scholarly journals Moral Animals and Moral Responsibility

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Albert W. Musschenga
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Subject ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
Moral Rules ◽  
Moral Competences

The central question of this article is, Are animals morally responsible for what they do? Answering this question requires a careful, step-by-step argument. In sections 1 and 2, I explain what morality is, and that having a morality means following moral rules or norms. In sections 3 and 4, I argue that some animals show not just regularities in their social behaviour, but can be rightly said to follow social norms. But are the norms they follow also moral norms? In section 5, I contend, referring to the work of Shaun Nichols, that the basic moral competences or capacities are already present in nonhuman primates. Following moral rules or norms is more than just acting in accordance to these norms; it requires being motivated by moral rules. I explain, in section 6, referring to Mark Rowlands, that being capable of moral motivation does not require agency; being a moral subject is sufficient. Contrary to moral agents, moral subjects are not responsible for their behaviour. Stating that there are important similarities between animal moral behaviour and human, unconscious, automatic, habitual behaviour, I examine in section 7 whether humans are responsible for their habitual moral behaviour, and if they are, what then the grounds are for denying that moral animals are responsible for their behaviour. The answer is that humans are responsible for their habitual behaviour if they have the capacity for deliberate intervention. Although animals are capable of intervention in their habitual behaviour, they are not capable of deliberate intervention.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

scholarly journals QUALITATIVE INVESTIGATION OF COACHES’ PERSPECTIVES ON MORAL EDUCATION IN SPORT

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (107) ◽  
pp. 46-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saulius Šukys ◽  
Živilė Dargenė ◽  
Diana Karanauskienė
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Career Planning ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Football Coaches ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
Moral Competences

Background. Moral behaviour and moral education of young athletes still remain an important issue in sports context. This study was designed to examine coaches’ perspectives on moral education in sport. Methods. In this study, aiming at establishing the perspectives of coaches on the moral education of athletes in sports activities, qualitative research was selected. Primary data were collected via semi-structured interviews with nine basketball and football coaches of different experience and age. The data were analysed applying thematic analysis. Results. Thematic analysis indicated that coaches identified goals of athletes’ education as the development of athletes’ personality, motivation, the development of sports excellence and the encouragement to achieve victory. Coaches defined moral education as the development of the authority of an athlete, fair play, compliance with rules, and integrity. The most common means coaches used for moral education were explanation, discussion, lectures, meetings, personal examples, case analyses. Such means are important for athlete’s personal development, pursuit of results, and career planning. The qualities of good coach were professional knowledge, authority, competences of creating motivational climate, and also moral competences. Conclusion. A central finding of the study is that coaches define moral education in sport through the education of moral values and the goals set by coaches related not only to the sports results, but also to the development of the personality of athletes. Personal role of coaches in moral education encompassing professional knowledge and moral competences of athletes is of great importance.

Moral collectivism

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Paul Spicker
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Agents

Moral collectivism is the idea that social groups can be moral agents; that they have rights and responsibilities, that groups as well as individuals can take moral action, that the morality of their actions can sensibly be assessed in those terms, and that moral responsibility cannot simply be reduced to the actions of individuals within them. This position is not opposed to individualism; it is complementary.

Sentimentalist moral education

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Slote
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Care Ethics ◽  
Lawrence Kohlberg ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Moral Sentimentalism ◽  
Moral Learning ◽  
Moral Rules ◽  
Do So

Care ethics, and moral sentimentalism more generally, have not developed a picture of moral education that is comparable in scope or depth to the rationalist/Kantian/Rawlsian account of moral education that has been offered by Lawrence Kohlberg. But it is possible to do so if one borrows from the work of Martin Hoffman and makes systematic use of Hume’s earlier sentimentalist ideas. Kohlberg and Rawls offer accounts of moral learning that leave moral motivation largely unexplained or mysterious, but an emphasis on the psychology of empathy can help us to better understand both the content of our morality and the ways in which children and adults can become and be morally motivated. Parents can in a number of ways evoke and strengthen children’s empathic moral tendencies, and such processes can also occur and need to occur in schools and later on in life. In addition, a sentimentalist understanding of the meaning of moral terms can show how moral rules, principles, and injunctions can strongly reinforce the sorts of empathic/moral tendencies that are at least initially based in other elements of human psychology.

Pirates, Kings and Reasons to Ad: Moral Motivation and the Role of Sanctions in Locke's Moral Theory

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
Moral Rules

Locke's moral theory consists of two explicit and distinct elements — a broadly rationalist theory of natural law and a hedonistic conception of moral good. The rationalist account, which we find most prominently in his early Essays on the Law of Nature, is generally taken to consist in three things. First, Locke holds that our moral rules are founded on universal, divine natural laws. Second, such moral laws are taken to be discoverable by reason. Third, by dint of their divine authorship, moral laws are obligatory and rationally discernible as such. Locke's hedonism, which is developed most fully in his later Essay Concerning Human Understanding, consists in the view that all good amounts to pleasure, with specifically moral good taken to consist in the pleasurable consequences of discharging one's moral duties.

Ethics, Motivation, and Egoism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Newlands
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Ethical Egoism ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Other Regarding

To show how this metaphysical machinery intersects with Spinoza’s ethics, chapter seven begins with a fresh account of what the author calls Spinoza’s psychological ethics, a series of descriptive claims about human desires that underwrites his metaethics. It is further argued that moral motivation for Spinoza is based on an agent’s intrinsic, appetite-based motivation for fundamental desire satisfaction. Most importantly, when this account of moral motivation is combined with his conceptualist metaphysics, Spinoza has a distinctive way of showing how moral agents can have self-interested, non-prudential moral motives to pursue the interests of others. This proposed reconciliation of Spinoza’s ethical egoism with other-regarding interests turns on his conceptualist account of how moral agents are individuated, thereby revealing just how deeply his ethics draws on his conceptualist metaphysics.

The Functional Morality of Robots

2012 ◽  
pp. 254-262
Author(s):  
Linda Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Moral Agents

It is often argued that a robot cannot be held morally responsible for its actions. The author suggests that one should use the same criteria for robots as for humans, regarding the ascription of moral responsibility. When deciding whether humans are moral agents one should look at their behaviour and listen to the reasons they give for their judgments in order to determine that they understood the situation properly. The author suggests that this should be done for robots as well. In this regard, if a robot passes a moral version of the Turing Test—a Moral Turing Test (MTT) we should hold the robot morally responsible for its actions. This is supported by the impossibility of deciding who actually has (semantic or only syntactic) understanding of a moral situation, and by two examples: the transferring of a human mind into a computer, and aliens who actually are robots.

Positive Freedom and the General Will

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piper L. Bringhurst ◽  
Gerald Gaus
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
General Will ◽  
Positive Freedom ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Diverse Society ◽  
Moral Rules ◽  
Moral Demands

This chapter shows how one understanding of positive liberty—freedom as reasoned control—is presupposed by relations of moral responsibility. Rousseau’s “quixotic quest”—insuring that all subjects of the moral law remain morally free—is necessary to maintain responsibility relations within a moral community. Unless all are free to exercise reasoned control in accepting moral demands, they cannot be held responsible for failure to comply. We then inquire whether the concept of the general will can reconcile positive freedom and moral responsibility with regulation by a common moral law. Rousseau’s account seems inappropriate for a deeply diverse society because it holds that the general will arises from an essential identity of citizens’ interests. Instead, Bosanquet’s work suggests two contemporary proposals for ways in which a diverse society might share a general will, explaining in turn how its members are all fit to be held responsible for violating its moral rules.

"Daran ist die Gesellschaft schuld!"

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kablitz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Central Question ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Society is to blame: The title of this book refers to a widespread dictum in modernity. From a historical point of view, however, it seems to lack plausibility as it appears in a culture whose ethical tradition has emphasised the importance of moral responsibility since antiquity. How could it then happen that social conditions have been declared responsible for all the deficiencies in humans’ lives? This is the central question this book addresses. The answer it gives goes back to the premises of the ethics of the New Testament. It describes Rousseau’s claim that society is to blame for all the evil in our world as the consequence of the secularisation of the Christian concept of charity that took place in the moralist literature of the early modern era.

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