Necessary Conditions for Moral Agency

Abstract

Goodpaster asks: “[I]s the concept of moral responsibility, as we are pursuing it, a normative concept or a descriptive concept or a mixture of the two?” (1983: 5). The way I see it the attribution of moral responsibility is a description about what a moral agent has done (or should have done). However, what is required to be a moral agent is normatively decided by us given an understanding of the central abilities that we think the metaphysics of moral agency requires. In other words the attribution of moral responsibility to an agent is an event-description founded on a normative conception of what it should mean to be morally responsible. And what it should mean to be morally responsible involves a thorough understanding of the abilities for moral agency and their moral relevance.