The Theoretical Analysis And Practical Countermeasures Of Moral Omission

Researchers focus on the social moral reality often refer to those inaction of righteousness as moral indifference, but this concept misleads the cause of the phenomenon to psychology, and hide more profound ethical mechanism behind;In this paper, I will use the concept of "omission" which comes from the law to describe the phenomenon, namely "moral omission",for they have the common feature——the neglect of obligations.The word "omission" is interpreted as "non-doing"in its general sense, which is not particularly related to obligations, but obviously only those omissions related to obligations deserve to be discussed; and such omission is still extensive, covering all of the normative aspects of cognition,aesthetic and morality.Moralomissionoften include the neglect of the obligation of moral cognition and moral action. Moral omission always get negative evaluations,therefore,it should be mentioned that the neglect of super moral obligation are allowed in morality.The deep mechanism of moral omission is associated with the weakness of will,but Davidson’s concept of the weakness of will is only suitable for the metaphysical aspect,and there are psychological and ethical aspects. In the ethical aspect,the weakness of will turns to be the conflicts of norms or reasons,but we often regard causes as reasons in daily life,however, the reasons here are illustrative at most;In ethics,these illustrative reasons can be restored to some normative reasons which are acquiescent.There are conflicts between normative reasons which are the cause of the weakness of will in ethics,and some weakness of psychology——such as that there’s no content in one’s brain in an emergency situation——can be restored to the conflicts of reasons.Three kinds of ethical strategy can be presented after we reveal the mechanism of moral omission.To overcome the moral omission,we need willpower which comes from cognition, empathy and character of virture,among which the character of virture,when according to George Sher’s character-based thoery that character is agent’s constitutive feature——the collection of physical and psychological states whose elements interact to sustain [her] characteristic patterns of conscious and rational activity, is a better power than the moral cognition and moral emotion.