I note here a new book in the domain of moral philosophy, with some obvious implications for jurisprudence, IGNORANCE AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY by Michael J. Zimmerman. Zimmerman maintains that ignorance of the "I didn't know the gun was loaded" sort, is a proper defense to a charge of wrongdoing. Or, in his words, "if one committed some act or omission that was wrong while ignorant of the fact that it was wrong, one is to blame for it, and thereby to blame for any of its consequences, only if one is to blame for one's ignorance." Doesn't sound all that novel, put that way. Few of us would blame a pregnant woman taking a morning sickness drug for the disability of her baby. We might blame a research scientist who was tasked with testing that drug before it could reach market. But we would blame him precisely because he is the one who is supposed to be aware of his ignorance on such matters when he IS ignorant. Or, as lawyers say, guilt requ...
Posts
To start off today's discussion, I refer the reader to my post in November discussing what "effective altruism" is and why I think we must judge that somewhere in its reasoning this philosophy goes horribly wrong. Effective Altruism: The short course (jamesian58.blogspot.com) I won't re-tread that ground but I will observe that the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews site has a review of a new book on the subject. The book is THE RULES OF RESCUE by Theron Pummer. The reviewer is Violetta Igneski . Pummer argues (in Igneski's paraphrase) that "we are not always required to provide the most help possible," that is, maximally effective altruism. He does not reject EA, but wants to reconcile it with a non-consequentialist account of both moral constraints and moral permissions. The constraints are things that you must NOT do, regardless of your utilitarian calculations, and the permissions are things that you CAN rightly do that are in some respect unhelpfu...
Peter Baron, paraphrasing J.L. Mackie, offers an argument against the intuitionism that W.D. Ross and G.E. Moore (and I) share, in meta-ethics or (what is it seems to me the same) moral epistemology. The Baron/Mackie argument runs thus: 1. Objective moral values and the faculties that intuitionists posit to detect them are strikingly queer, or as Mackie put it, "utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else." 2. We should not believe in such a queer concept without very strong evidence. Lemma: We should not believe in objective moral values or a moral sense without very strong evidence. 3. There is little or no evidence in favor of these queer things. Conclusion: We should not believe in them. Notice that the article proceeds as two syllogisms, with the conclusion of the first serving as one of the premises of the second. The whole thing seems to me to be a bit of evidential gerrymandering. It is strikingly odd, even queer, that bright highly-tra...
I've heard that GE Moore once said that whenever he wrote anything down, he saw that it was either false or true but only if qualified. But then when he wrote the qualification down, he would see that the same was true of THAT. Much of PRINCIPIA ETHICA reads like what would eventually be produced by someone who has that sort of writer's block. A, but only when B, except that B is not strictly always necessary, in circumstances such as C, but there might be some ambiguity in that statement of C, so .... And I feel simpatico. As I've mentioned before, Moore is the great philosopher whose death comes closest to coinciding with my own birth. I was born at a moment when Moore only had six days to live. This story about his unquenchable self-qualifications rather strengthens the case that I am he, despite the brief overlap when we must have shared a soul, ebbing from one body and flowing into the other.
As a matter of the psychology of emotions, or for that matter of moral philosophy: is agent regret the same thing as guilt? Jake Wojtowicz, a philosophy PhD student at King's College in London, thinks not. That is the subject of his ongoing dissertation work, and the subject of a lot of the tweets in his twitter account too. It has taken me some time to come to grips with the terminology. "Agent regret" doesn't mean, "regret that one has hired the wrong agent," which is presumably what Britney Spears feels toward -- just about any agent she's ever had. Agent regret means regrets about one' actions in one's capacity as a moral agent. "Oh, damn, I cheated that poor soul. Terrible thing I did," Is that the same as guilt? The case that it isn't the same as guilt is apparently that agent regret is acquired by looking at one's self as if from the outside, whereas true guilt is more of an internal matter. This seems to be mix...
In 2010, Cambridge University Press published KANT'S THEORY OF VIRTUE, by Anne Margaret Baxley, of Washington University, St. Louis. Kant of course is generally considered the foremost exponent in the western canon of deontological ethics, the view that good and bad are subordinate to right and wrong, and hat right/wrong are defined by duties, imperatives, things human beings as rational creatures must or cannot do, damning the consequences. Baxley says, though, that Kantian thinking goes beyond that. Kant has a worked-out view of human character, or virtue, logically separate from his well-known view of duty, We generally associate "virtue ethics" with Aristotle, just as we associate deontology with Kant and consequentialism with Bentham. If one were going to teach a very abbreviated ethics course, one might focus it on those three, and then if allowed time for a fourth, throw in John Stuart Mill and his differences with Bentham to show that consequentialisms ar...
Most readers will surely know by now that I am what is known as an "incompatibilist." I believe that determinism as to human behavior is incompatible with moral judgment. Today, though, I would like to simply quote a gentleman who recently made the case for compatibilism in the comment section of another blog. It is a very well put statement of the point, and I'll quote it today without further comment or contention. -------------------------- A woman goes into a restaurant, sits down, peruses the menu for a minute, and then calls the waiter over to give him her order. We cannot see what is going on in her head. But, assuming she has a normal brain, we expect it to be similar to what happens when we do the same thing, read a menu, evaluate our options, and place an order. We call this empirical event “choosing”. Options are presented, evaluated by some comparative criteria, and a choice is output. So, we know what happened (a choice was made) and we know ...
In the previous two posts, I've given brief blurbs to each of two distinguished contemporaries in the world of social and political philosophy, Amartya Sen and Alan Thomas. Today I'd like to bring their views in contact with one another. The most obvious point to make is that Thomas identifies himself as, if not a 'Rawlsian' exactly, at least a member of the family. Sen, on the other hand, describes his own views in anti-Rawlsian terms. John Rawls is generally credited with reviving political philosophy in the Anglophonic philosophic world after a long period of neglect. Some say he did more, that he revived substantive moral inquiry itself in that world, after a period in which it had disappeared into meta-ethics. So it seems fitting that nearly half a century later, once should describe two major figures by where they stand vis-a-vis Rawls. Thus, I'm illustrating this post with his visage. Rawls' work mixes teleological and deontological elements. Of...
As promised, a more personal follow-up to the encyclopedia-derived material of yesterday. It interests me because it relates, in an ambivalent way, to the controversy over "compatibilism." Intuitively most people (but not most philosophers, or I would guess most neurologists) would say that a person can only be blamed for an action if she could have done otherwise. So if there are no actions as to which one can accurately say that she could have done otherwise, she is not responsible for anything, there is no real distinction between actions per se and mere events. Given a thorough going determinism, then, conventional notions of moral responsibility, of perhaps of morality itself, go out the window. That inference is, as I say, intuitively appealing but very controversial. Back on Feb. 9th I shared with you a recent survey of contemporary academic philosophers on this subject among many others. It indicated that a clear majority of those asked said that they are ...
Friedrich Nietzsche often uses the word "morality" in a pejorative sense, but sometimes uses it for a system of values that he is promoting himself, a re-valued system of values. This causes some confusion. Accordingly, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses the initials MPS, for "morality in a pejorative sense" in an article on Nietzschean themes in moral and political philosophy. What Nietzsche despised about MPS boils down to three presumptions: that human beings are free and so morally responsible for our actions; that the human self is transparent, so some of us can make coherent judgment about why others have acted as they have; and that human selves are sufficiently similar for it to be possible to announce a single moral code for all. Nietzsche targets the first of these, for example, when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil that "the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd," and that MPS requires that absurdit...
The standard definition of "deontology," in moral philosophy, is the view that the morality of an action is to be judged by duty or rule independent of the consequences of the action. Or, in the popular cliche, the view that "the end never justifies the means." The standard example of a deontologist is Immanuel Kant. The standard Philosophy 101 type example involves the serial killer looking for his next victim, and the honest man who knows where the potential victim is hiding, and wonders whether it is permissible to lie to save that life. But in the 1990s Barbara Herman wrote a book apparently intended to overturn the way moral philosophy has been taught in survey courses for generations. I've just learned of this book, because ... well ... news from academia reaches me slowly. At any rate, the book is THE PRACTICE OF MORAL JUDGMENT (1993). That's a photo of her above. Here's a link to the book, much of which can be read on line.
I've heard it said that utilitarianism has this pragmatic benefit: it could constitute a plausible ethical consensus (even if we're all only pretending to believe it?) that could lessen the intensity of moral conflicts. In other words, it is better to argue over non-fundamental things than over fundamental things, because we're more likely to go to war over the latter than the former. Thinking this through: reaping this benefit would require us, I suppose, to give our consent to the simplest possible form of utilitarianism, because only that one can promise to turn serious substantive moral conflicts into mere mechanical computations. In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, portrayed above, then, let us suppose that pleasure could be measured in, say "positive hedons." Pain could be treated as negative hedons. Consider whether the govt should require a vaccine. Add up all the positive hedons the policy will create (discounting for uncertainties), subt...
The headline of this blog entry is "Preserver and Rebel." I deliberately don’t say “conservative” or “liberal” or “right” or “left.” Preserver and rebel have fairly obvious (and obviously relative) meanings, such that for example President Ford was a preserver within the Republican Party of themed 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was a rebel. Nothing very complicated or controversial so far I hope. The preserver often has a case. And when he does it is always the same case. Whatever he wants to preserve, he is willing in order to do so to lock out some interests and disdain some passions. The reasons always come down to this: those interests and passions are (a) inconsistent with the existing social equilibrium, and (b) we can not now see our way clear to a better one. But each passion has its champion, and the collective pressure of them helps make way (whether they as individuals wanted this or not is irrelevant) to a broader, more tolerant, equilibrium later. ...