At issue (and one gathers this as much from Wallace's notes, appended to the text, as from the narrative itself) is an intra-service fight over increasing automation, and the question of whether the IRS should be an organisation in which morally competent human beings enforce civic virtue, or just a money-making business in which machines process paperwork for maximum revenue.
For present purposes, we will simply assume that a plausible rationale is one that epistemically and morally competent peers will take seriously as a basis for supporting a coercive law.
The conduct book "helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as a 'middle class' and that the modest, submissive but morally and domestically competent woman it described was the first 'modern individual'".
It is possible, the liberal critics claim, for a morally sensitive and epistemically competent citizen to regard only certain religious considerations as providing decisive support for a given coercive law.
After all, if religious reasons can be adequate (a possibility that advocates of the standard view do not typically deny), then they are just the sort of reason that can be adequate without being recognized as such even by our morally serious and epistemically competent peers.
Exemptions involve pleas that a person is not competent to function as a morally responsible agent, such as, "She did not understand what she was doing.
There is a widespread belief that what is referred to as passive (voluntary) euthanasia, wherein life-sustaining or life-prolonging measures are withdrawn or withheld in response to a competent patient's request, is morally acceptable.
In our view, it is equally morally worrisome not to seek consent from a competent young person.
In this paper, we argue that the current state of affairs is morally unacceptable and that all stakeholders (pharmaceutical industry, competent authorities, lawmakers, regulators, and politicians) have the moral duty and the shared responsibility towards making bacteriophage therapy urgently available for all patients in need.
The idea is that everyone has the potential to become morally exemplary, but, in real life, the capacity to make competent and morally justifiable political judgments varies among people, and an important task of the political system is to identify those with above-average ability.
In short, on this alternative view, the capacity to value marks the morally crucial threshold above which the current interests of a formerly competent individual remain authoritative for the surrogate's decisions and the conflicting interests of the earlier self can be set aside.
