In ''Moral Luck'' Bernard Williams describes a lorry driver who, through no fault of his own, runs over a child, and feels ''agent-regret.'' I believe that the driver's feeling is moral since the thought associated with this feeling is a negative moral evaluation of his action. I demonstrate that his action is not morally inadequate with respect his moral obligations. However, I show that his negative evaluation is nevertheless justified since he acted in way that does not live up to his moral values. I then use this distinctive negative moral evaluation to distinguish agent-regret from guilt and mere regret.
This chapter focuses on moral personhood understood in terms of the notion of moral status. An entity is said to have moral status only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Nonutilitarians tend to think of moral status in terms of entitlements and protections that can conflict with, and sometimes override, doing what would maximize the good and minimize the bad. If moral status comes in degrees, and if there is a status of the highest degree (i.e., full moral status), then moral persons are those with full moral status. After giving a more precise account of it, we assess different views of what it takes to qualify for full moral status (some of which appeal to metaphysical notions of person). We also briefly discuss how metaphysical notions of personhood are put to moral use in utilitarian moral theorizing that eschews the notion of moral personhood.
When, in spite of our good intentions, we fail to meet our obligations to others, it is important that we have the correct theoretical description of what has happened so that mutual understanding and the right sort of social repair can occur. Consider an agent who promises to help pick a friend up from the airport. She takes the freeway, forgetting that it is under construction. After a long wait, the friend takes an expensive taxi ride home. Most theorists and non-theorists react to such cases by either judging the agent’s action as a violation of her obligation to help or as having satisfied the only obligation she really had, namely to try to help. However, as I show, there are serious difficulties that arise from categorizing this agent’s action as satisfying or violating her obligation – difficulties that are avoided if we instead add “mere moral failures”; to the basic categories for moral evaluation. An agent merely fails when she neither satisfies nor violates her obligation. She is responsible for what she has done, yet without thereby having done wrong. Moreover, there is a recognizable (though nameless) reactive attitude reflecting the agent’s responsibility that falls between blame and mere regret, and is also importantly different from agent-regret. What I show is that we need not reach for blame as our only way of registering that an agent has morally failed another. While thus far overlooked, mere moral failure is by no means a rare occurrence, but rather a regular part of life among friends, family, investors and clients, police and citizens, doctors and patients, and many others.
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