 2009
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