Abstract

This paper argues that, although moral agency and moral patiency are distinct concepts, we have pro tanto normative reasons to ascribe some moral agency to all moral patients. Assuming a practice-focused approach, moral agents are beings that participate in moral responsibility practices. When someone is a participant, we are warranted to take a participant stance toward them. Beings who lack moral agency are instead accounted for by an objective stance. As such, they are assumed to be exempted from moral responsibility practices but may still be acknowledged as moral patients. In this paper, I question that a wholly objective stance is, in practice, compatible with proper sensitivity and responsiveness to moral considerations regarding the exempted moral patient. I claim that the participant stance involves a distinct other-regarding perspective, only available from within this stance. Recognizing others specifically as addressor participants induces a readiness for second-person interaction. Instead of merely seeing and treating the moral patient as an object of moral concern, we see them as a source or maker of moral claims and demands. This “you-perspective” appears to be necessary for perceiving a wider range of morally relevant facts and considerations in relation to them. Consequently, taking a wholly objective stance towards a moral patient may impede, or even corrupt, one’s moral sensitivity and responsiveness. Given a commitment to scaffold and cultivate moral agency, there are normative reasons to take an addressor participant stance to all moral patients, and never a wholly objective one.