Dr. Jeremy Watkins
Two ways of being bad
In this post, I want to mention a puzzle about the nature of moral appraisal – and more especially the nature of the assessment of persons, as opposed to acts or states of affairs – that comes into focus when we consider the following pair of cases:
- Imagine that person A is a married, male, philosophy professor, who is away at a conference. One night he goes to the conference bar, where he meets a beautiful woman who propositions him. Although he doesn’t start out with the intention of using the conference as an opportunity for extra-marital affairs, one thing leads to another, and he ends up sleeping with the woman.
- Imagine that person B is a married, male, philosophy professor, who is away at a conference. One night, he goes to conference bar, which is deserted. He happily reads his newspaper, without any thought or intention of pursuing extra-marital sex. However, the following counterfactual is true of him: had he been propositioned by a beautiful woman (and perhaps had a few whiskies), he would have slept with her.
What should we make of the relative demerits of A and B? Is A morally worse (i.e. more blameworthy, more culpable) than B? Well, on first inspection, we might be tempted to think so. After all, A has committed adultery whilst B hasn’t, and surely committing adultery aggravates blameworthiness? But is this the full story? Isn’t it relevant that B would have committed adultery had he been exposed to the same circumstances as A? Doesn’t this mean that his character is just as bad (disloyal, lascivious) as A’s, assuming that character depends on dispositions. And doesn’t this mean, in turn that B is just as blameworthy as A, assuming blameworthiness depends on badness of character?
Well, perhaps, but perhaps we should say something more nuanced. Perhaps we should say that there are two kinds of blameworthiness: there’s blameworthiness in the sense of violating one’s obligations without an excuse, and there’s blameworthiness in the sense of having a bad character: A is blameworthy in the first sense when B is not (B hasn’t violated any obligations), but A and B are equally blameworthy in the second sense (since their characters are equally bad).
However, if we do say this, then a whole bunch of new questions come into focus. For example, why are there two ways of appraising people? Is one more fundamental than the other? If we’re interested in evaluating persons (as opposed to acts or states of affairs), shouldn’t we be more concerned with blameworthiness in the second sense since persons seem to be more closely tied to their characters than their actions. In which case, is the first sense of blameworthiness only of interest because of its relation to practical questions concerning criminal or civil liability?
I won’t comment on these questions here, but I suspect that thinking about them will shed light on a whole host of debates in moral philosophy, including the debate between virtue ethicists and their opponents, perhaps encouraging a form of reconciliation between the different views. In light of the foregoing distinction, for example, it might be argued that the contrast between virtue ethics and so-called “law conceptions of ethics” shouldn’t be expressed (as it is sometimes expressed) as a contrast between a conception of ethics which focuses on the evaluation of persons and a conception of ethics which focuses on the evaluation of acts; instead, it should be expressed as a contrast between two (equally important?) ways of evaluating persons, one focusing on character, the other focusing on compliance with moral obligations.
Thanks for the excellent food for thought.
I would like to ask to what extent does this approach reduce the key implications of moral codes- say ‘act according to categorical rules’ in the deontological outlook- to epistemological concerns? It seems that this is the natural outgrowth of describing moral codes as different ways of evaluating persons, insofar as we seem to be looking for some specific meta-ethical ‘good’ in our evaluations, which are on this approach all aimed at the same thing and are methods to find our way to it.
Though I do wonder whether (if moral codes are in fact different epistemological methods) this may yield a justification for applying different moral codes in different areas, the way you use different investigative tools to evaluate your way to truth in science for instance.
Certainly the first person perspective would be a good place to start for such an argument; in the example only the professor himself in the case of B could have known (though perhaps not certainly) that his fidelity was a mere consequence of moral luck. On the other hand, an onlooker incapable of knowing even this, lacking knowledge of the professor’s mind, would need to use different appraisal methods (‘law conceptions of ethics’) to gain any knowledge on the matter (what if the onlooker had some form of scientific implement for the purpose though, mabye a type of brain scanner- do at least some ethical codes become redundant methodology?).
Thanks for the very interesting comments, Brendan.
I don’t think that I want to take a firm stand on whether first-personal knowledge of psychological dispositions is better than third-personal knowledge. Certainly we sometimes show understanding of our dispositions (“I’m not going to drink tonight, because whenever I drink I become rude and obnoxious”) but sometimes our understanding may be marred by self-deception or undue optimism. B might have no inkling that he is prone to commit adultery whenever he is propositioned by a beautiful woman, perhaps because it hasn’t happened before or perhaps because he is so firmly wedded to a conception of himself as an upstanding person that he discounts evidence to the contrary.
I think you are on to something when you suggest that epistemic factors may sometimes explain why we appraise people on the basis of actions/intentions rather than character – the former are manifest in a more direct way than the latter. However, I guess I’m not sure that I would want to say that blaming people for actions/intentions is a mere proxy for blaming people for character, so that we would give up blaming people for actions/intentions if we had perfect information. I’m inclined to think that we would still say that A is, in one respect, more blameworthy than B in a condition of perfect information. My puzzle is to explain why, or, to put it another way, to explain why it matters what people actually do/intend.
Thank you for that most interesting reply, and thanks for clarifying the issue to do with whether the ‘evaluating persons’ element renders ethics partially epistemological.
I would certainly agree to your assertion that in most eyes A would look more blameworthy than B in the case given, though I do wonder whether you would agree that this may betray a streak of consequentialist practicality in the group supposed; it causes far more trouble when people actually do breach moral codes, rather than merely being disposed to do so. Elsewise you could perhaps argue that by actually doing wrong, that is abandoning one’s moral inhibitions, you make it more likely that you will repeat the pattern in the future. Neither account quite exorcises the moral luck issue within the example though.
Would it then perhaps be fair to say that moral luck is not usually a part of our ‘everyday morality’, and is rather (at least largely) a creation of further thought based upon the apparent lack of any non-contingent distinction between the cases A and B and our desire for our morality to be non-contingent? If this is the case, then doesn’t the question boil down somewhat to a question of why exactly we wish our morality to be non-contingent- is this a result of the influence of religion over moral thought or perhaps enlightenment beliefs about impartiality?
Also this may produce a difficulty as to how the issue of moral continence (alluded to, I believe, in the original post in terms of ‘evaluating persons … focusing on compliance with moral obligations) fits into this. Wasn’t A’s moral continence a contingent factor acting upon his original decision to commit adultery in the same way as the presence and actions of the woman in the bar were a contingent factors (it was after all, only his luck that he was born weak-willed), or do we define his moral continence as being part of the person under moral evaluation?
It seems we should choose the latter, but to do so we would have to bring in a further distinction between internal and external contingents. If however, if this distinction could be refined (bearing in mind the potential of external factors to alter internal ones; your moral beliefs do tend to be at least partially conditioned by your cultural background, for instance), could it perhaps aid in the discussion on the issue, insofar as you can see it as a question of what is actually part of the person under moral evaluation? Although it would be fair to say that this would still result in us assigning no more blame to B than A on the level of the person and that which is internal to the person.