Reflections

Anscombe persuasively exposes the incongruity in the notion of moral obligation for carrying a law binding sense. While I have no objections toward Aristotle’s ideas of human virtues, I wonder whether moral obligation has to entail a special law binding sense and whether modernity would be well served without a sense of moral obligation. In the modernity of the 21st century, we increasingly encounter actions not by individual human agents, but by abstract entities such as corporations, or machines whose actions are not entirely predictable by their creators. To examine actions by abstract entities or machines in a philosophical moral framework, relying on norms in human virtues seems inadequate. For one, abstract entities and machines do not share the same notion of virtues as human beings. Second, applying moral obligations and moral duties on abstract entities and machines seems to be a more plausible exercise than trying to apply norms of human virtue. Is it possible to repair moral obligation’s conceptual defects? I make an attempt at arguing that moral obligation can be a viable concept once it disposes of the special law binding sense, by using moral philosophy in ancient China as an example and by examining the ideas of moral community and moral code which give rise to notions of moral obligation.