EL2.1

• Agentive moral persons: moral persons who can be moral patients and moral agents.
• Non-agentive moral persons: moral persons who can be moral patients but not moral agents.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau

  • Citoyen de Geneve
  • Wrote the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
• Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

  • Rousseau’s greatest work
  • Compares the effects of history on us to the statue of Glaucus
• the statue of Glaucus,

  • which was so disfigured by time, seas and tempests, that it looked more like a wild beast than a god, the human soul, altered in society by a thousand causes perpetually recurring, by the acquisition of a multitude of truths and errors, by the changes happening to the constitution of the body,
• Freedom

  • animal is an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses to it to protect it from anything that disturbs it, same thing for the human machine.
  • nature alone does everything in the operation of an animal whereas man contributes as a free agent to his own operations.
• Perfectibility

  • virtually unlimited openness to change
  • what Rousseau connected to freedom.
  • From a human being, we could be a human becoming.
• Pity: we are not the rational animals. We re the sensitive creatures.
• Compassion (morality): is part of our nature. There is natural goodness in each one of us.
• Moral Accountability

  • The worthiness of blame or praise for the actions that we perform.
  • Agentive moral persons can be morally accountable for their actions.
  • Natural product of our rationality
• Reason/intelligence: distinction between right and wrong, good and evil.
• Free will/freedom: choice of action/s we would like to perform.
• Attribution conditions – determine whether moral accountability can be attributed to a person for an action they have done.
• Incriminating conditions

  – a person is accountable if and only if they:

  i. Are the agent of the action (agency condition)

  ii. Know that the action is good or bad (knowledge condition)

  iii. Intentionally perform the action (intentionality condition)
• Excusing conditions

  -- if at least one of these three conditions occur, then the person is excused from moral accountability:

  i. Does not have the volition to do the act (non-agency condition)

  ii. Does not have the capacity to know good v. bad (ignorance condition)

  iii. Does not intend to perform the act (involuntariness condition)
• Degree conditions – determine the degree of one’s moral accountability, i.e. greater or lesser accountability