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Obligations are used to assess the moral status of actions, motives, and character traits. [102] An action is morally right if it is in tune with a person's obligations and morally wrong if it violates them. [103] Supererogation is a special moral status that applies to cases in which the agent does more than is morally required of them. [104]
Robert Cummins, for example, argues that people should not be judged for their individual actions, but rather for how those actions "reflect on their character". If character (however defined) is the dominant causal factor in determining one's choices, and one's choices are morally wrong, then one should be held accountable for those choices ...
According to motivated desire theory, when a person is motivated to moral action it is indeed true that such actions are motivated—like all intentional actions—by a belief and a desire. But it is important to get the justificatory relations right: when a person accepts a moral judgment he or she is necessarily motivated to act.
Moral realism is the class of theories which hold that there are true moral statements that report objective moral facts. For example, while they might concede that forces of social conformity significantly shape individuals' "moral" decisions, they deny that those cultural norms and customs define morally right behavior.
Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (including omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism , falls under the broader category of teleological ethics , a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of ...
Deontological ethics – approach that judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules. Moral absolutism – view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of their circumstances such as their consequences or the intentions behind them. Thus stealing, for instance, might be considered to ...
The free will is the source of all rational action. But to treat it as a subjective end is to deny the possibility of freedom in general. Because the autonomous will is the one and only source of moral action, it would contradict the first formulation to claim that a person is merely a means to some other end, rather than always an end in ...
Altruism is often seen as a form of consequentialism, as it indicates that an action is ethically right if it brings good consequences to others. [7] Altruism may be seen as similar to utilitarianism, however an essential difference is that the latter prescribes acts that maximize good consequences for all of society, while altruism prescribes maximizing good consequences for everyone except ...