Many views of moral agency include, implicitly or explicitly, a consciousness requirement—namely, the claim that phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of moral agency. This paper casts doubt on the consciousness requirement. I argue that consciousness is not necessary for instantiating four key capacities necessary for moral agency: action, moral concept possession, responsiveness to moral reasons, and moral understanding. I defend my picture of nonconscious moral agency as a plausible account of an entity that can act for moral reasons and can be morally responsible. Lastly, I discuss broader implications of my argument, especially on the possibility of artificial moral agency.

Moral understanding has typically been defined as grasping the explanation, q, for some proposition, p, where p states that some action is morally right (or wrong). This article deals with an underdiscussed point within the literature on moral understanding: the degree of moral understanding one has deepens with the more moral reasons that one grasps, whereby these reasons not only consist of those that speak in favor of an action’s moral permissibility but also those speaking against. I argue for a surprising and important implication of this: having a deep degree of moral understanding can make it harder to carry out the right action. Furthermore, I propose that we should think of our pursuit of moral understanding in an analogous way as to how some have thought of scientific understanding: There may be good reasons to fail to appreciate all of the actual moral reasons that in fact exist; sometimes we should seek a surfaced-level moral understanding instead of something deeper. Just as idealizations used within science – which can involve deviations from the truth – can help us achieve scientific understanding, so too we might restrict the moral reasons that we seek to grasp in pursuit of moral understanding.

I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame facilitates moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to a blamer’s standing serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue, is blaming hypocritically, or is complicit in the wrongdoing at issue. In contrast, I argue that three widely recognized conditions on standing to blame—the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions—serve as epistemically tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame. Standing matters because, and to the extent that, it indirectly informs our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.

It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The problem of moral testimony is thus not a problem with testimony generally, but a problem of deferential testimony specifically.