Revealing Something Morally Deficient About Act and Agent Sample Clauses

Revealing Something Morally Deficient About Act and Agent. For an act to be ‘dirtying’, additional criteria must be met.14 The first of these is that there must be something about the act in question that can be used to speak against both the act and the agent responsible for it. There is a moral deficiency—not just the absence of some good quality, but something actively and affirmatively negative. How exactly an act does this will depend on the act in question and the specific values affected. The decisions in the five examples all have something about them that grounds negative commentary against both the act and agent. This can entail participating in an act that plausibly involves a pro tanto wrong (torture, gerrymandering, bribery) or showing an inconsistency with the agent's professed moral and political values. There must be something to the act that “is said to tell against act and agent” (Xxxxxxx, 1990: 12). This could be if the broken categorical norms have a “categorical and mandatory force” (Xxxxxxx, 2009: 38, following Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxx, 2004: 465). In extreme cases, it can be an act so contemptible, so outside what is normally justified, that for it to be considered “shows a corrupt mind” (Xxxxxxxx, 1958: 17). In other cases, the agent becomes shaped by or complicit with the corrupt institutional arrangements around her or the corrupt actions of other agents. The agent is then “voluntarily” co-opted into “committing immoral acts or participating in immoral projects” (De Wijze, 2009: 309), becoming part of a “complex of immorality”. The agent thereby forfeits “innocence-as-a-disposition” (Xxxxxxxx, 2016a: 169). Another way this criterion could manifest is if the agent acts in a manner contrary to their political commitments in a substantive and morally important way: Xxxx does this. Some political values are more than just policy programs. These values place constraints on 14 Here I use the word ‘act’ in a broader sense that encompasses strategies, practices, and decisions about character cultivation. individual behaviour too. To violate these is to act in a morally deficient way, contributing to the political problems that the agent opposes, even if the act is ATC-justified. To use Xxxxxxxxxx’x (1987) terminology, this goes beyond merely violating a “phenomenological” baseline. Those that the agent is acting against have morally important rights—rights that the agent accepts—not to be treated in a way that violates their rights, and yet these rights are being violated. Such an act is dirtying for ...