The Moral Community
The prerequisites for membership in the moral community are a crucial factor in any discussion of moral responsibility. If collectives cannot satisfy the basic entrance requirements, nothing further is needed to support Lewis’s pronouncement that the very notion of collective moral responsibility is barbaric.
It is not likely to raise too many hackles if I stipulate that to be a full-fledged member of the moral community and so susceptible to moral responsibility appraisals, a candidate must be normatively competent. Minimally that means that it must possess some internal mechanism with the functional capacity to appreciate moral reasons as relevant to its act choices, the ability to react to those reasons with intentional actions, and thereby acknowledge ownership of its actions, and the facility to participate in moral dialogue and address. Put another way, members of the moral community must be “moderate moral reasons responsive” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Also, it should be noted, to satisfy those criteria an entity must have more than an instantaneous existence. It cannot exist for a flash and never again. It must persist.Adult humans are prototypical members of the moral community. For over 40 years since my lunches with Lewis, I have argued that adult humans do not uniquely possess the functional capacities required for normative competence. Two types of mechanisms can demonstrate at least a modicum of moderate moral reasons responsiveness: neuro-psychological mechanisms and some organizational mechanisms.2 Most adult humans fall into the first category and one type of collective and many corporate organizations may demonstrate the requisite mechanisms.
To qualify as an appropriate target of moral scrutiny a candidate must to some degree be self- referential (in the collective cases that minimally includes the use of the pronoun “we”3 when describing or discussing its actions), act from, at least, rudimentary internal mechanisms that can recognize a sufficient moral reason not to do what they are about to do, conceivably react to that reason, even if, in the circumstances, that is a rather remote possibility, and care about the moral quality of their actions, i.e., be affective.4 Whether or not something is normatively competent is a fact about the functional and structural internal mechanisms and motivational triggers that generate an individual’s or a group’s decisions and actions.
1.2