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The Moral Agent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

Bernard Mayo
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Extract

I Want to examine how far the question ‘What is it for a man to act morally?’ can be answered in terms of the sociological concept of a role. Is, for example, acting as a moral agent consistent with acting in the capacity of one's role, or even identical with it if being a moral agent is acting a role? In the first part of my paper I shall examine some of the relations between morality and roles, especially from the point of view of that freedom which is always regarded as a necessary condition of a man's being a moral agent. In the second part I shall examine the concept of a role itself, not from the point of view of sociology to which it notionally belongs, but from the point of view of the philosophy of mind; this is the point of connection between my own theme and the general theme of this series of lectures. The role concept will thus be a bridging concept between ethics and the philosphy of mind. Finally I shall bring to bear on the idea of the moral agent any insights that may be yielded by the psychology of role-acting.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 1 , March 1968 , pp. 47 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1968

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References

page 49 note 1 L'Être et le Nèant (Eng. tr. Barnes, Hazel E.: Being and Nothingness, Methuen, 1957), p. 59.Google Scholar Quoted in Emmet, Dorothy, Rules, Roles and Relations, PP. 152–3Google Scholar.

page 50 note 1 I owe this example to Professor P. T. Geach, of Leeds, who is to be the Birmingham University philosophy department's external examiner.

page 51 note 1 Cohen, G. A., ‘Beliefs and Roles’, Proc. Arist. Soc., 1966-1967, pp. 17–34.Google Scholar

page 53 note 1 Action, Emotion and Will (London, 1963), p. 238.Google Scholar

page 54 note 1 Edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962) P. 92.

page 54 note 1 It could, of course, be said that in pouring the water he thinks of the act as a way of thawing the radiator; but it certainly cannot be assumed, and I think it is certainly false, that doing something as x is the same as doing something and thinking of it as x.

page 57 note 1 See, for instance, Findlay, J. N., Values and Intentions (1961), ch. 9.Google Scholar For another real-life example, compare Georg Simmel on ‘the Sociology of the Sexes’: ‘The simple and pure form of erotic decision… by definition does not enter into coquetry… sociability appears only when the man desires nothing more than this free moving play, in which something definitely erotic lurks only as a remote symbol.’ (Grundfragen der Soziologie, iii. 3.f.)

page 58 note 1 Ethics and the Moral Life (Macmillan, 1958), pp. 83–92.Google Scholar

page 59 note 1 p. 69 of H. J. Paton's translation of Kant's, I.The Moral Law (1961)Google Scholar.

page 60 note 1 Philosophical Papers (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961), ch. 9.Google Scholar

page 61 note 1 Plato, of course, carried out a somewhat similar exercise in the characters of Glaucon and Adeimantus.