Worth Repeating...

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Effort and Moral Worth

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.     

孺子可教

姥姥因为疾病做了子宫摘除手术,因此只生育了母亲一个孩子,我从小就和姥姥生活在一起以慰其情。在不知不觉中听着姥姥讲的妖魔鬼怪的故事长大了。姥姥身体还硬朗,70多岁的时候又开始帮我带孩子。于是太姥姥又给孩子重复起了那些红毛绿眼长舌头的故事,什么鬼搭墙、吊死鬼吓人、黄鼠狼迷人等等。这种教育的后果是孩子很胆小,一到晚上就怕黑,而且一旦什么事情成功了就会说“阿弥陀佛”。孩子6岁时,我把他接到身边上小     

Moral Accountancy and Moral Worth

People do good or bad things, and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters, and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

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.     

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several illustrative problems in mathematics and physics. When two representations are informationally equivalent, their computational efficiency depends on the information-processing operators that act on them. Two sets of operators may differ in their capabilities for recognizing patterns, in the inferences they can carry out directly, and in their control strategies (in particular, the control of search). Diagrammatic and sentential representations support operators that differ in all of these respects. Operators working on one representation may recognize features readily or make inferences directly that are difficult to realize in the other representation. Most important, however, are differences in the efficiency of search for information and in the explicitness of information. In the representations we call diagrammatic, information is organized by location, and often much of the information needed to make an inference is present and explicit at a single location. In addition, cues to the next logical step in the problem may be present at an adjacent location. Therefore problem solving can proceed through a smooth traversal of the diagram, and may require very little search or computation of elements that had been implicit.     

Sex Biases in Comparable Worth Analyses

Remunerating jobs according to their comparable worth has been suggested as one way to reduce sex inequities in wages. To implement such a policy, it is necessary to obtain unbiased ratings of a job's worth. The present study investigated whether such ratings would be biased by the incumbent's sex, the sex composition of the occupation, or the job analyst's sex. A second purpose was to ascertain what job characteristics are viewed as worthy of financial compensation. Business school undergraduates viewed videotapes of a male enacting a low prestige, anchor job and either males or females enacting a moderate and a high prestige job. Ratings of the moderate and high prestige jobs relative to the anchor revealed that both male and female analysts perceived the jobs as higher in responsibility, in persuasive ability requirements, and in monetary worth when enacted by males than by females. The occupation's sex composition had no effect on any job ratings, a finding attributed to subjects' failure to recall the sex composition information provided. Regression analyses revealed that the only significant predictors of a job's monetary worth relative to the anchor were its perceived salary, its desirability, the training it required, and the gender of the incumbent. It was concluded that sex biases in comparable worth analyses may yield an underestimation of the wages that women's work is worth.     

Kantianism, Moral Worth and Human Welfare

Book reviewed in this article:
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives