MULTI‐DIMENSIONAL CONSEQUENTIALISM

This article introduces and explores a distinction between multi‐dimensional and one‐dimensional consequentialist moral theories. One‐dimensional consequentialists believe that an act's deontic status depends on just one aspect of the act, such as the sum total of wellbeing it produces, or the sum total of priority‐ or equality‐adjusted wellbeing. Multi‐dimensional consequentialists believe that an act's deontic status depends on more than one aspect. They may, for instance, believe that the sum total of wellbeing produced by an act and the degree to which the wellbeing is equally distributed in the population affect the act's deontic status independently of each other. These two aspects cannot be reduced into any single (composite) aspect. Wellbeing and equality are two separate considerations that cannot be merged into some novel entity that accurately reflects both intuitions. On the multi‐dimensional view I defend, such clashes between separate aspects are irresolvable and are best accounted for by claiming that moral rightness and wrongness are non‐binary concepts. Some acts are, literally speaking, a little bit right (because they maximise wellbeing) and a little bit wrong (because they do not maximise equality). 1     

Frankfurt-Type Examples, Obligation, and Responsibility

I examine John Martin Fischer's attempt to block an argument for the conclusion that without alternative possibilities, morally deontic judgments (judgments of moral right, wrong, and obligation) cannot be true. I then criticize a recent attempt to sustain the principle that an agent is morally blameworthy for performing an action only if this action is morally wrong. I conclude with discussing Fisher's view that even if causal determinism undermines morally deontic judgments, it still leaves room for other significant moral assessments including assessments of moral blameworthiness.     

The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the “nonworseness claim,” it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as “better-than-permissible acts”—acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a “sweatshop” in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.     

Admirable Immorality,Dirty Hands,Ticking Bombs,and Torturing Innocents

Is torturing innocent people ever morally required? I rebut responses to the ticking‐bomb dilemma by Slote, Williams, Walzer, and others. I argue that torturing is morally required and should be performed when it is the only way to avert disasters. In such situations, torturers act with dirty hands because torture, though required, is vicious. Conversely, refusers act wrongly, yet virtuously, thus displaying admirable immorality. Vicious, morally required acts and virtuous, morally wrong acts are odd, yet necessary to preserve the ticking‐bomb dilemma's phenomenology, the role of habituation in moral development, the virtue/continence distinction, and morality's overridingness, consistency, and plausibility.     

Opportunistic Carnivorism

Some carnivores defend the position that the opportunistic consumption of meat is morally permissible even under the assumption that it is morally wrong to act in ways that ause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings. Ordering and consuming chicken once a week, they argue, will not increase the numbers of chickens suffering or slaughtered, since the system of purchasing and farming chickens is not sufficiently fine-tuned to register differences at margin. We argue that, insensitivity of the market notwithstanding, consistent consequentialists are morally prohibited from each additional purchase and consumption of meat.     

Young children's moral judgments of commission and omission related to the understanding of Knowledge or Ignorance

This study examined developmental change in young children's moral judgments of commission and omission related to mental states, especially knowledge or ignorance. 4–5 and 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds (n=67) made moral judgments about the tasks related to the understanding of knowledge or ignorance. The tasks were also composed of two types of acts: commission or omission. The results showed that the both age groups understood knowledge and ignorance, but that the older group made moral judgments based on this understanding more similar to adults compared to the younger group. There was not an age difference concerning whether the acts were of commission or omission. These findings indicate that there is no difference for young children in the difficulty in moral judgments of acts of commission and omission related to mental states, whereas there is a developmental difference in using the understanding of knowledge or ignorance for making moral judgments. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impermissibility and Kantian Moral Worth

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action’s maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the moral rightness of an act. I argue that Kant cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth.     

Is it Morally Wrong to Defend Unjust Causes as a Lawyer?

The question I address in this article is whether it is morally wrong for a lawyer to represent a client whose purpose is immoral or unjust. My answer to this question is that it is wrong, prima facie. This conclusion holds, even accepting certain traditional principles of lawyer's professional ethics, such as the right of defence and the so‐called principle of ‘adversarial’ litigation. Both the adversarial system and the right of defence are sufficient to support or justify the right of potential clients (and citizens in general) to defend their interests in the judicial system and to do so with the technical assistance of a lawyer. This right includes a right to pursue unjust or immoral purposes (within the law). However, having a right to do X does not mean that it is morally permissible to do X. We can have a right to do something morally wrong. This being so, the fundamental moral reason for a lawyer not to accept representation for a client with an immoral purpose is that it is, prima facie, morally wrong to help someone do something wrong.     

Children's moral judgments of commission and omission based on their understanding of second‐order mental states1

Abstract: Children's moral judgments about acts of commission and omission with negative outcomes were studied based on their understanding of mental states. Children (N = 142) in the first, third, and fifth grades made judgments about four tasks composed of two levels of mental states (first‐order or second‐order) and two types of acts (commission or omission). The results showed that the 7‐year‐olds responded considering only first‐order mental states, but the 9‐ and 11‐year‐olds also used second‐order mental states in their judgments. Whether the acts were commission or omission did not make a difference. These results indicate that children can make moral judgments regarding acts of commission and omission based on an understanding of second‐order mental states by approximately the age of 9 years.     

Respect for Just Revenge

The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extra‐legal) revenge, and draws attention to a special kind of judgement we may make of such acts. While endorsing the general view that an act of private revenge must be morally wrong, it maintains that under certain special conditions (which include its being just) it is susceptible of a rational respect from others which is based on its standing outside morality, as a choice by the revenger not to act morally but to obey other compelling motives. This thesis is tested against various objections, notably those which doubt the intelligibility or application of such non‐moral ‘respect,’ or would assimilate it to moral approval; and it is distinguished from various positions with which it might be confused, such as the ‘admirable immorality’ of Slote, or the Nietzschean critique of morality.     

Telling Others to Do What You Believe Is Morally Wrong: The Case of Confucius and Zai Wo

Can it ever be morally justifiable to tell others to do what we ourselves believe is morally wrong to do? The common sense answer is no. It seems that we should never tell others to do something if we think it is morally wrong to do that act. My first goal is to argue that in Analects 17.21, Confucius tells his disciple not to observe a ritual even though Confucius himself believes that it is morally wrong that one does not observe the ritual. My second goal is to argue against the common sense answer and explain how Confucius can be justified in telling his disciple to do what Confucius thought was wrong. The first justification has to do with telling someone to do what is second best when the person cannot do what is morally best. The second justification has to do with the role of a moral advisor.     

When ignorance is no excuse: Different roles for intent across moral domains

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key factor for moral judgments of harm, but less of a factor for purity violations. Based on the agent’s innocent intent, participants judged accidental harms less morally wrong than accidental incest; based on the agent’s guilty intent, participants judged failed attempts to harm more morally wrong than failed attempts to commit incest. These patterns were specific to moral judgments versus judgments of the agent’s control, knowledge, or intent, the action’s overall emotional salience, or participants’ ratings of disgust. The current results therefore reveal distinct cognitive signatures of distinct moral domains, and may inform the distinct functional roles of moral norms.     

On Why There is a Problem of Supererogation

How can it be that some acts of very high moral value are not morally required? This is the problem of supererogation. I do not argue in favor of a particular answer. Instead, I analyze two opposing moral intuitions the problem involves. First, that one should always do one’s best. Second, that sometimes we are morally allowed not to do our best. To think that one always has to do one’s best is less plausible, as it makes every morally best act obligatory. I argue that, despite its implausibility, this is the main ingredient in a traditional outlook I call ‘morality of law,’ which conceives of morality as impartial, impersonal, rule-based and obligation-based. My main point is that supererogation will always be seen as problematic if the background theory is a morality of law. This is because supererogation encapsulates a view of morality-outside-obligation, whereas morality of law centers upon obligation as its main instrument of curbing a supposedly natural human selfishness.

     

Collective and Individual Duties to Protect the Environment

ABSTRACT Many environmental harms are produced by the consequences of too many people doing acts which taken together have collective bad consequences, e.g. overuse of an underground aquifer or acid rain ‘killing’ a lake. If such acts are wrong, what should a conscientious moral agent do in such circumstances? Examples of such harms have the general feature that they are produced by individual acts, which taken by themselves may be innocent and morally permissible, but which have disastrous consequences when too many people perform them. Philosophers once thought that the generalisation argument (GA), “If the consequences of everyone's doing acts of kind a are undesirable, then no one ought to do a,” was the appropriate principle to guide a conscientious moral agent in such circumstances. However, there has been considerable literature discussing the shortcomings of this principle. Nevertheless, a proper understanding of the GA suggests that whole groups of people have collective duties to prevent such harms, which duties then provide clues to individual duties to protect the environment. In this paper I consider some major deficiencies of the generalisation argument, the collective duty which follows from the salvageable part of the argument, and the distribution of individual duties a conscientious moral agent has with regard to such environmental harms as a consequence. These duties turn out to be peculiarly political in nature with the result that conscientious moral agents may have a number of political duties to protect the environment heretofore unrealised.     

Defending Moral Mind-Independence: The Expressivist’s Precarious Turn

A central feature of ordinary moral thought is that moral judgment is mind-independent in the following sense: judging something to be morally wrong does not thereby make it morally wrong. To deny this would be to accept a form of subjectivism. Neil Sinclair (2008) makes a novel attempt to show how expressivism is simultaneously committed to (1) an understanding of moral judgments as expressions of attitudes and (2) the rejection of subjectivism. In this paper, I discuss Sinclair’s defense of anti-subjectivist moral mind-independence on behalf of the expressivist, and I argue that the account does not fully succeed. An examination of why it does not is instructive, and it reveals a fundamental dilemma for the expressivist. I offer a suggestion for how the expressivist might respond to the dilemma and so uphold Sinclair’s defense.     

Children and the Limits of Paternalism

Philosophers disagree about what precisely makes an act paternalistic, and about whether, when, and why paternalistic acts are morally objectionable. Despite these disagreements, it might seem uncontroversial to think that it is permissible to paternalize children. When paternalism seems morally objectionable, that is usually because an adult has been treated in a way that seems appropriate only for children. But, we might think, there can be nothing morally objectionable about treating children as children. In this paper, however, I argue that there are limits to how we may permissibly paternalize children. I begin in Section 1 by describing and endorsing Jonathan Quong’s account of paternalism, which defines paternalistic acts as those that involve particular kinds of judgments that the paternalizer makes about the capacities of the paternalizee. In Section 2, I identify a distinction between two kinds of paternalism: ‘compensatory’ paternalism, and ‘non-compensatory’ paternalism. In Section 3, I argue that compensatory paternalism is usually permissible in the case of children. In section 4, I argue that non-compensatory paternalism is much harder to justify than compensatory paternalism, and because of this, it is sometimes impermissible even when directed at children.     

The Right Wrong-Makers

Right- and wrong-making features (“moral grounds”) are widely believed to play important normative roles, e.g. in morally apt or virtuous motivation. This paper argues that moral grounds have been systematically misidentified. Canonical statements of our moral theories tend to summarize, rather than directly state, the full range of moral grounds posited by the theory. Further work is required to “unpack” a theory’s criterion of rightness and identify the features that are of ground-level moral significance. As a result, it is not actually true that maximizing value is the fundamental right-making feature even for maximizing consequentialists. Focusing on the simple example of utilitarianism, I show how careful attention to the ground level can drastically influence how we think about our moral theories.     

Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? One common response to this challenge proposes a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent’s credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: where does the threshold come from, and why should it take any one value rather than another? Threshold views also seem to violate “ought” agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). The stochastic dominance approach also allows a principled, albeit intuitively imperfect, response to the agglomeration problem. Thus, I argue, deontologists are better equipped than many critics have supposed to address the problems of decision-making under uncertainty.     

Amorality

Actions are usually grouped into one of several moral categories. Familiar ones include the morally required, the morally permitted, and the morally prohibited. These categories have been expanded and/or refined to include the supererogatory and the “suberogatory”. Some eschew deontic categories such as the above, but nevertheless allow the existence of two comparative moral categories, i.e., the morally better or morally worse. At the risk of adding to the clutter, I want to explore the possibility of yet a further category, viz., amoral action, or actions that, strictly speaking, lack any moral status whatsoever. I think admitting the existence of amoral actions is not only plausible in its own right, but has consequences for our understanding the nature of moral obligation.     

The role of moral commitments in moral judgment

Traditional approaches to moral psychology assumed that moral judgments resulted from the application of explicit commitments, such as those embodied in consequentialist or deontological philosophies. In contrast, recent work suggests that moral judgments often result from unconscious or emotional processes, with explicit commitments generated post hoc. This paper explores the intermediate position that moral commitments mediate moral judgments, but not through their explicit and consistent application in the course of judgment. An experiment with 336 participants finds that individuals vary in the extent to which their moral commitments are consequentialist or deontological, and that this variation is systematically but imperfectly related to the moral judgments elicited by trolley car problems. Consequentialist participants find action in trolley car scenarios more permissible than do deontologists, and only consequentialists moderate their judgments when scenarios that typically elicit different intuitions are presented side by side. The findings emphasize the need for a theory of moral reasoning that can accommodate both the associations and dissociations between moral commitments and moral judgments.