The Uses and Abuses of Narrative for Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Meretoja
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Blind Side ◽  
Ethical Evaluation ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Narrative Imagination ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
The Continuum

Chapter 4 tests hermeneutic narrative ethics as a lens for analyzing the (ab)uses of narrative for life in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007, The Blind Side of the Heart), exploring how narrative practices expand and diminish the space of possibilities in which moral agents act and suffer. It demonstrates how narrative “in-betweens” bind people together, through dialogic narrative imagination, and can promote exclusion that amounts to annihilation. It addresses the necessity of storytelling for survival, and a transgenerational culture of silence that leads to the repetition of harmful emotional-behavioral patterns. It explores the continuum from being able to tell one’s own stories to violently imposed narrative identities and suggests that moral agency requires a minimum narrative sense of oneself as a being worthy and capable of goodness. The chapter argues that the ethical evaluation of narrative practices must be contextual—sensitive to how they function in particular sociohistorical worlds.

scholarly journals Relationships, Authority, and Reasons: A Second-Personal Account of Corporate Moral Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Alan D. Morrison ◽  
Rita Mota ◽  
William J. Wilhelm
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Corporate Communications ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Corporate Moral Agency ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Corporate Punishment

We present a second-personal account of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to the first-personal approach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment.

Moral agents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinit Haksar
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Strong Version ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Concern For Others

Moral agents are those agents expected to meet the demands of morality. Not all agents are moral agents. Young children and animals, being capable of performing actions, may be agents in the way that stones, plants and cars are not. But though they are agents they are not automatically considered moral agents. For a moral agent must also be capable of conforming to at least some of the demands of morality. This requirement can be interpreted in different ways. On the weakest interpretation it will suffice if the agent has the capacity to conform to some of the external requirements of morality. So if certain agents can obey moral laws such as ‘Murder is wrong’ or ‘Stealing is wrong’, then they are moral agents, even if they respond only to prudential reasons such as fear of punishment and even if they are incapable of acting for the sake of moral considerations. According to the strong version, the Kantian version, it is also essential that the agents should have the capacity to rise above their feelings and passions and act for the sake of the moral law. There is also a position in between which claims that it will suffice if the agent can perform the relevant act out of altruistic impulses. Other suggested conditions of moral agency are that agents should have: an enduring self with free will and an inner life; understanding of the relevant facts as well as moral understanding; and moral sentiments, such as capacity for remorse and concern for others. Philosophers often disagree about which of these and other conditions are vital; the term moral agency is used with different degrees of stringency depending upon what one regards as its qualifying conditions. The Kantian sense is the most stringent. Since there are different senses of moral agency, answers to questions like ‘Are collectives moral agents?’ depend upon which sense is being used. From the Kantian standpoint, agents such as psychopaths, rational egoists, collectives and robots are at best only quasi-moral, for they do not fulfil some of the essential conditions of moral agency.

scholarly journals Corporate Moral Agency and the Responsibility to Respect Human Rights in the UN Guiding Principles: Do Corporations Have Moral Rights?

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia H WERHANE
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Business And Human Rights ◽  
Human Agent ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
The United Nations

AbstractIn 2011 the United Nations (UN) published the ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework’ (Guiding Principles). The Guiding Principles specify that for-profit corporations have responsibilities to respect human rights. Do these responsibilities entail that corporations, too, have basic rights? The contention that corporations are moral persons is problematic because it confers moral status to an organization similar to that conferred to a human agent. I shall argue that corporations are not moral persons. But as collective bodies created, operated, and perpetuated by individual human moral agents, one can ascribe to corporations secondary moral agency as organizations. This ascription, I conclude, makes sense of the normative business responsibilities outlined in the Guiding Principles without committing one to the view that corporations are full moral persons.

scholarly journals The Theft: An Analysis of Moral Agency

Conatus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Gerard Elfstrom
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Decisions

Adam and Eve’s theft marks the beginning of the human career as moral agents.   This article will examine the assumptions underlying the notion of moral agency from the perspective of three unremarkable human beings who found themselves in situations of moral difficulty.  The article will conclude that these three people could not have acted differently than they did.  It will conclude that it is unreasonable to assume that ordinary human beings will inevitably possess the resources to address difficult moral decisions.

‘You shall not wash my feet εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα’ (John 13.8): Time and Ethics in Peter’s Interactions with Jesus in the Johannine Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 458-477
Author(s):  
Olivia Rahmsdorf
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Foot Washing

In search of ‘timeless’ norms or behavioral examples, the Gospel of John seems to offer few options. The principle of brotherly love exemplified in the act of foot washing is often considered as the only example of ethically significant material in the Johannine narrative. However, by taking a closer look at the ‘tempo’ of actions and the characters’ orientation in time, we can understand that Peter’s protest against the foot washing is not only in favor of norms that secure existing hierarchies, but is driven by temporal norms, i.e. his genuine fear of death. Peter’s protest (Jn 13.8) indicates his desire for the eternal life promised by Jesus (Jn 11.25-26) and at the same time it serves as a defense against the foot washing as pointing to his own burial, which he infers from Jesus’ earlier interpretation of the anointing of his feet (Jn 12.7). Starting from this vantage point, a multitude of other interesting (time) conflicts and behavioral patterns come to light, revealing both Jesus, through his act of foot washing, and all of those who encounter him in their own actions and reactions, as instructive moral agents.

Artificial Moral Agency in Technoethics

2009 ◽  
pp. 205-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Sullins
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Artificial Moral Agents ◽  
Traditional Notion

This chapter will argue that artificial agents created or synthesized by technologies such as artificial life (ALife), artificial intelligence (AI), and in robotics present unique challenges to the traditional notion of moral agency and that any successful technoethics must seriously consider that these artificial agents may indeed be artificial moral agents (AMA), worthy of moral concern. This purpose will be realized by briefly describing a taxonomy of the artificial agents that these technologies are capable of producing. I will then describe how these artificial entities conflict with our standard notions of moral agency. I argue that traditional notions of moral agency are too strict even in the case of recognizably human agents and then expand the notion of moral agency such that it can sensibly include artificial agents.

Jewish philosophy in the early 19th century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Seeskin
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Issues

Although Jewish philosophy flourished in the Middle Ages, it underwent a serious decline in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The period following Kant and Mendelssohn witnessed an attempt to reintegrate Jewish philosophy into the mainstream of Western culture. The strategy of reintegration consisted of two elements: (1) showing that there is more to Judaism than the study of Scripture and (2) arguing that some of the ideas that won favour in the Enlightenment were anticipated by Jews centuries earlier. The most central idea that Jewish thinkers claimed as their own is a shift in focus from theoretical issues to practical ones. As important features of the medieval worldview fell into disrepute, many philosophers began to ask whether there are limits to what human reason can know. Can it really prove that God exists or that the soul is immortal? One response was to argue that even if no proof can be found, there are still grounds for believing, particularly if our understanding of ourselves as moral agents makes no sense without them. But it did not take long for people to argue that moral agency requires not just a God but a free and transcendent God capable of issuing commands to free agents created in the divine image. Here too, Jewish thinkers claimed that the idea of a God who is not limited by nature and insists on mercy and justice for all people was an integral part of monotheism as understood by the Hebrew prophets.

The Production-Oriented Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Ted Nannicelli
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Ethical Criticism ◽  
General Argument ◽  
Ethical Evaluation ◽  
Conceptual Space ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Oriented Approach

This chapter sketches the general argument for the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art. It begins by noting that at least some artworks (of performance art, for example) are isomorphic with the actions by which they are created. Such artworks are open to ethical evaluation in the same way that any action of a moral agent is open to ethical appraisal. This clears the conceptual space for the production-oriented approach. The chapter goes on to show that the production-oriented approach has an advantage over the interpretation-oriented approaches advocated by Booth, Devereaux, and Gaut in virtue of its ability to assign praise or blame to real moral agents who are responsible for their artworks. The chapter then bolsters the rationale for the production-oriented approach by appealing to anti-empiricist arguments in the aesthetics literature before drawing upon an analogy to similar arguments in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

scholarly journals Moral agents and legal persons: the ethics and the law of state responsibility

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 466-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Fleming
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
State Responsibility ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Functional Theory ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Corporate Moral Agency ◽  
The Law

Why, if at all, does it make sense to assign some responsibilities to states rather than to individuals? There are two contemporary answers. According to the agential theory, states can be held responsible because they are moral agents, much like human beings. According to the functional theory, states can be held responsible because they are legal persons that act vicariously through individuals, much like principals who act through agents. The two theories of state responsibility belong to parallel traditions of scholarship that have never been clearly distinguished. While the agential theory is dominant in IR, political theory, and philosophy, the functional theory prevails in International Law. The purpose of this article is to bridge the gulf between ethical and legal approaches to state responsibility. I argue that IR scholars and political theorists have much to gain from the functional theory. First, it provides a plausible alternative to the agential theory that avoids common objections to corporate moral agency. Second, the functional theory helps us to understand features of International Law that have puzzled IR scholars and political theorists, such as the fact that states are not held criminally responsible. I suggest that states can be ‘moral principals’ instead of moral agents.

scholarly journals A neo-aristotelian perspective on the need for artificial moral agents (AMAs)

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejo José G. Sison ◽  
Dulce M. Redín
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Artificial Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Case ◽  
Aristotelian Ethics ◽  
Context Dependent

AbstractWe examine Van Wynsberghe and Robbins (JAMA 25:719-735, 2019) critique of the need for Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs) and its rebuttal by Formosa and Ryan (JAMA 10.1007/s00146-020-01089-6, 2020) set against a neo-Aristotelian ethical background. Neither Van Wynsberghe and Robbins (JAMA 25:719-735, 2019) essay nor Formosa and Ryan’s (JAMA 10.1007/s00146-020-01089-6, 2020) is explicitly framed within the teachings of a specific ethical school. The former appeals to the lack of “both empirical and intuitive support” (Van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019, p. 721) for AMAs, and the latter opts for “argumentative breadth over depth”, meaning to provide “the essential groundwork for making an all things considered judgment regarding the moral case for building AMAs” (Formosa and Ryan 2019, pp. 1–2). Although this strategy may benefit their acceptability, it may also detract from their ethical rootedness, coherence, and persuasiveness, characteristics often associated with consolidated ethical traditions. Neo-Aristotelian ethics, backed by a distinctive philosophical anthropology and worldview, is summoned to fill this gap as a standard to test these two opposing claims. It provides a substantive account of moral agency through the theory of voluntary action; it explains how voluntary action is tied to intelligent and autonomous human life; and it distinguishes machine operations from voluntary actions through the categories of poiesis and praxis respectively. This standpoint reveals that while Van Wynsberghe and Robbins may be right in rejecting the need for AMAs, there are deeper, more fundamental reasons. In addition, despite disagreeing with Formosa and Ryan’s defense of AMAs, their call for a more nuanced and context-dependent approach, similar to neo-Aristotelian practical wisdom, becomes expedient.

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