Someone may argue that although many of our moral...

Someone may argue that although many of our moral obligations are determined by different existential situations and social roles we play, we do often consent to be in those situations and to play those social roles in the first place. My response to this argument is, first, we do not always choose our existential situations or social roles. Many times we are thrown into a situation and many social roles are imposed on us without our previous consent.

Second, although many times a moral agent does theoretically have an option to play or not to play a specific social role, such an option may not always be practical and therefore not real. Third, consenting to do something and being obligated to do something are not always the same. Therefore, in many cases, I consent to do something because I ought to do it, rather than it being the case that I ought to do it because I have consented to do it.

Thus understood, moral responsibility and moral duty are two types of moral obligation. They are different and the distinction between them should not be confused. The difference, as I have argued above, consists in that the former is caused exclusively by the intentional consent of the moral agent while the latter is not. However, they are not completely irrelevant to each other. Moral responsibility may be seen as a special type of moral duty.

That is to say, moral responsibility is a particular moral duty of a moral agent when she behaves as an autonomous being or when she practices her autonomy in her consensual actions. However, a human being as a moral agent is not only an individual autonomous being.

A person is also a social and communal being, which imposes on her duties for caring for others as well as for her surrounding ecological environment, and a rational being, which makes her obligated to calculate the consequential implications of her consensual action before she consents to it. Furthermore she is also a historical and cultural being, a concrete and situational being, etc.

All of these essential features of a human being have created or revealed different types of moral duties that human beings as moral agents have. Therefore, an appropriate moral evaluation or moral judgement of a person's action should be based on or determined by weighing these moral duties of the person in her existential situation against one another.