We all have moral reasons to act in a certain way—whether that would be through creating the best outcomes for yourself, maximizing net utility, or following universalized rules. Those reasons can be generally split into agent-relative and agent-neutral. Moral frameworks like ethical egoism are partial and thus agent-relative, while frameworks like utilitarianism and deontology are impartial and thus agent-neutral.
“You should give people food because it makes them happy” is an example of an agent-neutral reason, while “You should give your burger-loving friend burgers because it makes him/her happy” is an example of an agent-relative reason. The difference between the two rests within the usage of the word “your”.
The best way to classify reasons to act as either agent-relative or agent-neutral is through a principle-based conception, where a reason is agent-relative if it satisfies the condition of using ‘you’ or a specific set of people in a non-trivial way. Your reason to give your burger-loving friend burgers rests upon your friend being a person who enjoys burgers—many people don’t, so it doesn’t give you a reason to act in any situation; your reason to act in this case stems entirely from having a friend who happens to enjoy burgers.
If a reason doesn’t refer to specific actors and is a reason to act in any situation, it’s agent-neutral. Creating positive utility gives a utilitarian a reason to act in any situation, regardless of the identities of moral agents involved, while violating a deontological rule gives any moral agent a reason not to act in the way that violates the rule, regardless of who the agent is.
Categorizing rules based on their principles seems very effective—working for nearly every reason you can conceive of, but there do seem to be possible exceptions to this protocol, which we’ll examine in this article.
Those who reject the principle-based conception usually bring up 3 objections:
A rule such as: “If you see a drowning person, you have to save them” includes a non-trivial reference to the word ‘you’. This should, under a principle-based conception, be considered an agent-relative rule, as it specifically refers to the agent itself, though every person who sees a drowning person has a reason to save them.
Such an objection isn’t particularly strong. If I have an agent-neutral reason to act and I swap moral positions with a stranger, the stranger also has that same reason to act—if this doesn’t hold up, the reason is agent-relative. A father has an obligation to care for his child, but if he were to switch places with a stranger, that stranger doesn’t have the same obligation to care for the father’s child.
In this case, following a syntactical rule doesn’t automatically qualify the statement as agent-relative or neutral; I can just as easily write out this statement in a hyper-specific, agent-neutral form without agent references in the form of: “For any agent A and person P, if A is in a position to save P from drowning, A is obligated to do so”.
Driving the point home further, imagine if I were operating under an agent-neutral utilitarian framework and took the impartial, agent-neutral rule of: “Everyone’s interests matter equally”, I could rewrite it as: “Everyone who happens to be inside of your moral circle has interests that matter equally”.
Does this specificity and non-trivial usage of the word ‘your’ cause “everyone’s interest matters equally” to become agent-relative? The answer to this question is no, since that would mean impartial moral theories like utilitarianism suddenly become partial and agent-relative.
An egoist, impartial moral principle can be universal under this definitional framework. A rule such as: “For every agent A, if action B promotes A’s welfare, then A has a reason to do it” is a core tenet of ethical egoism, yet it’s universal in form. Remember that ‘universal’ only means that a principle gives any person a reason to act, and promoting your own welfare is a reason to act for any agent.
This would be a killer objection if the principle-based conception asserted that universality implied agent-neutrality, as well as the contrapositive of that statement. The principle-based conception does not claim that universality implies agent-neutrality, nor does it assert that an absence of universality implies agent-relativity.
Just because all agent-neutral reasons are universalizable doesn’t mean that all universalizable reasons must be agent-neutral. Statements such as:
“You have a special obligation to care for your family.”
“You should give back to your community,” and
“You need to be extra nice to your friends.”
Are all universalizable—everyone with those relationships now has a moral reason to act, but they produce agent-relative reasons.
Particularism negates. No agent-relative reason is true in every specific case; a friend who loves burgers may give you a reason to act and buy him a cheeseburger on one occasion but, if the burger were to give him severe poisoning, it would no longer give you that reason to act anymore. In the case of food, dozens of factors ranging from blood sugar levels to financial cost can alter your reason to act.
The third objection is by far the strongest, so much so that the principle-based conception has to be completely revised into a default-principle-based conception. Particularism essentially proves that an agent-relative or neutral reason to act is never always a reason, despite the laws referring to the same actors and similar situations.
Proponents of the principle-based conception now have to consider overriding principles that invalidate the reason given to the agent in specific scenarios.
The default principles approach usually boils down to this: “If agent A can perform action B such that it brings about result R to person(s) P, and there are no factors that disqualify R from being morally relevant, A has a reason to perform action B”.
While the logically formal version of this statement is full of jargon, it simply boils down to “a person has a reason to perform an action with a type of reason as long as there are no other factors that make the reason morally unimportant.” Protecting your hamburger-loving friend from food poisoning disqualifies your agent-relative reason to give him a hamburger if the hamburger meat has E. coli.
Hardline particularists will object to having ‘default principles’ that aren’t situation specific—every reason to act, no matter how fundamental, should be a consequence of environmental and situational factors; if this were true, the default-principle-based conception fails to accommodate particularism.
Hardline particularists are simply incorrect. A rule such as: “Utility is good, suffering is bad” that gives utilitarians default principles to act on comes from a priori truths—utility is intrinsically good, and suffering is intrinsically bad. These precede accounting for any context-dependent moral shifts that may override our default principles, making the default-principles-based conception extraordinarily flexible.
Generally, we have reasons to act based on intrinsically true reasons, but particularist reasons change from situation to situation and, therefore, have the ability to steer us away from those broad, default directions.
The default-principle-based conception is an extremely useful way of discerning between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons—the drowning-person objection fails to prove that all references to agents are morally relevant, the universality objection only proves that universal principles can still generate agent-relative reasons (something the default-principle-based conception accounts for), and particularism can easily be solved by adopting a default principles approach to the principle-based conception.
In conclusion, we categorize moral reasons by their default principles, and it should be considered the best framework we have for doing so.
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