Drawing on pragmatism, this chapter thus provides a sketch of how moral agency needs to be conceptualised to facilitate a relational account of moral practice. In dialogue with contemporary sociological and psychological studies of morality, it is argued that G. H. Mead’s work is especially effective at providing a framework for firstly conceptualising the relational constitution of moral agency, and secondly for conceptualising an interactionist-relational account of how moral agency is enacted across the dimensions of agency specified in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) famous relational account of agency. However, Mead’s account – along with wider traditions of conceptualising moral agency – gives insufficient attention to crucial dimensions of power and emotion in how moral agency is constituted and enacted. The work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Carol Gilligan are deployed to explore the significance of power for moral agency, and Jane Addams’s work is brought into dialogue with contemporary moral psychology to expound the role of emotion in moral life. I close by briefly setting out the value of this pragmatist account of moral agency to understanding the processual nature of moral relations at a ‘social’ scale.

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A Sketch of a Pragmatist Account of the Relational Constitution and Enactment of Moral Agency

  • Owen Abbott

摘要

Drawing on pragmatism, this chapter thus provides a sketch of how moral agency needs to be conceptualised to facilitate a relational account of moral practice. In dialogue with contemporary sociological and psychological studies of morality, it is argued that G. H. Mead’s work is especially effective at providing a framework for firstly conceptualising the relational constitution of moral agency, and secondly for conceptualising an interactionist-relational account of how moral agency is enacted across the dimensions of agency specified in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) famous relational account of agency. However, Mead’s account – along with wider traditions of conceptualising moral agency – gives insufficient attention to crucial dimensions of power and emotion in how moral agency is constituted and enacted. The work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Carol Gilligan are deployed to explore the significance of power for moral agency, and Jane Addams’s work is brought into dialogue with contemporary moral psychology to expound the role of emotion in moral life. I close by briefly setting out the value of this pragmatist account of moral agency to understanding the processual nature of moral relations at a ‘social’ scale.