Moral Agency Essay Example for Free

Moral Agency Essay some philosophers suggest only rational beings, who can reason and form self-interested judgments, are capable of being clean agents. Some suggest those with limited rationality (for example, people who are mildly mentally disabled or infants1) also have some basic moral capabilities. 3 Determinists argue all of our actions are the product of predecessor causes, and some believe this is incompatible with free will and thus claim that we have no actual control over our actions. Immanuel Kant argued that whether or not our real self, the noumenal self, can choose, we have no choice merely to believe that we choose freely when we make a choice. This does not mean that we can control the make of our actions. Some Indeterminists would argue we have no free will either. If, with respect to human behaviour, a questionable cause results in an indeterminate number of possible, so-called effects, that does not mean the person had the free-thinking separatist will to choose that effect. More likely, it was the indeterminate consequence of his chance genetics, chance experiences and chance circumstances pertinent at the time of the cause. In Kants philosophy, this calls for an act of faith, the faith free agent is based on something a priori, yet to be known, or immaterial.Otherwise, without free agents a priori fundamental source, socially essential concepts created from human mind, such(prenominal) as justice, would be undermined (responsibility implies freedom of choice) and, in short, civilization and human values would crumble. It is useful to compare the thought of moral agency with the legal doctrine of mens rea, which means guilty mind, and states that a person is legally liable for what he does as long as he should know what he is doing, and his choices are deliberate.Some theorists incarcerate any attempts to evaluate mental states and, instead, adopt the doctrine of strict liability, whereby one is liable under the virtue witho ut regard to capacity, and that the only thing is to determine the degree of punishment, if any. Moral determinists would most likely adopt a similar point of view. Psychologist Albert Bandura has observed that moral agents engage in selective moral disengagement in regards to their own inhumane conduct. 4.