Moral Worth as Policy Signal: A Constraint-Sensitive Alternative

Accounts of moral worth—the property that makes an agent praiseworthy for acting rightly—typically proceed by conditional analysis: given some standard of rightness, what further condition distinguishes praiseworthy from non-praiseworthy right action? This paper argues that such accounts face an underidentification problem: without invariance constraints on the bracketed predicate “rightness,” the explanatory target is not well-defined, and downstream claims about moral worth are not stably evaluable for correctness. I develop an alternative account on which moralworth attributions function as compressed signals tracking counterfactual policy reliability under coordination constraints. The framework recovers the phenomena that motivate moral-worth talk while avoiding the underidentification problem. I show that the two approaches generate divergent predictions about praise judgments, and I argue that the constraint-sensitive account better explains cases—including those traditionally favorable to the duty-based view.