Moral Agency in Mammalia

Moral Agency in Mammalia

About the extent of moral agency in the animal kingdom, one view is that only humans are moral agents. Holding a different view, I argue that moral agency depends on the capacity for other-regard and the capacity to be attuned to significance—such that things matter to one. I derive a criterion where a creature is a moral agent if she performs an action that promotes others’ significant interes...

Artificial Moral Agency in Technoethics

This chapter will argue that artificial agents created or synthesized by technologies such as artificial life (ALife), artificial intelligence (AI), and in robotics present unique challenges to the traditional notion of moral agency and that any successful technoethics must seriously consider that these artificial agents may indeed be artificial moral agents (AMA), worthy of moral concern. This...

Agency and Moral Realism

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency

This research examined the role of mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Regulatory self-sanctions can be selectively disengaged from detrimental conduct by converting harmful acts to moral ones through linkage to worthy purposes, obscuring personal causal agency by diffusion and displacement of responsibility, misrepresenting or disregarding the injurious effects i...

Competitive agency with moral hazard.∗

Principals seek to enter a productive relationship with agents by posting general incentive contracts. A contract is exclusive and must solve both the ex post moral hazard and the ex ante competitive search problem (participation). Menus of contracts do not help hence (single) contract posting is optimal. Principal competition restores some bargaining power with the agents, to whom principals m...