ABSTRACT
Morality is a universal and distinctive human feature. Compared to other living creatures, morality emphasizes human’s uniqueness that it leads to describe human as a morality agent. Humans make judgments based on rationality to justify what morally right or wrong actions are. This paper elaborates the perennial debate about morality, the source of the values that humans are rooted for finding their moral orientation. The first part will reiterate Alasdair MacIntyre and communitarianism thinker’s arguments that moral judgments come from collective values shared in a community. Rational moral agent means an individual who is bound to historicity of one’s tradition. Hence, morality is particular and subjective. The second part of this paper will present Kantian point of views to examine whether a historical moral agent has autonomy that is derived from a priori, universal principles. At the end of this paper, I will show that the concept of autonomy and historicity of moral agents are not mutually exclusive.
