Characterizing the Value of Morally Responsible Agency

Moral influence theories of responsibility justify practices of praising and blaming by pointing to their effects on the development of our reasons-responsive capacities. Exercising these capacities has instrumental value—for example, they enable agents to act rightly and to flourish—but some argue that it is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I develop a value theory of morally responsible agency. I show how the value realized by exercising agency depends on the moral valence of the action performed and the skill with which agency is exercised. I then argue that moral influence theorists who accept this axiology have reason to adopt a more ambitious approach such that our responsibility practices should aim to cultivate maximally skilled and maximally good agents.