Why the Wrongness of Killing Innocents is Not a Universal Moral Certainty

In this paper, I argue that the certainty about the wrongness of killing must not be considered as a universal, but as a local one. Initially, I show that there exist communities in which the wrongness of killing innocents is not a moral certainty and that this kind of case cannot be justified by arguing that such people are psychopaths. Lastly, I argue that universal certainties do not admit of exceptions: thus, the fact that some exceptional cases affect the certainty that killing innocents is wrong, leads me to conclude that it is a local certainty.     

Why the Wrongness of Killing Innocent,Non-threatening People is a Universal Moral Certainty

In a recent article in this journal, José María Ariso makes the argument that the killing of innocent, non-threatening people is not a universal moral certainty. To make this case, he gives two examples where the certainty is seemingly not present: the pisa-suave child soldiers in the Colombian civil war and the often-discussed case of Nazi Germany. This paper is an attempt to respond to these criticisms. I will respond to each charge in turn and argue that they do not pose a problem to the idea that the wrongness of killing innocent, non-threatening people is a universal moral certainty.     

Moral advice and moral theory

Monists, pluralists, and particularists disagree about the structure of the best explanation of the rightness (wrongness) of actions. In this paper I argue that the availability of good moral advice gives us reason to prefer particularist theories and pluralist theories to monist theories. First, I identify two distinct roles of moral theorizing—explaining the rightness (wrongness) of actions, and providing moral advice—and I explain how these two roles are related. Next, I explain what monists, pluralists, and particularists disagree about. Finally, I argue that particularists and pluralists are better situated than monists to explain why it is a good idea to think before we act, and that this gives us reason to favor particularism and pluralism over monism.     

Accounting for Moral Conflicts

In his recent book The Dimensions of Consequentialism (2013), Martin Peterson defends, amongst other things, the claim that moral rightness and wrongness come in degrees and that, therefore, the standard view that an act’s being morally right or wrong is a one-off matter ought to be rejected. An ethical theory not built around a gradualist conception of moral rightness and wrongness is, according to Peterson, unable to account adequately for the phenomenon of moral conflicts. I argue in this paper that Peterson’s defence of this claim is not convincing. Over and above this negative result, a careful assessment of Peterson’s case for degrees of rightness reveals that the theoretical corridor for accounting for moral conflicts without a gradualist conception of rightness and wrongness is relatively narrow. As I show, the only way of avoiding the conclusion of Peterson’s argument is to reject his conception of the ‘final analysis’ that an ethical theory provides, i.e. of what the theory ultimately has to say about individual acts and their normative properties. According to Peterson, such a final analysis should be seen as comprising the all-things-considered judgements yielded by the theory, and nothing else. As it turns out, the only alternative to this account that is compatible with the standard view about moral rightness and wrongness is to conceive of the final analysis as also containing judgements about morally relevant factors, or aspects, and the way in which they are normatively relevant.     

Killing and the Time-relative Interest Account

Jeff McMahan appeals to what he calls the “Time-relative Interest Account of the Wrongness of Killing” to explain the wrongness of killing individuals who are conscious but not autonomous. On this account, the wrongness of such killing depends on the victim’s interest in his or her future, and this interest, in turn, depends on two things: the goods that would have accrued to the victim in the future; and the strength of the prudential relations obtaining between the victim at the time of the killing and at the times these goods would have accrued to him or her. More precisely, when assessing this interest, future goods should be discounted to reflect reductions in the strength of such relations. Against McMahan’s account I argue that it relies on an implausible “actualist” view of the moral importance of interests according to which satisfactions of future interests only have moral significance if they are satisfactions of actual interests (interests that will in fact exist). More precisely, I aim to show that the Time-relative Interest Account (1) does not have the implications for the morality of killing that McMahan takes it to have, and (2) implies, implausibly, that certain interest satisfactions which seem to be morally significant are morally insignificant because they are not satisfactions of actual interests.     

Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s reflections bring into view the phenomenon of basic certainty. He explores this phenomenon mostly in relation to our certainty with regard to empirical states of affairs. Drawing on these seminal observations and reflections, I extend the inquiry into what I call “basic moral certainty”, arguing that the latter plays the same kind of foundational role in our moral practices and judgements as basic empirical certainty does in our epistemic practices and judgements. I illustrate the nature and significance of basic moral certainty via critical examination of contemporary philosophical “explanations” of the wrongness of killing. These pseudo explanations, as I show them to be, will be seen to founder in a similar manner to Moore’s “Proof” of an external world, that is, in a manner that discloses the phenomenon of basic (moral) certainty.     

Bodily Violence,Agency, and Animals

Ethical theories in the Kantian tradition tend to centre heavily on rational agency, so it may appear challenging for such theories to account for the wrongness of bodily violence, especially the wrongness of bodily violence to animals who lack rationality. This article develops a Kantian explanation for the pro tanto wrongness of killing or injuring animals who have agency and lack rationality, based on a Kantian explanation for the pro tanto wrongness of killing or injuring people. Even though morality is grounded in the will of rational agents or the value of rational agency, one does not have to be a rational agent to be morally considerable.     

The response model of moral disgust

The philosophical debate over disgust and its role in moral discourse has focused on disgust’s epistemic status: can disgust justify judgments of moral wrongness? Or is it misplaced in the moral domain—irrelevant at best, positively distorting at worst? Correspondingly, empirical research into disgust has focused on its role as a cause or amplifier of moral judgment, seeking to establish how and when disgust either causes us to morally condemn actions, or strengthens our pre-existing tendencies to condemn certain actions. Both of these approaches to disgust are based on a set of assumptions that I call, in what follows, the evidential model of disgust. This paper proposes an alternative model, which I call the response model. Instead of looking at disgust as a cause and justification of judgments of moral wrongness, I will argue that disgust is better understood as a response to wrongness. More precisely, I argue that disgust is a response to norm violations, and that it is (sometimes) a fitting response insofar as norm violations are potentially contagious and therefore pose a threat to the stability and maintenance of norms.     

Horribly Wrong

Moral horror is an extreme emotional response to that which violates things we regard as sacred. In Robert Merrihew Adams's view, horror is a response to badness and not to wrongness, and so one could properly regard some actions as horrible but not wrong. In contrast, I argue that horror, when directed toward actions, is only appropriate for wrong actions. The reason is that horror involves moral disgust, and agents who committed a horrible action would have self‐disgust, that is, they would be repulsive to themselves. I argue, with reference to killing in combat and in self‐defense, that those who have done no wrong should not be in such a state.     

SHOULD WE DE‐MORALIZE ETHICAL THEORY?

Some philosophers, such as Roger Crisp and Alastair Norcross, have recently argued that the traditional moral categories of wrongness, permissibility and obligation should be avoided when doing ethical theory. I argue that even if morality does not itself provide reasons for action, the moral categories nevertheless have a central role to play in ethical theory: they allow us to make crucial judgements about how to feel about, and react to, agents who behave in anti‐social ways, and they help motivate us to act altruistically.     

The Good and the Gross

Recent empirical studies have established that disgust plays a role in moral judgment. The normative significance of this discovery remains an object of philosophical contention, however; ‘disgust skeptics’ such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that disgust is a distorting influence on moral judgment and has no legitimate role to play in assessments of moral wrongness. I argue, pace Nussbaum, that disgust’s role in the moral domain parallels its role in the physical domain. Just as physical disgust tracks physical contamination and pollution, so moral disgust tracks social contamination. I begin by examining the arguments for skepticism about disgust and show that these arguments threaten to overgeneralize and lead to a widespread skepticism about the justifiability of our moral judgments. I then look at the positive arguments for according disgust a role in moral judgment, and suggest that disgust tracks invisible social contagions in much the same way as it tracks invisible physical contagions, thereby serving as a defense against the threat of socio-moral contamination.     

Epicurus,Death, and the Wrongness of Killing

This article questions the assumption, held by several philosophers, that the Epicurean argument for death's being “nothing to us” must be fallacious since its acceptance would undermine the principle that killing is (in general) wrong. Two possible strategies are considered, which the Epicurean-sympathizer might deploy in order to show that the non-badness of death (for the person who dies) is compatible with killing's being wrong. One of these is unsuccessful; the other is more promising. It involves arguing that the wrongness of killing is a “basic moral certainty” and hence requires no underpinning by the judgement that death is bad. Problems for this proposal, and possible responses to those problems, are considered. Though the strategy is not decisive, it is deemed to be one that the Epicurean could plausibly adopt.     

Rule Consequentialism and Scope

Rule consequentialism (RC) holds that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by an ideal moral code, i.e., the set of rules whose internalization would have the best consequences. But just how many moral codes are there supposed to be? Absolute RC holds that there is a single morally ideal code for everyone, while Relative RC holds that there are different codes for different groups or individuals. I argue that Relative RC better meets the test of reflective equilibrium than Absolute RC. In particular, I contend that Relative RC is superior because it accommodates our convictions about costless benefits. Some have charged that Relative RC threatens our convictions about the generality of moral codes and that it leads inevitably to what Brad Hooker calls “runaway relativism.” I argue that Relative RC has principled reasons for stopping this imagined slide down the slippery slope.     

Wittgenstein,Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically‐ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically‐ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing.     

Hypocrisy as Either Deception or Akrasia

The intuitive, folk concept of hypocrisy is not a unified moral category. While many theorists hold that all cases of hypocrisy involve some form of deception, I argue that this is not the case. Instead, I argue for a disjunctive account of hypocrisy whereby all cases of “hypocrisy” involve either the deceiving of others about the sincerity of an agent's beliefs or the lack of will to carry through with the demands of an agent's sincere beliefs. Thus, all cases of hypocrisy can be described either as cases of deception or as cases of akrasia. If this analysis correct, then I suggest further that the moral status of all instances of hypocrisy must be reduced either to the moral blameworthiness of deception or to the moral blameworthiness of akrasia. There can be no unified account of the moral wrongness of “hypocrisy” that holds across the disjunction.     

Killing Humans and killing Animals

It is one thing to say that the suffering of non‐human animals ought to be considered equally with the like suffering of humans; quite another to decide how the wrongness of killing non‐human animals compares with the wrongness of killing human beings. It is argued that while species makes no difference to the wrongness of killing, the possession of certain capacities, in particular the capacity to see oneself as a distinct entity with a future, does. It is claimed, however, that this is not the only factor to be taken into account: pleasant or happy life is in itself good. The application of these conclusions to killing animals for food is then considered, with some passing reflections on infanticide.     

Harm concerns predict moral judgments of suicide: Comment on Rottman,Kelemen and Young (2014)

Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide. They conclude that suicide wrongness is independent of harm, therefore arguing against dyadic morality and for moral pluralism. However, these conclusions may be overstated; across all these studies, a meta-analysis reveals that harm is a significant predictor of suicide judgments. Moreover, the association between harm and suicide wrongness may be suppressed in individual studies by insufficient power, restrictive exclusion criteria, a single bivariate outlier, and reliance upon the conventional significance threshold of p < .05. In revised analyses harm is robustly associated with suicide wrongness, consistent with dyadic morality.     

MORAL RELEVANCE AND CETERIS PARIBUS PRINCIPLES

My goal in this paper is twofold: to provide an account of what makes properties morally relevant, and to indicate the role such properties have in our moral thinking. I suppose that a property is morally relevant just in case it must, ceteris paribus, determine the moral status (the rightness or wrongness) of actions having it. The main part of the paper concerns the conditions under which the ceteris paribus caveat is satisfied, that is, when other things are equal. I argue that the caveat is satisfied when, with respect to a proposed set of morally relevant properties, an act differs from its alternatives at most in the degree to which it has one of those properties. Since other things are seldom equal, it is natural to wonder why what is true when they are equal should be important when they are not. That is, why is moral relevance, as I characterize it, a useful moral notion? I suggest that it is only by recognizing the moral relevance of properties that we are able to engage in useful moral thinking about the future.     

Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid

One of the aims of this article is to contribute to the identification of the empirical criteria governing the use of the concepts of killing and letting die. I will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the concepts but will limit the inquiry to certain problematic cases -- namely, cases involving the removal or withdrawal of life-supporting aid or protection. The analysis of these cases will, however, shed light on the criteria for distinguishing killing and letting die in other cases as well. My overall aims in the article are partly constructive and partly skeptical. I hope to advance our understanding of the nature of the distinction between killing and letting die. This, I believe, will enable us to defend the moral relevance of the distinction against certain objections -- in particular, objections that claim that the distinction fails to coincide with commonsense moral intuitions. Yet I will suggest that, as we get clearer about the nature of the distinction and the sources of its intuitive appeal, it may seem that the intuitions it supports are not so well grounded as one could wish.