How moral agents became ghosts or why the history of ethics diverged from that of the philosophy of mind

Abstract

At the very beginning of modern moral philosophy which for reasons that will become clear, I date in the 1780s the moral agent as traditionally understood almost, if not quite, disappeared from view. The moral agent's character, the structure of his desires and dispositions, became at best a peripheral rather than a central topic for moral philosophy, thus losing the place assigned to it by the vast majority of moral philosophers from Plato to Hume. And with this displacement the history of moral philosophy was divorced to a large and quite new extent from the philosophy of mind and action. The implications for the philosophy of mind are not inconsiderable, for it is in part at least because of this divorce, and not only because of Cartesian influences upon epistemology, that that part of philosophy became merely the philosophy of mind rather than the philosophy of mind-and-action. But the alterations in the preoccupations of moral philosophy itself were even more drastic. What replaced and still too often replaces the concept of moral character at the core of philosophical thinking about morality was and is a conception of choice of a particular kind as central to moral agency. Originally in the writings of Reid and Kant this choice was conceived of as that which individuals make between the promptings of desire and the requirements of morality; much later in the writings of Sartre it has become the individual's choice of those principles obedience to whose prescriptions constitutes morality. In both earlier and later writers it is common to find this notion of choice closely connected with the praise of individual autonomy as a defining property of morality. A. N. Prior summarised Reid's view of the matter accurately: "In