Dimensions of Moral Agency

Book excerpt: Dimensions of Moral Agency addresses and exemplifies the multi-dimensionality of modern moral philosophy. The book is a collection of papers originally presented at the Northwest Philosophy Conference in October 2013. The papers encompass a wide variety of topics within moral philosophy, including metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, and broadly fall within the areas of the nature of moral agency and moral agency as it is played out in particular aspects of people’s lived experiences. The papers include assessments of the contributions of historical figures, such as Aristotle, Epictetus, Confucius, Berkeley, and Descartes, as well as analyses of agency as it relates to individual and social moral issues like mental illness, the ethics of debt, prostitution, eco-consumerism, oppression, and species egalitarianism, among others. Also covered are concerns related to the nature of moral reasoning at the individual and social level, the relevance of love and emotion to moral agency, and moral responsibility and efficacy. Interwoven with these topics and issues are concerns related to what sorts of things are, or could be, moral agents and what constitutes a moral good; the possibility of the existence of moral knowledge or moral facts or moral truth; and what constitutes moral motivation and how that is, or is not, related to questions of moral justification.