Lecture 2:

THE MORAL
AGENT
CHARLES KEVIN T. SALONGA
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
PHIL1B LECTURER
Only Human Beings
can be ethical
BASIC TENET IN ETHICS
1. Only Human beings are rational, self-conscious and autonomous
2. Only Human beings can act morally or immorally
3. Only Human beings are part of moral community.
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
Culture in Moral
Behaviour
CULTURE
 cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings,
hierarchies, religions, notion of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the
universe, and material objects and possessions…
 acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and
group striving
 products of action
 sum total of the learned behaviour of a group of people… transmitted from
generation to generation
 symbolic communication
 TOTALITY OF PEOPLE’S WAY OF LIFE
Moral Standards as Social Conventions
and the Social Conditioning Theory
Social Convention Theory

 By convention, they mean those things agreed upon by people like through their
authorities. Convention also refer to the usual or customary ways through which
things are done within a group.
 Moral standards are merely human inventions
 As a theory, moral law is a social convention which human beings had just made
up for themselves and might have been different had they liked.
Social Conditioning Theory

 Moral conscience or the feeling that we are obliged to at morally is nothing but an
outcome of social conditioning

 ACTS society disapproves  aware of the weight of reproof 

dissatisfaction develop into a habit  function as a CONSCIENCE

 C.S Lewis explains why morality is not just a social convention

 It is the intellect (REASON) which can be molded or socially conditioned, not the
sense of moral nor the so called conscience per se
The Challenges of
Cultural Relativism
Kohlberg’s Moral
Development Theory