Abstract

Martin Sticker's discussion of the common moral agent contains much that I find insightful, true and significant. As a response to his paper, I focus on two important issues that nevertheless separate us: Sticker claims that knowing our duty can be mere passive awareness and that it indeed is passive as awareness of the special status of humanity. I deny that knowing our duty is ever passive. He further claims that the common universalization test is the paradigmatic way active agents acquire moral knowledge. I argue that Sticker appears to construe universalization as a formal test that presupposes no moral knowledge and that so construed the test cannot serve for acquiring moral knowledge