Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2024 9:37 am
Definition seems a bit circular, as there's no definition for moral good.
Because it would depend on the population, though I think moral instrumentalism is even more flexible than that. There need not even be a stable moral good in a specific population.
I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible.
This makes sense I think, at least a little bit. "Responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency" - if you're not in some way succeptible to changing or altering your behaviour for moral reasons, then you don't have moral agency. So like... that's why rocks don't have moral agency, even ones that do very bad things like fall on peoples heads. Because they're not succeptible to developing agency or changing behaviors. And it's also why we don't hold people responsible for terrible accidents that happen to them - because a change in their behavioral patterns wouldn't necessarily have presented the accident, so it doesn't really make sense. They may be succeptible to moral change in general, but not succeptible in a way that would reasonably have prevented the terrible accident.
For example if you're a mom and you're a safe driver and you're driving your kid to work and you get T-boned by a drunk driver, we don't hold the mom responsible for her kids death. An ultra-naive moralist would say "well the action you took - driving around at that particular time - resulted in the kids death, so the death is your fault". We obviously have a strong intuition that that line of reasoning doesn't make sense, so any account of morality has to have a sensible way of dealing with that.
This all seems to fit with a number of meta-ethical positions.