Lois Taylor Old Greenwich, Conn., Sept. 19, 2008 To the Editor: I read with interest the Op-Ed article by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards regarding the Bush administration's proposal to protect health care workers from performing actions that they find morally objectionable.
Moreover, as argued in Smiley 2010, if we are truly concerned about collective moral responsibility, rather than about the moral responsibility of individuals who belong to collectives, we do not have to insist that individual members have performed actions that render them morally blameworthy.
Note also that corruptors are not simply persons who perform actions that corrupt, they are also morally responsible for this corruption.
Kelly Sorensen defends a model of the relationship between effort and moral worth in which the effort exerted in performing a morally desirable action contributes positively to the action's moral worth, but the effort required to perform the action detracts from its moral worth.
A person with a frail will attempts to perform morally right actions because these actions are morally right, but she is too weak to follow through with her plans.
Is the idea, then, that while occasional prevention of such evils does not significantly reduce the extent of the moral responsibility of others, if one's power were to increase, a point would be reached where one should sometimes refrain from preventing people from performing morally horrendous actions?
He posits two core relations between effort and moral worth: The effort that the agent exerted in performing the morally desirable action (henceforth, 'Effort Expended') positively influences moral worth, in the sense that, at least over some range, increased Effort Expended makes for morally worthier action.
The effort that the agent exerted in performing the morally desirable action (henceforth, 'Effort Expended') positively influences moral worth, in the sense that, at least over some range, increased Effort Expended makes for morally worthier action.
Instead, she performs morally right actions partly because these actions are morally right and partly because of some other incentive, e.g., self-interest.
A person with an impure will does not attempt to perform morally right actions just because these actions are morally right.
According to Kant, we have a morally good will only if we choose to perform morally right actions because they are morally right (Kant 1785, 4: 393–4:397; Kant 1793, Bk I).
