Is increasing agency a valid basis for morality?
In normative ethics, people resort to different systems like deontology, utilitarianism, rights, and virtues.
Is it possible for someone to form an ethical theory based on increasing moral agency?
For instance, can someone say "I reject your utilitarian framework of reducing suffering and increasing pleasure as right. Instead, my framework regards increasing the number of moral agents as the right thing to do". Or would that be tautology?
Is it possible for someone to form an ethical theory based on increasing moral agency?
For instance, can someone say "I reject your utilitarian framework of reducing suffering and increasing pleasure as right. Instead, my framework regards increasing the number of moral agents as the right thing to do". Or would that be tautology?
Comments (8)
System-less morality is the weakest part in western philosophy. It has the same propensity to infinite regress as metaphysics. I do not understand why people do not grasp the fundamentally inferior nature of such approach. It literally leads to nowhere at all.
If you ever studied even just the very basics of Jewish law or Islamic law, you would quickly see that western "ethics" is just a pile of nonsense. Morality requires the system-wide premises of a legitimate formal system.
The wish to increase the number of virtuous people sounds like a viable combination of virtue ethics and utilitarianism. It wouldn’t be a rejection of either, but rather a confirmation of both.
In virtue ethics, virtue is the path to happiness and only a virtuous person can be truly happy. There is no contradiction between virtue ethics and utilitarianism and a believer in the former would naturally equate an increase of happiness with an increase of virtue.
However, such a moral goal cannot exhaust the goals of either ethical theory since not only virtue has an influence on happiness. Stealing and killing is wrong because thieves and murderers are less virtuous and therefore less happy, but obviously it is also wrong because someone who grieves the loss of life and property is less happy. No ethical theory can care about the agent only and ignore the moral patient since a moral wrong is always identified through someone suffering a moral wrong (at least potentially). The goal of any ethical theory would necessarily be to reduce both evil doing and evil suffering.
I think so. Here's a sketchy attempt ... and even sketchier clarification. (Embedded links go down rabbit holes of assumptions, etc.)
Quoting Congau
True. Caring for a "moral patient", however, presupposes moral agency, whereby the latter increases in capabilities (as per OP's query) by exercising - a positive feedback loop - those capabilities which prevent, mitigate or relieve "suffering a moral wrong". Insofar as every moral agent also, simultaneously and always, is a moral patient (i.e. vulnerable or harmed), suffering is a "moral wrong" iff conceived of as decrease in - dysfunctioning of - capabilities which constitute agency (moral or otherwise); thus, an ethics of "increasing moral agency" entails reflectively caring for moral patients (i.e. cultivating virtue via negative utilitarian / consequentialist preferences and actions).
Thoughts?
the agent-based, aretaic-negative consequentialist hybrid I (sketchily) propose is, I think, grounded deontologically ... ('love child' of a Philippa Foot, Derek Parfit & Benny Spinoza ménage à trois :smirk:) ... so Kant's still relevant to me, however indirectly, for the time being.
This is actually what a person I was debating claimed. And yes he did refer to an increase in the total number of moral agents instead of virtuous ones. I suppose we are all in agreement his system is absurd?