Another Moral Standard

Abstract

If moral agents have a standing obligation to prevent their own future wrongdoing, human susceptibility to weakness of will and moral ignorance leads to the unacceptable conclusion that agents must immediately terminate their moral agency to guarantee that no future transgressions occur. The valid argument generating this conclusion can only be avoided by rejecting the premise that agents ought never choose to act immorally. Rejecting this premise is justified because completely moral extended courses of action are realistically unavailable to human agents. Over a lifetime, any feasible course of action will inevitably involve some moral failures. Consequently, an agent may be morally required to choose an available course of action that entails future wrongdoing. This dilemma demonstrates that conventional moral theories, which evaluate isolated individual actions, cannot be directly extended to extended trajectories of behavior. Ethical theory therefore requires a distinct standard specifically formulated to evaluate entire courses of action—one capable of prescribing the morally best life among alternatives that inevitably contain moral transgressions. – AI-generated abstract.