The Internal Capacities of Moral Agency

 

Introduction
Moral agency is often treated as a question of will—of choice, conscience, or principle. Yet beneath every deliberate act lies an intricate web of cognitive, emotional, and neural processes that make such choice possible. To understand how we act responsibly, we must first understand how we function coherently. The ability to perceive moral significance, regulate impulses, remember commitments, and respond to social expectations depends on systems evolved to sustain balance, prediction, and adaptation within the living body.

At Northern Sage Kung Fu, this truth is mirrored in practice. Every decision under pressure—whether to engage, yield, or redirect—draws on the same inner capacities that govern moral action: perception, regulation, timing, and restraint. The difference is one of context, not kind. Both demand coherence under stress and discernment amid uncertainty.

This essay examines the internal architecture that makes moral life possible. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and adaptive systems theory, it explores four interdependent capacities—cognitive–affective competence, executive self-regulation, temporal continuity of selfhood, and norm sensitivity. Together, these mechanisms form the foundation of moral functioning: the capacity to integrate thought and emotion, sustain purpose over time, and act in ways that remain both self-directed and socially intelligible.

Inner Foundations
The exercise of moral agency rests on a set of internal capacities that allow individuals to understand their circumstances, evaluate reasons, regulate conduct, and sustain commitments over time. Clinical psychology offers an authoritative framework for identifying such functions. In their seminal work on decisional competence, Thomas Grisso and Paul Appelbaum outlined four key abilities—understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and the ability to express a choice[1]—criteria still used to determine whether individuals possess the psychological foundations of responsible agency.

These functional categories correspond closely to the adaptive systems underlying moral cognition and can be generalized into four domains: (1) cognitive-affective competence, (2) executive self-regulation, (3) temporal continuity of selfhood, and (4) norm sensitivity and evaluative orientation. Together, these domains form the internal architecture of moral agency, integrating emotional awareness, inhibitory control, memory, and social valuation into a unified pattern of evaluative coherence. These same mechanisms instantiate the adaptive coherence first traced in my articles on natural autonomy, extending biological self-organization into deliberative and moral regulation.

i） Cognitive–Affective Competence
The first internal capacity of moral agency is the ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to morally salient features of one’s environment. In clinical psychology, this corresponds to the Grisso–Appelbaum triad of understanding, appreciation, and reasoning—the foundation of informed judgment.[2] These cognitive functions operate in concert with affective dispositions that orient perception and appraisal. Rather than opposing reason, emotion functions as a precision-weighting signal, highlighting what is relevant to well-being and to the needs of others.[3]

Neuroscientific evidence shows that interoceptive networks in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex integrate bodily feedback with evaluative cognition, forming the substrate through which compassion, guilt, and fairness are felt as motivational imperatives.[4] Emotion thus modulates salience by weighting predictive precision over sensory input, directing attention toward features of moral significance.[5] When these processes fail—as in psychopathy or orbitofrontal damage—moral salience collapses, producing callous or disinhibited behavior.[6] Cognitive–affective integration therefore serves as the primary mechanism by which agents recognize others as bearers of claims and coordinate empathy with deliberation.

ii） Executive Self-Regulation
The second capacity is executive self-regulation: the ability to inhibit immediate impulses, sustain commitments, and act consistently with reasons. In the Grisso–Appelbaum framework, these functions—reasoning and appreciation—constitute prerequisites for competent choice.[7] Neuroscientifically, they correspond to the prefrontal–limbic circuitry that mediates top-down control, working memory, and inhibitory precision. Adele Diamond’s research shows that executive functions—working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition—are essential for adaptive learning and moral consistency.[8]

More recent models interpret these same functions through predictive control. Self-regulation entails the continuous updating of expected outcomes and the minimization of error between predicted and actual states.[9] Under threat or chronic stress, prefrontal regulation weakens, driving behavior from deliberative to reactive modes.[10] Allostatic theory further explains that effective regulation depends on balancing internal stability with external change; when stress load exceeds adaptive range, moral conduct devolves into short-term coping.[11] Self-regulation thus reflects predictive control—the ongoing calibration of action and expectation that preserves coherence under pressure.

iii） Temporal Continuity of Selfhood
Moral responsibility presupposes a coherent sense of self across time. Continuity of selfhood integrates memory, intention, and foresight, enabling agents to connect past commitments with future goals. Grisso and Appelbaum highlight memory and appreciation as prerequisites for deliberation and consent.[12] Cognitive science extends this temporal framework: episodic memory and prospection interact dynamically, generating possible futures from past experience. Endel Tulving’s concept of autonoetic consciousness identifies this as the foundation of self-continuity.[13]

Neuroimaging evidence further shows that the default-mode network—encompassing medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and hippocampal regions—supports this integration by binding past and imagined future events into coherent narrative models of the self.[14] Through this predictive synthesis, agents sustain moral continuity and long-range accountability, aligning present action with anticipated consequence.[15] When these systems fracture—as in dementia, trauma, or major depression—agency collapses into isolated reactivity, unable to maintain responsibility across time.[16] Continuity of selfhood thus provides the temporal architecture through which moral identity endures and projects purpose.

iv) Norm Sensitivity and Evaluative Orientation
The fourth capacity is norm sensitivity: the ability to recognize certain reasons as binding and to orient conduct within shared expectations. Cognitively, normativity shapes salience by directing attention toward socially meaningful features and filtering potential actions through evaluative relevance. Contemporary social neuroscience indicates that moral norms are represented in predictive social models linking expected approval, sanction, and fairness outcomes.[17] Agents acquire and refine these models through social feedback loops in which recognition, praise, and blame recalibrate moral expectations.[18] This continuous updating—“social prediction-error learning”—explains how individuals maintain alignment with communal standards while preserving adaptive flexibility. Frith and Frith demonstrate that this predictive mapping of others’ intentions underlies shared intentionality and moral coordination.[19]

Norm sensitivity therefore constitutes the social extension of predictive control, binding self-regulation to intersubjective recognition. When this system falters, conduct may detach from shared justification (as in antisocial behavior) or rigidly over-conform (as in authoritarianism)—both representing failures of evaluative calibration rather than deliberate moral choice. Healthy norm sensitivity maintains equilibrium between autonomy and reciprocity, enabling conduct that is both self-authored and mutually intelligible.

Integrative Synthesis
Taken together, these four domains form an interdependent architecture of moral functioning. Cognitive–affective competence generates moral salience; executive regulation channels energy toward coherent goals; temporal continuity binds decisions across time; and norm sensitivity situates choice within shared life. Mechanistically, these systems interlock through reciprocal feedback: affective salience shapes executive control, temporal prospection stabilizes planning, and social feedback recalibrates norm adherence. Contemporary integrative neuroscience refers to this process as neural reuse—the functional integration of emotion, control, memory, and valuation into a unified system of predictive moral governance.¹⁹ Through this synthesis, moral agency emerges not as an independent faculty but as an evolved coordination of adaptive systems sustaining coherence, foresight, and mutual recognition. Its fragility under stress, trauma, or deprivation underscores why these capacities must be protected by the external enabling conditions developed in the next section.

Social Embedding and Fragility
Moral agency does not arise in isolation. It is scaffolded by developmental processes, stabilized through cultural learning, and sustained by social recognition. Cognitive and social neuroscience reveal that human cognition is inherently interactive, emerging from neural systems that co-regulate attention, affect, and evaluation through participation with others.[20] Shared intentionality and cooperative inference form the ecological substrate of moral understanding, aligning individual prediction with collective patterns of meaning.[21] Within this network, relevance realization functions as a distributed process—a dynamic interplay between individual inference and collective norm calibration that sustains coherence in shared moral perception.[22]

Despite their sophistication, these systems remain fragile. Chronic stress, coercion, and deprivation disrupt prefrontal–limbic regulation, biasing cognition toward immediacy and reactive control.[23] Prolonged threat exposure narrows predictive horizons, fragments continuity of self, and suppresses empathic attunement. Trauma and moral injury further erode executive function and narrative integration, weakening the neurocognitive scaffolding required for responsible action.[24] The vulnerability of these systems underscores that moral agency depends not only on internal competence but also on stable environmental and social conditions that protect against coercive or dehumanizing disruption.

Normative Grounding and Transition
The internal capacities of moral agency form the functional architecture of moral viability—an ensemble of cognitive, affective, and regulatory mechanisms that sustain coherent and socially intelligible conduct. Once developed, these systems help stabilize their own preconditions, fostering coordination, recognition, and the predictability required for moral life. Recent work in predictive social neuroscience shows that norms operate as precision constraints, determining which features of social reality are treated as meaningful within collective inference.[25] Moral learning functions as a process of predictive calibration, in which deviations from expectation refine an agent’s sense of legitimate action within a shared world.[26]

Conclusion
Moral agency is not an abstract faculty set apart from life—it is the living integration of perception, emotion, memory, and regulation that allows human beings to act coherently within a shared world. The capacities that sustain it—cognitive–affective competence, executive self-regulation, temporal continuity, and norm sensitivity—form a dynamic system of balance rather than a hierarchy of control. When these systems function harmoniously, moral understanding becomes embodied: emotion refines judgment, foresight steadies action, and empathy aligns freedom with responsibility.

At Northern Sage Kung Fu, these principles take tangible form. Each exercise, from stance work to sparring, trains the same inner architecture of coherence: attention under pressure, restraint amid intensity, and recognition of others through movement. Physical practice thus reinforces moral practice by stabilizing the biological and psychological foundations of agency itself.

To preserve moral agency, then, is to preserve the integrity of these interdependent systems—the cognitive and affective mechanisms that make ethical life possible. Their fragility under stress and their resilience through cultivation remind us that morality is not imposed from above but sustained from within. It grows through disciplined coherence—of body, mind, and relation—within the living rhythm of human life.

 

 

About The Author

Nathan A. Wright
Nathan is the Managing Director and Chief Instructor at Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, and Chief Representative of Luo Guang Yu Seven Star Praying Mantis in Canada and China. With over 25 years of experience living in China, he is deeply committed to passing on traditional martial arts in its most sincere form. As part of his passion Nathan regularly writes on related topics of self-defense, combat, health, philosophy, ethics, personal cultivation, and leadership. Email Nathan if you have questions on this article, or if you have interest in learning more about studying traditional Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu.

 

 

 

End Notes
[1] Thomas Grisso and Paul S. Appelbaum, Assessing Competence to Consent to Treatment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–34.
[2] Paul S. Appelbaum and Thomas Grisso, “Assessing Patients’ Capacities to Consent to Treatment,” New England Journal of Medicine 319, no. 25 (1988): 1635–38.
[3] Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 120–128; see also Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994),173-176.
[4] Lisa Feldman Barrett and W. Kyle Simmons, “Interoceptive Predictions in the Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, no. 7 (2015): 419–29.
[5] Philippe Koban and Patrik Vuilleumier, “The Affective Neuroscience of Morality and Emotions,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22, no. 12 (2021): 766–781.
[6] James Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 49-51.
[7] Thomas Grisso and Paul S. Appelbaum, Assessing Competence to Consent to Treatment, 40–44.
[8] Adele Diamond, “Executive Functions,” Annual Review of Psychology 64 (2013): 135–68.
[9] Karl J. Friston, Thomas Parr, and Giovanni Pezzulo, “Active Inference: A Process Theory,” Biological Cybernetics 112, no. 5 (2018): 495–513.
[10] Amy F. T. Arnsten, “Stress Signalling Pathways that Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, no. 6 (2009): 410–22.
[11] Peter Sterling, “What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 108 (2020): 1–15.
[12] Thomas Grisso and Paul S. Appelbaum, Assessing Competence to Consent to Treatment, 42–44.
[13] Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
[14] Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner, “Episodic Simulation of Future Events,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8, no. 9 (2017): 657–661.
[15] Bruce D. McNaughton and György Buzsáki, “Hippocampal Consolidation and Sequence Replay,” Science 364 (2019): eaav4476.
[16] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Viking, 2014).
[17] Eshin Jolly and Luke J. Chang, “Social Learning through Prediction Error,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23, no. 4 (2019): 388–401.
[18] Molly Crockett, “Moral Outrage in the Digital Age,” Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 11 (2017): 769–771.
[19] Michael L. Anderson, “Neural Reuse and the Integration of Cognitive Functions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41 (2018): e169.
[20] Chris D. Frith and Uta Frith, “Mechanisms of Social Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 63 (2012): 287–313.
[21] Michael Tomasello, “The Moral Psychology of Obligation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43 (2020): e56.
[22] John Vervaeke, Richard Rebele, and Stephen Ferraro, “Distributed Relevance Realization and the Social Constitution of Meaning,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 581430.
[23] Amy F. T. Arnsten, “Stress Signaling Pathways That Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, no. 6 (2009): 410–22; Bruce S. McEwen and Peter J. Gianaros, “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Links to Socioeconomic Status, Health, and Disease,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1186 (2010): 190–222.
[24] Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706; Rachel Yehuda et al., “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Nature Reviews Disease Primers 1, no. 1 (2015): 15057.
[25] Eshin Jolly and Luke Chang, “Social Learning through Prediction Error: How People Learn to Value and Coordinate with Others,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23, no. 5 (2019): 388–401.
[26] Falk Lieder, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Noah D. Goodman, “Learning to Learn from Cognitive Biases,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23, no. 12 (2019): 1019–34.