TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jefferson, Anneli
AU  - Heinrichs, Jan-Hendrik
AU  - Sifferd, Katrina
TI  - Scaffolding Bad Moral Agents
JO  - Topoi
VL  - 44
SN  - 0167-7411
CY  - Dordrecht [u.a.]
PB  - Springer Science + Business Media B.V
M1  - FZJ-2024-06501
SP  - 445-455
PY  - 2025
AB  - Recent work on ecological accounts of moral responsibility and agency have argued for the importance of social environments for moral reasons responsiveness. Moral audiences can scaffold individual agents’ sensitivity to moral reasons and their motivation to act on them, but they can also undermine it. In this paper, we look at two case studies of ‘scaffolding bad’, where moral agency is undermined by social environments: street gangs and online incel communities. In discussing these case studies, we draw both on recent situated cognition literature and on scaffolded responsibility theory. We show that the way individuals are embedded into a specific social environment changes the moral considerations they are sensitive to in systematic ways because of the way these environments scaffold affective and cognitive processes, specifically those that concern the perception and treatment of ingroups and outgroups. We argue that gangs undermine reasons responsiveness to a greater extent than incel communities because gang members are more thoroughly immersed in the gang environment.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:001342057200001
DO  - DOI:10.1007/s11245-024-10110-2
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1033628
ER  -