MODULE1:

WEEK2DAY2
A CONTINUATION ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF
MORALITY

1.AGENCY AND AUTONOMY, THE ETHICS TOOLKIT

BY JULIAN BAGGINI PP. 3-12 LINK:
HTTPS://BOOKSHELF.VITALSOURCE.COM/READER/BOO
KS/9781444326734

2.ALL MORAL ACTIONS ARE HUMAN ACTIONS BY

PATRICK SHEERAN [A READING ARTICLE]
 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS &
ANSWERS
1. What is the meaning of moral agency?
A moral agent is a person who can discern right from wrong and to
be held accountable for his or her own actions. Moral agents have a
moral responsibility not to cause unjustified harm. Traditionally,
moral agency is assigned only to those who can be held responsible
for their actions.

2. What is the difference between a moral agent and subject?

A moral agent can act with reference to right and wrong and has the
power to intentionally cause harm to another. A moral subject is
anything that can be harmed. This video focuses on distinguishing
between the concepts of moral agent and subject of moral worth.
3. Does personhood require moral agency?
In other words, personhood takes independence. It requires the ability to
steer the course of one's own existence. Along the same vein as Kant,
some philosophers believe personhood requires moral agency, the capacity
to make moral decisions based on the perception of right and wrong.
Stated simply, it's the ability to judge between good and bad, moral and
immoral. Building on this definition, a moral agent is a being who is
conscious of the concepts of right and wrong.
FINALLY ON THE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS…

4.Is autonomy an ethical issue?

Yes, autonomy can be an ethical issue. Having autonomy, whether collectively
or individually, means having the freedom to act without external control.
Ethical concerns come into play when an individual or group abuses their right
to autonomy and puts other people, or society, in harm's way.

5.What is the difference between personal autonomy and moral autonomy?

The intersection of morality and autonomy has given rise to the term moral
autonomy, which is based on the premise that people have the choice to
control their own behavior based on their inner sense of right and wrong. The
other category, personal autonomy, is not concerned with the morality of
autonomy.
 
 AGENCY

• Agency for many involves the exercise of freedom, is usually taken to

require the ability to act otherwise or in ways contrary to the way one is
currently acting or has acted in the past.
• For many holding this point of view, being responsible (and thence an
agent) means possessing a “free will” through which one can act
independently of desires and chains of natural causes.
• Of course, there are also many philosophers who don’t think much of
this conception of freedom. Most of the critics, however, nevertheless do
accept using the term for actions that proceed in a causal way from
oneself or one’s own character in the absence of external compulsion,
coercion, or mental defect. (These philosophers are called
“compatibilists.”)
 Conditions of agency

• For thinkers following Aristotle, agency requires that one understands what one’s
doing, what the relevant facts of the matter are, and how the causal order of the
world works to the extent that one can foresee the likely consequences of chosen
courses of action.

• It’s also important that an agent possess some sort of self-understanding – that is,
some sense of self-identity, knowledge of who and what one is, what one’s character
and emotional architecture are like, what one is capable and not capable of doing.

• Self-knowledge is important because it doesn’t normally make sense to think of

someone as a free agent who is unaware of what he or she does – for example, while
asleep or during an unforeseen seizure. It can still make sense to talk of some of this
kind of action as the result of agency, however, if the impairments that lead to the
unconscious conduct are the result of one’s own free choices.
• For Immanuel Kant, the ability to reason is crucial to agency.

• In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), what’s important is that one act
unselfishly, purely based on reason or a certain kind of rational principle (a
categorical imperative), instead of based on desire or fear. Only this sort of
rational action qualifies for Kant as truly moral action, because even acting well
based on desire ultimately boils down to the same thing as acting in other ways for
the sake of desire.

• Desires and fears simply come over us, the result of natural and social causes
beyond our control. To act strictly from desire is to be a slave to desire.

• Only by acting based on reason alone are we, for Kant, autonomous – that is, self-
governing beings who legislate moral laws of action to ourselves.
 Other conditions of agency

• But perhaps it’s wrong to regard feelings and desires as irrelevant. Indeed, shouldn’t
moral agency also be understood to require the capacity to sympathize with others, to
be distressed by their suffering, and to feel regret or remorse after harming others or
acting immorally? Would it make sense to regard as a moral or free agent a robot that
behaved rationally and that possessed all the relevant information but didn’t have any
inner, affective life? It’s not obvious what the answer to this question is. Star Trek’s Mr.
Spock, for example, seemed to be a moral agent, even though the only reason he had
for condemning immoral acts was that they were “illogical.”

• Similarly, it might be thought that the right social conditions must be in place for moral
agency to be possible. Could people truly be moral agents capable of effective action
without public order and security, sufficient means of sustenance, access to information
and communication, education, a free press, and an open government? But again, this is
far from obvious.
 Types of agent

• It may seem strange to consider things like corporations or nations or mobs or social
classes as agents, but the issue often arises in reflections about whether one should
make judgments that attribute collective responsibility.

• People did speak of the guilt of the German nation and demand that all Germans
contribute to war reparations after World War I. When the government of a truly
democratic nation goes to war, because its policy in some sense expresses “the will of
the people,” the country arguably acts as though it were a kind of single agent.

• People also, of course, speak collectively of the responsibilities of the ruling class,
corporations, families, tribes, and ethnic groups. Because human life is populated by
collectives, institutions, organizations, and other social groupings, agency can
sometimes be dispersed or at least seem irremediably unclear. These “gray zones,” as
thinkers like Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, 1975) and Claudia Card (The Atrocity
Paradigm, 2002) have called them, make determining agency in areas like sexual
conduct and political action exceedingly difficult.
• There are three ways of understanding how we talk about collectives as
agents.

 One is that it’s just mistaken and that collectives cannot be agents.

 The second is that collectives are agents in some alternative, perhaps

metaphorical sense – that they are like real agents but not quite the same
as them.

 The third is that collectives are as much agent’s as individual people,

who are themselves perhaps not as singular, cohesive, and unified as
many would like to believe.
 AUTONOMY

• Expressing people’s preferences should they become unable to do so because of

illness or injury, these curious documents aim to make sure that physicians treat
individuals as they wish, not as others think best.
 The 2005 case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged American woman whose
husband and parents fell into a sensational and painful legal wrangle concerning
her wishes, illustrates all too well the reasons people write living wills.
 Proponents of the practice argue that one of the most important bases for the
human capacity to act in moral ways is the ability not only to choose and to act
on those choices but also to choose for oneself, to be the author of one’s own
life. This capacity is known as “autonomy.” But what does it mean to be
autonomous?
• Autonomy requires, at the very least, an absence of compulsion. If someone is
compelled to act rightly by some internal or external force – for instance, to return a
lost wallet packed with cash – that act isn’t autonomous. So, even though the act was
morally proper, because it was compelled it merits little praise.

• For philosophers like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), this is why autonomy is required
for truly moral action for he argues in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and
elsewhere that autonomously acting without regard for one’s desires or interests is
possible because people are able to act purely on the basis of rational principles given
to themselves by themselves.

• Indeed, the word “autonomous” derived from the Greek for self (auto) and law
(nomos) and literally means self-legislating, giving the law to one’s self.

• Actions done through external or internal compulsion are, by contrast, “heteronomous”

(the law being given by something hetero or “other”). In this way autonomy differs
from, though also presupposes, metaphysical freedom, which is commonly defined as
acting independently of the causal order of nature. Political freedom, of course, has to
do with people’s relationship to government and other people regardless or their
relationship to systems of cause and effect. But theories of political freedom also draw
upon the concept of autonomy.
 Politics

• Conceptions of autonomy are important politically, because one’s ideas about politics
are often bound up with one’s ideas about what people are and what they’re capable
of doing or not doing. Those who think that people are not capable or little capable of
self-legislating, self-regulating action are not likely to think that people can govern
themselves.

• Liberal democratic theory, however, depends upon that ability. The authority of
government in liberal democracies draws its justification from the consent of the
governed. Through systems of elections and representation the people of democracies
give the law to themselves. Liberal democracies are also configured to develop certain
institutions (like the free press) and to protect political and civil rights (such as the
rights to privacy and property) toward the end of ensuring people’s ability to act
autonomously and effectively.

• In this way, liberal democrats recognize autonomy not only as an intrinsic human
capacity but also as a political achievement and an important element of human well-
being.
• The legitimacy of liberal democracy is therefore threatened by claims that human
beings are not the truly autonomous agents we believe ourselves to be. And there is no
shortage of people prepared to argue this view.

• Many critics maintain that people really can’t act independently of their passions, of
their families, of the societies in which they live, of customs, conventions, and
traditions, of structures of privilege, exploitation, and oppression, including
internalized oppression.

• Some go as far as to claim that the sort of autonomy liberal democrats describe is the
fantasy of wealthy, white, European and North American males – or, worse, a
privilege they enjoy only because they deny it to others. Still other critics regard the
idea as a mystifying ideology through which the ruling class deludes people about the
exploitive system under which they labor.
 Medical ethics

• The concept of autonomy has become increasingly important, however, in medicine.

• Many medical ethicists have effectively argued that because human beings are
autonomous, no medical treatments ought to be administered to patients without their
informed consent to any procedures or therapies – unless they’re not competent to
make informed choices (e.g., perhaps because of mental illness). That is, patients must
both: (1) understand what is to be done to them, what risks are entailed, and what
consequences may follow; and (2) agree to the treatment considering that
understanding. When they fail to acquire informed consent, medics are said to act
paternalistically, invasively, and disrespectfully, deciding what’s best for an adult who
really should be allowed to make such decisions for him or herself.

• Problems, however, with the requirement to respect autonomy arise in trying to

determine precisely when a patient is incompetent, as well as when a patient is
sufficiently well informed. Just how much mental impairment is too much; just how
much information is enough? Living wills are intended as one way to get around at
least some of these problems.
 ACTIVITY: ASSIGNMENT1

• Asynchronous class on November 18, 2022 [Friday] /

November 19, 2022 [Saturday] – No ZOOM meeting

• The questions & instructions will be posted in the

Assignment tool.

• This activity will open on November 16, 2022 [Wednesday]

/ November 17, 2022 [Thursday] at 7:30 pm. However, this
is due for submission on November 18, 2022 [Friday] /
November 19, 2022 [Saturday] in the Assignment tool also
up to 9:00 pm.
 ASSIGNMENT1
INSTRUCTIONS & QUESTIONS:

• Read the attached article titled “The Importance

• of What We Care About” by Harry Frankfurt.

• Answer the questions below in five to seven sentences only.

 ASSIGNED READING
M1WK3D1

• Moral Theories: 1. Universalism [Thesis: There are

moral absolutes.]; 2. Moral Relativism [Thesis:
Morality is relative to the individual.]

• Reading Materials: 1. Universalism & Moral

Relativism, Ethics: The Basics by John Mizzoni

• Synchronous class via ZOOM