What is moral agency?

• What is moral agency?
  • One of the things we anticipate being difficult about the class: there is no consensus right answer to this question.
  • Neither:
    • What moral agency means,
    • What it takes to be a moral agent, nor
    • What the significance of something having moral agency is.
• In broad outlines, a moral agent is something that is capable of acting rightly or wrongly.

Moral agency vs. moral patiency

• There’s a lot of conceptual distinctions we can make in this space. Even these should not be taken for granted, though. A and B can be conceptually distinct but actually every A is B and vice versa.
• As an example, moral agency vs. moral patiency.
• We saw: moral agent is something that is capable of acting rightly or wrongly.
• Moral patient: something whose interests matter for moral purposes.
  • I.e., you’re a moral patient if actions that affect you have moral significance because of their effects on you.
• Can you conceive of a moral patient that’s not a moral agent?
• Can you conceive of a moral agent that’s not a moral patient?

Moral patiency cont’d

• So we have a conceptual distinction: agency vs. patiency. But this doesn’t mean the concepts are not related in some way.
  • How do you think they are related?

Moral patiency, cont’d

• So we’ve done two things here.
  • One, made an important conceptual distinction: moral agency vs. moral patiency.
  • Two, illustrate that there’s no consensus on how these concepts relate to each other.
    • They are conceptually distinct, but, depending on what you think, maybe they completely overlap.
    • This is a microcosm of the kind of philosophical work we’ll be trying to do.
    • You’ll be trying to keep these concepts separate in your head, while at the same time thinking about the connections among them.
• Philosophy is like 90% thinking about the connections between concepts. Hope you like that.

Moral agency: capabilities and accountability

At least two major questions:

1. What capabilities are needed to be able to choose between right and wrong?
2. What does it take to count as a moral agent?

Capabilities

Being able to choose between right and wrong.

Might include:

• Practical ability to choose among actions.
• Detecting morally salient features of a situation.
• Morally salient features of a situation matter to you in the right way.

Accountability

Counting as a moral agent: being the kind of thing whose actions can count as either right or wrong. Capable of being treated as a moral agent.

Might involve: - Ability to be held accountable or responsible. - Having a right to make moral decisions.

Three speculative hopes for the class

• Hypothesis 1: now is the perfect time to think deeply about AI and moral agency.
• Hypothesis 2: Thinking about our own moral agency and reasoning is a way to gain insight into agency and reasoning in general, including in the case of AI.
• Hypothesis 3: Thinking about how moral agency and reasoning work or might work in AI systems is a way to gain insight into our own agency and our own minds.