Conclusion: A Social Perspective on Moral Agency

This concluding chapter is used to explore what the theorists covered throughout this book tell us about moral agency. It is divided into two main parts: how moral agency is constituted and how moral agency is enacted. The first part revisits arguments about moral socialisation and the situatedness of moral agency within social and cultural histories. It argues that social accounts of moral agency need to recognise how moral agency is constituted within personal relationships and dynamics of power more often than they do. The second part uses Emirbayer and Miche’s (1998) typology of agency in action to construct an argument about the phases of consciousness across which moral agency needs to be understood. It moves from intuitiveness and habituated moral action into in situ evaluativeness, before raising the significance of moral reflections and projections to moral experience. It then centres emotions as crucial to intuitive, evaluative, and reconstructive aspects of moral agency. The conclusion closes by showing how the account of moral agency established across this chapter connects with—and is necessary to—an account of the relational constitution of the moral dynamics of social life.