Recently I was searching for a journal article to research and I stumbled across the article “Moral Responsibility” by Andrew Eshlemen. “Moral Responsibility was published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. When I first came across the article it didn’t really catch my attention because I did not think that the topic of moral responsibility really pertained to my question. But, after reading the article I realized that the article may not have much to do with my question, but my question has everything to do with the article. 

 

Moral responsibility is something that we are all raised to have. The example given in the text by Andrew Eshlemen is that if a person comes across a car accident, he or she may feel morally obligated to help. He also goes on to say that the way a person responds can sometimes change the way society perceives that person. He stated that if a person stops and helps and saves a child, that person is more than likely to be perceived as a hero. If that person just keeps on going and does not even stop to help or call for help, that person may be perceived as immoral.

 

The way this issue of moral responsibility fits into my question is this. Do we feel moral obligation to do things because we are raised and taught to do them and are therefore forced by society or are we freely choosing to do things that are perceived as morally correct or incorrect. I think this is a two sided coin. If a person is raised in a neighborhood where it is “eat or be eaten,” that person probably doesn’t feel as much moral obligation to help the car accident victim as a person raised in a nice, quiet neighborhood would. So, I do think society plays some roll in how morally obligated we feel towards others.

 

However, being that I am an advocate of the idea that we as humans have free will to make choices, I believe that we freely choose what we are morally obligated to do. We may have been raised a certain way which influences the way we think, but we are still freely choosing to act on something. If a person sees a car accident they must freely choose to stop, get out of their car and help. They may have been told to when they were young and they may not have. Either way it doesn’t matter. If a person stops to help, it is in their own free will. Honestly, they could keep on driving and society would probably never know that that person even saw the accident.

 

Throughout the rest of his essay, Mr. Eshlemen goes on to describe some ancient history on moral obligation. He gives insight on Aristotle’s take on the issue. Aristotle was the first to construct explicitly a theory of moral responsibility (Eshlemen). This is significant because there were people on earth for thousands of years before Aristotle’s time and no one ever stopped to think whether or not we are morally obligated to do things. Aristotle believed that moral obligation went hand in hand with human responsibility. Many people believe that moral obligation is based upon what God would want a person to do.

 

I tend to agree with Aristotle. We are responsible for our own actions. If we mess up, we should be blamed for it. If we do something well, we should be praised for it. I believe that moral obligation and free will go hand in hand. Even if we do something because we think it is what God wants us to do, we still have the physical ability not to do it. Therefore, everything we do that is not physically forced upon us is done in free will.