The "Ethical Subject/Agent" as "Rational Individual" but Also as So Much More!

My thesis is that contemporary ethics needs to reconceptualize its notion of the "ethical subject/agent." In developing this argument, I draw on three sources: (1) the field of moral psychology, (2) philosophical explorations of the concepts of "moral responsibility" and "moral community, and (3) the work of American philosophers such as Josiah Royce and John Dewey. Primary attention will be given to the latter two sources, though, given the short span of this essay, only brief references to Royce and Dewey are possible, even though these philosophers provide the foundational theoretical framework for any reconceptualization efforts. Indeed, these philosophers, as well as William James, engaged in and drew upon empirical research in developing their notions of self and moral development (Dewey 1884, 1894, 1896; James 1981; Royce 1894, 1895a, 1895b, 1895c, 1897, 1903), and they would have agreed, as do I, with the judgment of two leading moral psychologists that "neither normative ethics nor metaethics can be done behind a firewall. There can be little valid ethical inquiry that is not anchored in the facts of a particular species, so most philosophers had best get a good grasp of the empirical facts of moral psychology" (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008, 182).

Rather than centering only on the "capacity to reason" as the foundation of moral reasoning and judgment and focusing on the individual, autonomous, self-sufficient rational person, the self of ethical deliberation and action must be seen as a social, embodied, passionate, imaginative, interpretive, problem-solving being with the capacity to enter into certain kinds of relationships with other persons, to be functional as a member of a "moral community." The focus on reason and on the individual fails to capture the importance of moral agents as members of a moral community who have obligations to others and who need empathetic capacities in addition to reasoning capacities. Thus, recent discussions of the nature of moral responsibility and of moral community, including studies of the behavior of psychopaths, highlight this failure in traditional ethical theory (Darwall 2006; Duff 1977; Fingarette 1967; Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Murphy 1972; Nichols 2004; Shoemaker 2007; Strawson 2003; Wallace 1994; Watson 2004). Further, this analysis of moral agency brings ethical theory much closer to the rich interpretations of Royce (1898, 1903, 1913) and Dewey (1981-90), who saw the self as foundationally social and interactions between individual selves and between their communities as crucial to self and moral development as well as communal development and ethical problem solving.

Contemporary analyses of moral responsibility and moral community also address a troublesome problem for traditional ethics, namely, the failure to be "morally motivated." Traditional explanations with their focus on reason see this moral failure as an epistemic deficiency, namely, the person "fails to fully understand or fails to reason in a proper manner." However, studies of psychopathic behavior reveal that "epistemic failure" is not an adequate explanation. The psychopath appears to be highly adept at reasoning; the problem is an affective deficit, an inability to respond to the distress cues of other people; the deficit is in the personal distress mechanism or the concern mechanism (Blair et al. 1997). A recent book on psychopathic behavior describes the psychopath in an almost "eerie, nightmarish manner," as follows: "Imagine if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life. . . . And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools" (Stout 2005, 1). This study also postulates that the psychopath is a human being "without conscience" and defines "conscience" a follows: "Psychologically speaking, conscience is a sense of obligation ultimately based on an emotional attachment to another living creature (often but not always a human being), or to a group of human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole...