Neurodiversity and moral agency

Nathan Hilberg (Reading Area Community College)

While what constitutes moral agency can vary among different approaches to ethics, with rationality being featured within deontological approaches and sentience being countenanced within utilitarian thought, the ability to conduct means-end reasoning seems to be a minimal requirement for who has been considered moral actors. After all, even if maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain is regarded as the highest good, a relevant moral agent still must be able to do the calculus of determining which action will bring about the desired end. While one of the strengths of philosophy is its ability to articulate abstract generalizations that can be broadly applicable, this particular abstraction, about the connection between rationality and moral agency, has, in my view, always been problematic. Now, though, we have enough scientific data to diagnose precisely a defect in this model that makes rationality the centerpiece of what constitutes moral agency. At a descriptive, factual level, neurodivergence calls into question the practice of using a standardized form of rationality as the benchmark for what constitutes moral agency such that we need to re-examine the contours of moral responsibility so that they reflect this reality.