Category: Moral Philosophy

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Ella Whiteley – “Order-Based Salience Patterns in Language: What They Are and Why They Matter”

In this post, Ella Whiteley discusses their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Ella’s article can be found here.

Portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino (ca. 1473-1475) by Piero Della Francesca
Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (ca. 1474) Piero Della Francesca

Imagine you’re talking with someone, and suddenly they shout their last sentence while making emphatic hand gestures. “I do enjoy Jeff Goldblum’s outfits in shows; his luxe dressing gown in Kaos is pretty excellent BUT OH MY GOSH THE UNBUTTONED SHIRT IN JURASSIC PARK!” Outside of finding this mildly disconcerting or amusing, you’d likely find that last part of the communication the most attention-grabbing. The volume, the phrase ‘oh my gosh’, the banging-of-fists on the table – these are explicit cues to focus on those latter words. The part about the unbuttoned shirt stands out, which invites you to treat it as more important and memorable. (The result of course is that the image of Goldblum on that metal doctor’s table is what insists upon your mind’s eye. If it doesn’t, we have identified a horrifying gap in your cultural knowledge that you should now rectify.)

We make certain elements of what we’re saying more salient to our audience in a range of ways – tone of voice, repetition, and so on. Philosophers have pointed out how just mentioning something makes it salient. Maxime LePoutre (2024), for instance, has shown how mentioning a conspiracy theory in service of debunking it can raise the salience of that conspiracy theory. This can have counterproductive consequences: its heightened salience makes the theory feel more familiar and, ultimately, true.  

I want to focus on a different salience mechanism: the order in which we communicate information. Since we cannot say, hear, or read everything at once, ordering is unavoidable. This makes it a particularly important phenomenon to analyse.

Sometimes, the significance of ordering is not subtle or elusive. It’s intuitive that the first page of the newspaper is more salient than page 10. It’s intuitive that what comes up at the top of one’s social media feed is likely to grab one’s attention the most. But I don’t think we’re used to recognising the importance of order in other aspects of communication. Most of us talk about ‘men and women’, ‘kings and queens’, ‘he or she’, without noticing this persistent pattern of positioning men first. Many of us gloss over the pattern whereby we standardly position the ‘for’ first, when we ask if one is ‘for or against’ a given proposal. 

What are the implications of these orderings for audience interpretation? One place to look for answers is psychological research into ‘order effects’ (Haugtvedt & Wegener,1994). A general picture emerges from this research. Firstly, the content positioned first, call it content 1, is generally processed as more salient – more attention-grabbing. Other factors, like volume and tone of voice, inevitably complicate this general rule. But once we control for other factors, we find that, systematically, the first-mentioned content is treated as more salient. Heightened salience is then processed as indicating heightened relevance – content 1 is considered more important for understanding. Audiences then unconsciously draw on various accessible beliefs and associations that help to make sense of this signalled relevance.

This picture explains various psychological findings. For instance, talking about men before women tends to activate gender stereotypes in audiences’ minds, including men being more agential, powerful, assertive, decisive, and so on (Kesebir, 2017). These stereotypes are cognitively accessible and socially licensed ways of interpreting why, through being discussed first, men have been signalled as more salient and relevant. Troublingly, stereotypes that are activated in this covert way generally resist being blocked, and thus audiences are liable effectively to endorse those stereotypes in their subsequent inferences. Order-based salience patterns have unexpected normative significance, then, in virtue of triggering ethically and/or epistemically problematic biases.

I am keen that this insight avoids being appreciated only in certain circumscribed contexts, such as the ordering of binomials. So, let’s think about another example. One trend I have noticed in sex/gender science papers is the tendency to mention sex or gender differences first. In recent decades it has become more standard explicitly to acknowledge gender similarities—something that historically was rarely mentioned or recognised. But routinely such similarities do not make the first page. There’s reason to consider this a problem. A great deal of research has documented a particularly accessible, easy-to-trigger bias of gender essentialism, which treats gender differences as extreme and immutable, a belief routinely justifying a range of harmful social practices (Gelman & Taylor, 2000). By discussing gender differences before similarities, researchers are making them more salient. Order effect research gives us reason to think that audiences will likely process this salience as indicating relevance, which audiences then try to understand by drawing on accessible and licensed beliefs and associations that fit with this gender difference being made more relevant. Gender essentialism, easy-to-activate as it is, risks being triggered in this process. 

There are other risks to consider. Rather than activating specific problematic beliefs or associations, discussing differences before similarities may help more broadly to shape audiences’ overall cognitive map of sex/gender, which has significant effects for what they then notice in the world, the inquiries they conduct, and so on. Or, rather than focus on the downstream effects of these salience patterns, we might reflect on whether the patterns themselves constitute subtle forms of prejudicial speech. Speech act theory, for instance, recognises that we do things with words; saying ‘Run, there’s a fire!’ does not just cause people to flee, it constitutes an act of warning (Langton, 1993). Mentioning men before women might constitute an androcentric act of placing men at the centre of things. Routinely discussing sex/gender differences before similarities might count as a particularly subtle act of essentialising gender.

Imagine an account of a phenomenon, whether that be a historical event, a person, a scientific topic. Imagine that account contained no falsehoods – only truths. Imagine further that it contained every significant and relevant truth –nothing important is left out. I suggest that there may still be ways in which that account can be normatively criticisable. By ordering those truths in a particular way, this account might make salient the ‘wrong’ truths. Perhaps the ordering elicits biases of ours, which trigger false beliefs. Perhaps it simply counts as a subtle form of prejudice. 

References

  • Gelman, S., and M. Taylor (2000). “Gender Essentialism in Cognitive Development”. In P. H. Miller and E. Scholnick (Eds.), Towards a Feminist Developmental Psychology (169–90). Routledge.
  • Haugtvedt, C. O. and D. T. Wegener (1994). “Message Order Effects in Persuasion: An Attitude Strength Perspective”. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1): 205–18.
  • Kesebir, S. (2017). “Word Order Denotes Relevance Differences: The Case of Conjoined Phrases with Lexical Gender”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2): 262–279.
  • Langton, R. (1993). “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts”. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22(4): 293–330.
  • Lepoutre, M. (2024). “Narrative Counterspeech”. Political Studies, 72(2): 570-589.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6166/.

About the author

Ella Whiteley is a Lecturer in PPE at the University of Sheffield. Their research interests are primarily in ethics, social epistemology, and political philosophy. Their key specialism is the normative dimensions of salience and attention; Ella is interested in how mere patterns of salience can cause or constitute discrimination, a harm, or an epistemic flaw. Since their role at the ‘Invisible Labour Project’ at the University of Cambridge, Ella also works on the philosophy of labour. 

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Justin Capes – “The W-Defense Defended”

In this post, Justin Capes discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Justin’s article can be found here.

street sign indicating that expectations and reality go in opposite directions

A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it. This principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), as it has come to be known, sounds plausible. But why think it’s true?

David Widerker (2000, 2003) suggests an answer that I find attractive. Widerker’s argument, which is known as the W-defense, goes something like this:

Premise 1: A person deserves blame for what she did only if it would have been reasonable to expect her not to do it.

Premise 2: It would have been reasonable to expect a person not to do what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

Conclusion: A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

This argument is significant, as it promises to advance a debate many believe has reached an impasse. But does it deliver? Does it yield a convincing argument for PAP? 

Some think not. In a past philosophical life, I complained that Premise 1 is unmotivated (Capes 2010). Others have complained that it requires us to reject intuitively plausible judgments about particular cases (Frankfurt 2003; McKenna 2005, 2008). And still others have complained that Premise 2 depends on the controversial ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ maxim (Fischer 2006).

None of these complaints, though, is legitimate. I respond to each of them in turn.

Start with complaint (lodged by my past philosophical self) that Premise 1 is unmotivated. This isn’t so. Premise 1 is supported by many of our ordinary and uncontroversial moral practices. Consider, for example, what we do when we want to persuade others that we don’t deserve blame for what we did. One of the most obvious strategies is to argue that expecting us to behave any differently would have been unreasonable – in behaving as we did, we didn’t fail to live up to any reasonable expectations. If we can establish this, either by showing that we didn’t fail to live up to others’ expectations or by showing that, if we have, the expectations in question were unreasonable, that will suffice, it seems, to demonstrate that we aren’t blameworthy for our behavior. Premise 1 thus looks pretty plausible.

Often, though, ideas that sound plausible have counterexamples. Consider the following case (modeled on a famous example from Frankfurt 1969):

Shooter: Jones shoots Smith without hesitation. But if Jones had hesitated, a nefarious neuroscientist would have taken control of Jones’s brain and forced him to shoot Smith, and there is nothing Jones could have done to stop this from happening.

Because Jones shot Smith on his own, without being caused to do so by the neuroscientist, many judge that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, even though he couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith (since the neuroscientist would have forced him to shoot Smith if he hadn’t done so on his own). Thus, many philosophers think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to PAP. 

Many of those same philosophers also think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to Premise 1 of the W-defense. They grant, for the sake of argument, that it wouldn’t have been reasonable to expect Jones to avoid shooting Smith, given that he couldn’t have avoided doing so. However, they claim that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, nonetheless.

So, here’s the situation. Premise 1 is plausible, but it also seems to conflict with our intuitive sense that Jones deserves some blame for what he did. What’s a W-defender to do? 

As I see it, we should have our cake and eat it too. Here’s the recipe. Note that, in the example, Jones shoots Smith on his own (i.e., without being forced to do so), and, although Jones couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith, he could have avoided shooting Smith on his own. For example, he could have thought twice about shooting Smith, hesitating enough to prompt the neuroscientist to intervene and force him to shoot Smith. Moreover, we could reasonably have expected Jones to do just that. We can therefore justly blame Jones for shooting Smith on his own (or for shooting Smith without hesitation), since we could reasonably have expected Jones to avoid doing that. What we can’t justly blame Jones for, though, is shooting Smith, as we couldn’t have reasonably expected him to avoid doing that.

So, Jones does deserve some blame for something in this case, but what he deserves blame for is something he could have avoided and that we could reasonably have expected him to avoid. In this way, we can retain PAP and Premise 1 of the W-defense without having to deny that there is indeed something in Shooter for which Jones deserves some blame.

What about Premise 2? Well, it arguably entails the controversial deontic maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (the Maxim, for short), and some see this as reason to reject it (Fischer 2006: 210). However, I argue that the case for Premise 2 is stronger than the case against the Maxim. So, if Premise 2 entails the Maxim, we should accept both claims.

To illustrate this, imagine the following:

Sandy walks by a lake with twenty children in it, all of whom are clearly drowning. She can’t rescue all twenty children; there’s not enough time and no one else around to help.

What would it be reasonable to expect Sandy to do in this situation? The obvious answer is: to save as many of the drowning children as she can. But why isn’t it reasonable to expect her to save all twenty? Here, too, the answer is obvious; it’s because she can’t save all twenty. 

I think we will be hard pressed to account for these judgments without appealing to the general idea (of which Premise 2 is an instance) that expecting something of someone is reasonable only if the person can comply with the expectation. Since the judgements in question are correct, I think we should accept the general idea (and thus Premise 2).

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5717/.

References

  • Capes, Justin. (2010). “The W-Defense.” Philosophical Studies 150: 61-77.
  • Fischer, John Martin. (2006). My Way. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (1969). “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66: 829-39.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (2003). “Some Thoughts Concerning PAP.” In Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 339-348. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2005). “Where Frankfurt and Strawson Meet.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 163-180.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2008). “Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Looking Beyond the Examples.” Nous 42: 770-793.
  • Widerker, David. (2000). “Frankfurt’s Attack on Alternative Possibilities: A Further Look,” Philosophical Perspectives 14: 181-201.
  • Widerker, David. (2003). “Blameworthiness, and Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 53-74. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.

About the author

Justin Capes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flagler College. He writes on issues in ethics and the philosophy of action, especially those that concern proper responses to wrongdoing.

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Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer – “Tightlacing and Abusive Normative Address”

In this post, Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

“Standing woman viewed from the front, clasping her corset” (ca. 1883) Edgar Degas

When we interact with each other, we draw on assumptions about what the other is like. When I talk to someone, I assume they can understand me; when I ask them for help, I assume they are capable of helping; when I offer help, I assume it is in their interest. These assumptions are often neither explicit nor conscious, but they guide our interactions.

Likewise, when we act, we are influenced by assumptions about what we ourselves are like. I only get into the pool because I assume that I can swim; I go to bed early because I assume that I need a certain amount of sleep; I hesitate to run for a public office because I am unsure I can handle its pressures.

Our agency is thus deeply influenced by our conception of ourselves. This also holds for our moral agency. We may feel under a duty to help others because we assume not only that they need help but also that we are able to offer the help they need at no great cost to ourselves. Conversely, we think that others should help when we assume they are able to and it is not too demanding. Whether we think we have a certain duty, then, depends in part on what kind of people we understand ourselves to be, including what we understand our capacities to be and what we think will count as unduly burdensome for us. 

This makes us vulnerable to having our self-conceptions wrongfully distorted by others in ways that control how we think we should act. We call this kind of wrong “tightlacing”.

Tightlacing occurs when someone is subjected to influences that foreseeably distort their self-conception in a way that makes them have overburdening demands on themselves. This may come about in various ways, but moral address, and the assumptions it makes about its target, are a particularly useful vehicle for it. Consider two examples:

  • Some parents want their children to suppress their emotions, especially where they are negative, and this can lead to emotional abuse. If normal episodes of, say, a child’s anger regularly elicit responses like “Keep your ridiculous anger to yourself”, “Why are you annoying us with this?”, or “Your mother/father is having such a hard time already, and now you’re being so unhelpful”, a moral demand is made that conveys an assumption about what the child is like. They are expected to be able to suppress their anger in order not to annoy their parents, and this conveys that their anger is something they should be in control of, and that managing it away has no cost to them.
  • Survivors of political atrocities like the Holocaust are sometimes expected to overcome feelings of resentment to enable a society to move forward. Where they refuse to do so, they may find themselves accused of vengefulness and egoism. Their resentment is not treated as a proper emotional reaction to the horror they experienced, but as something they, in the interest of society, should be able to get rid of. This expectation, too, conveys a view of their emotional nature.

In these examples, people are addressed with moral demands based on the assumption that they can regulate their emotions away in order to benefit others without significant cost to themselves. Given the perceived authority of moral demands and the fact that these problematic assumptions are left implicit, this risks manipulating the moral addressees into accepting the view conveyed. If successful, this strategy induces in them a distorted view of themselves: for example, that they are beings with no significant affective nature, or at least with an affective nature that can be easily disposed of. As a consequence, they will tend not to view their emotions as a natural and integral part of themselves, and they will not recognise that emotion regulation can be a difficult and costly task. In short, their view of themselves might become distorted.

This tightlaces them: if someone is made to think their affective nature carries no weight and is easily managed away, they will make moral demands on themselves that are based on this assumption. Once manipulated into thinking that one’s anger has no significance, or that emotion regulation has no costs, these agents are likely to expect themselves to regulate their anger away even when doing so is in fact inappropriate. They will apply norms to themselves that appear to be justified but, given their actual nature, are in fact decidedly overburdening. Victims of tightlacing thus find themselves wearing a normative corset which does not fit what they are like.

We are not saying that tightlacing is the only form of wrongdoing occurring in these examples. Nor do we think that tightlacing only occurs in relation to managing feelings; it occurs whenever someone’s view of themselves is changed such that they apply overburdening demands to themselves. 

Tightlacing wrongs people in many ways: it is manipulative, it makes unreasonable demands, and it is likely harmful to its victims. But, in addition to this, there are two especially significant ways in which it is wrongful. First, by pressuring the victims into applying unreasonable demands to themselves, it denies their rights, and it makes them complicit in this denial. Second, it erases who they are and, again, makes them complicit in this erasure of who they are.

To sum up, our actions and interactions depend on our conception of what we and others are like. This makes us vulnerable not only to other people’s conception of us, but also to what they may do to alter our conception of ourselves. Not abiding by a distorted conception of ourselves, and not being tightlaced into unfitting norms, matters greatly to our lives and our freedom. To break free of unfitting normative corsets, we need to let go of such distorted conceptions. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4644/.

About the authors

Alexander Edlich is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where he completed his PhD in 2023. He works on moral responsibility (specifically blame, protest, and apology), the philosophy of emotions, and feminist and LGBTQ ethics.

Alfred Archer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is interested in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of sport and moral psychology. He is the co-author of Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide (Routledge 2021), Why It’s Ok to be a Sports Fan (Routledge 2024) and Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies (Oxford University Press 2024).

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Nir Ben-Moshe – “An Adam Smithian Account of Humanity”

In this post, Nir Ben-Moshe discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Nir’s article can be found here.

photo of two people in a room without sensory reference points.
“Bridget’s Bardo” © James Turrell/Courtesy The Pace Gallery/Photo by Florian Holzherr

Some sentimentalists, inspired by Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, have tried to establish a strong normative connection between one’s own perspective and the perspectives of others, as a way of showing that one is reciprocally bound to, and ought to be engaged with, one’s fellow human beings (Debes 2012; Stueber 2017; Fleischacker 2019).

I understand the connection via Christine Korsgaard’s claim that

“valuing humanity in your own person [. . .] implies, entails, or involves valuing it in that of others” (Korsgaard 1996: 132)

Based on Smith’s moral philosophy, I offer a sentimentalist defense of a version of the Korsgaardian claim: my valuing my own humanity, my unique perspective, entails my valuing your humanity, your unique perspective.

Following Samuel Fleischacker (2019: 31), the conception of humanity that I develop builds on the notion of perspective at the heart of Smith’s account of sympathy.

Smith has an account of sympathy based on imaginative projection, according to which we use our imagination in order to place ourselves in another actor’s situation (TMS I.i.1.2).

“[Sympathy] does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it” (TMS I.i.1.10)

This account pays special attention to an agent’s perspective on the situation, including the causes of their passions: 

“The first question which we ask is, What has befallen you? Till this be answered, […] our fellow-feeling is not very considerable” (TMS I.i.1.9).

I associate humanity with having a unique perspective and being aware of this perspective. More specifically, a human being is the type of being that is aware, qua spectator, of its own unique perspective, qua actor.

The main argument of the paper relies on three components of Smith’s moral theory.

The first component is the impartial spectator, which Smith understands as the standpoint of a person in general, a neutral point of view. This standpoint humbles our self-love and makes us appreciate that our perspective is but one of a multitude and in no respect better than any other. From this standpoint, Smith argues, we take into account the perspectives and interests of all concerned. 

The second component is the normative status of other-oriented sympathy. When discussing sympathy early in TMS, Smith focuses on imagining being oneself in another actor’s situation (self-oriented sympathy). However, later in TMS, Smith focuses on imagining being another actor in that actor’s situation (other-oriented sympathy). I make the case that Smith thought that other-oriented sympathy is the proper form of sympathy. The key idea is that the appropriate form of sympathy to experience from a neutral point of view is a form of sympathy that is not influenced by self-love.

The third component is the desire for mutual sympathy with others: people are pleased when others sympathize with them and when they are able to sympathize with others.

In order to appreciate the importance of these three components of Smith’s thought, I make use of a distinction that Nagel (1986: 170) draws between recognizing a perspective and occupying it.

The standpoint of the impartial spectator is a standpoint from which I recognize that all perspectives have equal worth: adopting it makes me appreciate that my own perspective is no more privileged than—indeed, is equal to—other people’s perspectives; it tells me that insofar as my perspective is worthy of recognition, your perspective is worthy of recognition, too.

However, this type of recognition would merely show me that your perspective has normative force for you in the same way in which my perspective has normative force for me; it would not show, in and of itself, that your perspective has normative force for me. This is so because, while the recognition of equality necessitates consistency, this consistency can be attained by recognizing that each perspective has normative force for its author; it does not necessitate my engagement with your perspective. 

This is where other-oriented sympathy, as the proper form of sympathy, has a crucial role to play: the impartial spectator requires me to see the situation from your perspective rather than my own; it requires me, that is, to try to occupy your perspective, and not merely recognize it. 

This requirement to occupy someone else’s perspective does not come about ex nihilo, but rather builds on the aforementioned third component, namely, the desire for mutual sympathy with others. According to Smith, the desire for mutual sympathy leads to a process in which we constantly imagine being in the other person’s situation and augment our sympathy so as to match the experiences of the actor; this process, in turn, leads people to construct a rudimentary internal spectator, albeit one that is just averaged out from the perspectives of the people that we have encountered. When the impartial spectator is constructed, he reaffirms the sympathetic efforts to see the situation from others’ perspectives, giving normative authority to other-oriented sympathy.

The combination of being required to both recognize and occupy your perspective means that your perspective has normative force for me in the following way. Insofar as I value my perspective as a unique perspective, I am required to engage with your perspective and consider it from the inside—I am required to attempt to sympathize with you in your person and character in the same way in which I, qua spectator, sympathize with myself, qua actor, in my own person and character—while also recognizing that your perspective has equal standing to my own.

By doing so, your perspective, which is equal in standing to, but different in content from, mine, demands a rational response from me, thereby making your perspective normative for me. Therefore, the proposed Smithian account shows that my valuing my own humanity, my unique perspective, entails my valuing your humanity, your unique perspective.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4662/.

References

  • Debes, Remy (2012). “Adam Smith on Dignity and Equality”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20(1), 109–40.
  • Fleischacker, Samuel (2019). Being Me Being You: Adam Smith & Empathy. University of Chicago Press.
  • Korsgaard, Christine M. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Onora O’Neill (Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Nagel, Thomas (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press.
  • Smith, Adam (1976). The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS]. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Eds.). Liberty Fund.
  • Stueber, Karsten R. (2017). “Smithian Constructivism: Elucidating the Reality of the Normative Domain”. In Remy Debes and Karsten R. Stueber (Eds.), Ethical Sentimentalism: New Perspectives (192–209). Cambridge University Press.

About the author

Nir Ben-Moshe is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research falls primarily into two areas. The first area lies at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy and 18th-century moral philosophy. The second area is biomedical ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled Idealization and the Moral Point of View: An Adam Smithian Account of Moral Reasons.

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Craig Agule – “Defending Elective Forgiveness”

In this post, Craig Agule discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Craig’s article can be found here.

self-portrait of frada kahlo with a calm monkey, and angry black cat, and a neckless of thorns
“Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940) Frida Kahlo

Not all that long ago, I got angry at someone close to me. They had slighted me; it was not a terrible wrong, but it was enough to be angry (or, at least, I was angry, and several confidants told me that my reaction was reasonable). This person deserved my resentment, and I righteously felt it. But as time passed, and as our relationship continued, I found myself wondering what to do with my anger:  should I hold on to it, or should I forgive this person, letting my anger go? 

I kept coming back to two related puzzles. First, what sort of reasons would support or oppose my forgiving this person? For example, should I be thinking about whether they had taken responsibility? This person had acted poorly and never apologized. Or should I rather be thinking about the consequences of being angry? My anger was both unproductive and disruptive. Were those downsides of anger enough reason to forgive the unrepentant wrongdoer?

I came to see that there was good reason to forgive, but this brought me to the second puzzle:  If it was wise and prudent to forgive, then wouldn’t holding on to my anger be unwise and imprudent? The thought irked me.  Even if it would be reasonable to forgive, this person deserved my anger, and I was entitled to be angry. I was allowed to forgive, I thought, but not required to forgive.

I was irked because I suspected a tension in my thinking about forgiveness. On the one hand, I take forgiveness to be principled, in that we can forgive for reasons and we can offer others reason to forgive. On the other hand, I take forgiveness to be elective, such that, at least in many cases, it is acceptable both to forgive and to withhold forgiveness.

One way to defuse the tension is to pick between these two features of forgiveness, and so a number of philosophers defend principled forgiveness, deflating or abandoning electivity. We may identify reasons to forgive by thinking about the function of anger and blame. Perhaps we can say, with Miranda Fricker, that the point of blame is to bring the wrongdoer and the blamer into an aligned moral understanding. Or perhaps we can say, with Pamela Hieronymi, that the point of blame is to protest a past action that persists as a threat. If the point of blame is something like this, then we might have good reason to forgive in cases where blame has become pointless. If, for example, the wrongdoer has earnestly apologized, that apology might be adequate evidence that the wrongdoer has come to the right moral understanding and is therefore unlikely to repeat their wrong.

This can help us organize our thinking about whether and when to forgive. We think about the point of our anger, and we think about whether anger remains useful. Yet despite this advantage, this way of thinking also threatens the electivity of forgiveness. According to this framework, withholding forgiveness from a repentant wrongdoer might be irrational and even morally inappropriate.

In this paper, I argue that forgiveness is both principled and elective by looking closely at the nature of blame. Reactions like blame, I claim, are in the business of marking and making significance. When we blame someone, we prioritize their culpability and wrongdoing. This affects how we perceive and treat the person. When we forgive, our priorities change. The person’s wrongdoing and culpability is no longer quite as significant for our relationship.

Noticing the role of priorities at the heart of both blame and forgiveness helps to explain why forgiveness is elective. Our priorities are largely (although not entirely!) up to us, given that we have great freedom to settle for ourselves what sort of life we want to lead. Because forgiveness is largely a matter of our changing priorities, whether we should forgive has as much to do with who we are and want to be as it has to do with external facts, such as whether the wrongdoer has apologized. This is a deep sort of electivity!

At the same time, forgiveness remains principled. We might, for example, explain our forgiveness by reference to the wrongdoer’s apology. That apology might have been particularly important to us, or it might have causally prompted us to revisit our own priorities. The apology, then, provides an explanation for our coming to forgive, even if it does not compel forgiveness.

Thinking of forgiveness in terms of priorities helps us to reframe our thinking about forgiveness. For instance, it enables us to make sense of both conditional and unconditional forgiveness: sometimes we forgive because the things that we care about in the world have changed, and sometimes we forgive because our cares themselves have changed.

Thinking in terms of priorities also helps us to understand why forgiveness is not, normatively, entirely up to us. Although we have tremendous leeway to set our own priorities, there are some legitimate demands others can make on us regarding our priorities, often grounded in our relationships and interactions. Thus, there might well be some cases, albeit probably rare, where failing to forgive is blameworthy!

More generally, my defense of truly elective forgiveness pushes us to look inward in thinking about whether we should hold on to anger. Of course, we should think about the wrongdoer’s wrongs and culpability. Yet we should also keep in mind that when we hold on to our anger we prioritize, and so it is also important that we think about how our anger fits into what we care and should care about.

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4647/.

About the author

Craig K. Agule is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University–Camden. He is interested in philosophy of law and moral psychology, particularly issues concerning moral and legal responsibility and the normative conditions of blame and of punishment.

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Igor Douven, Frank Hindriks, and Sylvia Wenmackers – “Moral Bookkeeping”

In this post, Igor Douven, Frank Hindriks, and Sylvia Wenmackers discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Allegorical image of Justice punishing Injustice.
“Allegory of Justice Punishing Injustice” (1737) Jean-Marc Nattier

Imagine a mayor who has to decide whether to build a bridge over a nearby river, connecting two parts of the city. He is informed that the construction project will also negatively affect the local wild­life. The mayor responds: “I don’t care about what will happen to some animals. I want to improve the flow of traffic.” So, he has the bridge built, and the populations of wild animals decline as a result of it.

This fictional mayor sounds like a proper movie villain: he knows that his actions will harm wild animals and he doesn’t even care! We expect that people reading this vignette will blame him for his actions. But how does their moral verdict change if the mayor’s project happened to realize positive side-effects for the wildlife, although he was similarly indifferent to that? Would people praise him as much as they blamed him in the first case?

According to most philosophers, someone can only be praiseworthy if they had the intention to bring about a beneficial result. Yet, many philosophers also think that someone can be blamed for the negative side-effects of their actions, even if they did not intentionally cause them. This presumed difference between the assignment of praise and blame is the Mens Rea Asymmetry. (Mens rea is Latin for ‘guilty mind’.) However, data about how people actually assign praise or blame to others does not support this hypothesis.

One source of evidence that runs counter to the hypothesis of the Mens Rea Asymmetry is Joshua Knobe’s influential paper from 2003, which can be seen as the birth of experimental philosophy. His results show, among other things, that respondents do assign praise to agents who bring about a beneficial but unintended side-effect. We used the structure of the vignette from Knobe’s study to produce similar scenarios, including the mayor deciding about a bridge in the above example.

In order to explain the observed violations of the praise/blame asymmetry, we formulated a new hypothesis. Our moral compositionality hypothesis assumes that people evaluate others by taking into account their intentions as well as the outcome of their actions to come to an overall assignment of praise (when the judgment is net positive) or blame (when net negative). In principle, the overall judgment could be a complicated function of the two separate aspects, but we focused on a very simple version of the compositionality hypothesis: people’s overall judgment of someone’s actions is equal to the sum of their judgment of the agent’s intention and of the outcome of the action. We call this the Moral Bookkeeping hypothesis.

To put our hypothesis to the test, we asked nearly 300 participants to score how blameworthy or praiseworthy the mayor was for his decision and likewise for other agents in two similar scenarios. As already mentioned, we varied whether the potential side-effect of the decision was harmful or helpful. To study the respondents’ judgements of an agent’s intentions and outcomes separately, we included cases where the agent wasn’t informed about potential side-effects and where the potential side-effects didn’t occur after all. We also considered decision makers who were aware of potential side-effects, without knowing whether they would be positive, neutral or negative.

As expected, we found further evidence against the Mens Rea Asymmetry. Our results also corroborated the Moral Bookkeeping hypothesis, including its counterintuitive prediction that respondents still assign praise or blame to decision makers who weren’t aware of potential side-effects. Moreover, participants assigned more praise than blame to decision makers who unintentionally brought about the respective positive or negative side-effect. This finding remains puzzling to us as well.

Finally, based on our data, more complicated versions of the general compositionality thesis cannot be ruled out either. We hope that this work will inspire further experiments to unravel how exactly we come to our moral verdicts about others.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4645/.

References

  • Knobe, J. (2003). “Intentional Action and Side-effects in Ordinary Language”. Analysis, 64(3): 81–87.

About the authors

Igor Douven is a CNRS Research Professor at the IHPST/Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris.

Frank Hindriks is Professor of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Sylvia Wenmackers is a Research Professor in Philosophy of Science at KU Leuven, Belgium.

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Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas – Nudge Transparency Is Not Required for Nudge Resistibility

In this post, Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Image of a variety of cakes on display.
“Cakes” (1963) Wayne Thiebaud © National Gallery of Art

Consider,

Food Placement. In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been had foods instead been distributed randomly.

Interventions like this are often called nudges. Though many agree that it is, at least sometimes, permissible to nudge people, there is a thriving debate about when, exactly, it is so.

In the now-voluminous literature on the ethics of nudging, some authors have suggested that nudging is permissible only when the nudge is easy to resist. But what does it take for a nudge to be easy to resist? Authors rarely give accounts of this, yet they often seem to assume what we call

The Awareness Condition (AC). A nudge is easy to resist only if the agent can easily become aware of it.

We think AC is false. In our paper, we mount a more developed argument for this, but in this blog post we simply advance one counterexample and consider one possible response to it.

Here’s the counterexample:

Giovanni and Liliana: Giovanni, the owner of a company, wants his workers to pay for the more expensive, unhealthy snacks in the company cafeteria, so, without informing his office workers, he instructs the cafeteria staff to place these snacks at eye level. While in line at the cafeteria, Liliana (who is on a diet) sees the unhealthy food, and is a bit tempted by it, partly as a result of the nudge. Recognizing the temptation, she performs a relatively easy self-control exercise: she reminds herself of her plan to eat healthily, and why she has it. She thinks about how following a diet is going to be difficult, and once she starts making exceptions, it’s just going to be easier to make exceptions later on. After this, she decides to take the salad and leave the chocolate pudding behind. Although she was aware that she was tempted to pick the chocolate pudding, she was not aware that she was being nudged, nor did she have the capacity to easily become aware of this, since Giovanni went to great lengths to hide his intentions.

Did Liliana resist the nudge? We think so. We also think that the nudge was easily resistible for her, even though she did not have the capacity to easily become aware of the fact that she was being nudged. If you agree, then we have a straightforward counterexample to AC.

In response, someone might argue that, although Liliana resists something, she does not resist the nudge. Rather, she resists the effects of the nudge: the (increased) motivation to pick the chocolate pudding. Resisting the nudge, rather than its effects, requires that one intends to act contrary to the nudge. But Liliana doesn’t intend to do that. Although she intends to pick the healthy option, to pick the salad, or to not pick the chocolate pudding, she does not intend to act contrary to the nudge.

If resisting a nudge requires that one intend to act contrary to the nudge, then Liliana does not resist the nudge, and the counterexample to AC fails. Yet we do not think that resisting a nudge requires that one intend to act contrary to the nudge. While we grant that a way of resisting a nudge is to do so while intending to act contrary to it, and that resisting it in this way requires awareness of the nudge, we do not think that this is the only way to resist a nudge. Partly, we think this because we find it plausible that Liliana (and agents in other similar cases) do resist the nudge.

But further, we think that, if resisting a nudge requires intending to act contrary to the nudge, this will cast doubt on the thought that nudges ought to be easy to resist. Suppose that there are two reasonable ways of understanding “resisting a nudge.” On one understanding, resistance requires that the agent acts contrary to the nudge and intends to do so. Liliana does not resist the nudge on this understanding. On a second, broader way of understanding resistance, one need not intend to act contrary to the nudge in order to resist it; it is enough simply to act contrary to the nudge. Liliana does resist the nudge in this way.

Now consider two claims:

The strong claim: A nudge is permissible only if it is easy to act contrary to it with the intention of doing so.

The weak claim: A nudge is permissible only if it is easy to act contrary to it.

Are these claims plausible? We think that the weak claim might be, but the strong claim is not.

Consider again Food Placement. This was a case of a nudge just like Giovanni’s nudge, except that the food placement is intended to get more people to pick the healthy food option over the unhealthy one, rather than the reverse. In this version of the case, Giovanni wants to do what is in the best interests of his staff. According to the strong claim, this nudge would be impermissible insofar as his staff cannot easily become aware of the nudge. And this is so even though it would be permissible for Giovanni to put the healthy foods at eye level randomly. Moreover, it would remain so even if all the following are true:

  1. the nudge only very slightly increases the nudgee’s motivation to take the healthy food,
  2. the nudgee acts contrary to this motivation and picks the same unhealthy food she would have picked in the absence of the nudge,
  3. she finds it very easy to act contrary to the nudge in this way,
  4. her acting contrary to the nudge in this way is a reflection of her values or desires, and
  5. her acting contrary to the nudge is the result of normal deliberation which is not significantly influenced by the nudge.

We find it hard to believe that this nudge is impermissible, or even more weakly, that we have a strong or substantial reason against implementing it.

We think, then, that if nudges have to be easily resistible in order to be ethically acceptable, this will be because something like the weak claim holds. On this view, a nudge can meet this requirement if it is easy for the nudgee to resist it in our broader sense, and this is compatible with it being difficult for the nudgee to become aware of the nudge, as in our Giovanni and Liliana case.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4635/.

About the authors

Gabriel De Marco is a Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His research focuses on free will, moral responsibility, and the ethics of influence.

Tom Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy and Director of Research at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His research focuses especially on the ethics of using medical and neuro-scientific technologies for non-therapeutic purposes, such as cognitive enhancement, crime prevention, and infectious disease control. He is currently leading the project ‘Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence‘, funded by the European Research Council.

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Corey Dethier – “Interpreting the Probabilistic Language in IPCC Reports”

A young sibyl (sacred interpreter of the word of god in pagan religions) argues with an old prophet (sacred interpreter of the word of god in monotheistic religions). It looks as if the discussion will go on for a long while.
Detail of “A sibyl and a prophet” (ca. 1495) Andrea Mantegna

In this post, Corey Dethier discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Corey’s article can be found here.

Every few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases reports on the current status of climate science. These reports are massive reviews of the existing literature by the most qualified experts in the field. As such, IPCC reports are widely taken to represent our best understanding of what the science currently tells us. For this reason, the IPCC’s findings are important, as is their method of presentation.

The IPCC typically qualifies its findings using different scales. In its 2013 report, for example, the IPCC says that the sensitivity of global temperatures to increases in CO2 concentration is “likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence) and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)” (IPCC 2013, 81).

You might wonder what exactly these qualifications mean. On what grounds does the IPCC say that something is “likely” as opposed to “very likely”? And why does it assign “high confidence” to some claims and “medium confidence” to others? If you do wonder about this, you are not alone. Even many of the scientists involved in writing the IPCC reports find these qualifications confusing (Janzwood 2020; Mach et al. 2017). My recent paper – “Interpreting the Probabilistic Language in IPCC Reports” – aims to clarify this issue, with particular focus on the IPCC’s appeal to the likelihood scale.

Traditionally, probabilistic language such as “likely” has been interpreted in two ways. On a frequentist interpretation, something is “likely” when it happens with relatively high frequency in similar situations, while it is “very likely” when it happens with a much greater frequency. On a personalist interpretation, something is “likely” when you are more confident that it will happen than not, while something is “very likely” when you are much more confident.

Which of these interpretations better fits the IPCC’s practice? I argue that neither of them does. My main reason is that both interpretations are closely tied to specific methodologies in statistics. The frequentist interpretation is appropriate for “classical” statistical testing, whereas the personalist interpretation is appropriate when “Bayesian” methods are used. The details about the differences between these methods do not matter for our present purposes. My main point is that climate scientists use both kinds of statistics in their research, and since the IPCC’s report reviews all of the relevant literature, the same language is used to summarize results derived from both methods.

If neither of the traditional interpretations works, what should we use instead? My suggestion is the following: we should understand the IPCC’s use of probabilistic terms more like a letter grade (an A or a B or a C, etc.) than as strict probabilistic claims implying a certain probabilistic methodology.

An A in geometry or English suggests that a student is well-versed in the subject according to the standards of the class. If the standards are sufficiently rigorous, we can conclude that the student will probably do well when faced with new problems in the same subject area. But an A in geometry does not mean that the student will correctly solve geometry problems with a given frequency, nor does it specify an appropriate amount of confidence that you should have that they’ll solve a new geometry problem. 

The IPCC’s use of terms such as “likely” is similar. When the IPCC says that a claim is likely, that’s like saying that it got a C in a very hard test. When the IPCC says that sensitivity is “extremely unlikely less than 1°C”, that’s like saying that this claim fails the test entirely. In this analogy, the IPCC’s judgments of confidence reflect the experts’ evaluation of the quality of the class or test: “high confidence” means that the experts think that the test was very good. But even when a claim passes the test with full marks, and the test is judged to be very good, this only gives us a qualitative evaluation. Just as you shouldn’t conclude that an A student will get 90% of problems right in the future, you also shouldn’t conclude that something that the IPCC categorizes as “very likely” will happen at least 90% of the time. The judgment has an important qualitative component, which a purely numerical interpretation would miss.

It would be nice – for economists, for insurance companies, and for philosophers obsessed with precision – if the IPCC could make purely quantitative probabilistic claims. At the end of my paper, I discuss whether the IPCC should strive to do so. I’m on the fence: there are both costs and benefits. Crucially, however, my analysis suggests that this would require the IPCC to go beyond its current remit: in order to present results that allow for a precise quantitative interpretation of its probability claims, the IPCC would have to do more than simply summarize the current state of the research. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4637/.

References

  • IPCC (2013). Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thomas F. Stocker, Dahe Qin at al. (Eds.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Janzwood, Scott (2020). “Confident, Likely, or Both? The Implementation of the Uncertainty Language Framework in IPCC Special Reports”. Climatic Change 162, 1655–75.
  • Mach, Katharine J., Michael D. Mastrandrea, at al. (2017). “Unleashing Expert Judgment in Assessment”. Global Environmental Change 44, 1–14.

About the author

Corey Dethier is a postdoctoral fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He has published on a variety of topics relating to epistemology, rationality, and scientific method, but his main research focus is on epistemological and methodological issues in climate science, particularly those raised by the use of idealized statistical models to answer questions about climate change.

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Christine Bratu – “How (Not) To Wrong Others with Our Thoughts”

image of two cherubs thinking
Detail of the San Sisto Madonna (c. 1513-1514) Raphael

In this post, Christine Bratu discusses her article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Christine’s article can be found here.

Imagine Jim attends a fancy reception and, seeing a person of color standing around in a tuxedo, concludes that they are a waiter (when, in fact, they, too, are a guest). Alternatively, picture Anna who, during a prestigious conference, sees a young woman setting up a laptop at the lectern and concludes that she is part of the organizing team (when, in fact, this woman is the renowned professor who will give the keynote lecture). In many of us, cases like these elicit the fundamental intuition that there is something morally problematic going on.

Some philosophers have used this intuition to argue for the possibility of doxastic wronging (Basu 2018, 2019a, 2019b; Basu and Schroeder 2019; Keller 2018). Cases like these, they argue, show that we have the moral duty not to have bigoted beliefs about each other. On their interpretation, the situations above are morally troublesome because, by believing classic racist and sexist stereotypes, Jim and Anna violate a duty they have towards their fellow party guest and keynote speaker, respectively. According to proponents of doxastic wronging, positing this morally grounded epistemic duty is the best way to explain our intuition, since in the situations depicted neither protagonist acts in a reprehensible way (in fact, neither of them acts at all!) – it’s their racist and sexist beliefs as such that are the problem.

I think this proposal is intriguing. Group-based discrimination is a serious moral and political problem, and the moral duty not to have bigoted beliefs seems perfectly tailored to strike at its root. Nevertheless, in my article I argue that we should reject the existence of such a duty: there is no such thing as doxastic wronging. I argue for this by presenting what I call the liberal challenge.

I start from the assumption that positing any new, morally grounded epistemic duties comes at a price, because it constitutes a curtailment of our freedom of thought. We should only accept such curtailment if we can thereby gain something comparably important. I then point out three strategies that advocates of doxastic wronging could adopt to convince us that we are gaining something comparably important, and I explain why I think that all three of them fail.

First, the advocates of doxastic wronging could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs helps us avoid bigoted actions. This strategy fails, I argue, because we are already under the moral obligation not to act in bigoted ways. If the reason for limiting our freedom of thought is merely to decrease the risk of bigoted actions, then placing us under this new obligation is superfluous.

Second, these philosophers could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs helps us avoid practical vices that bigoted beliefs manifest such as, for instance, arrogance. This strategy fails, I argue, because – while we might be morally better, i.e. more virtuous, if we avoided vices like arrogance – we are under no moral obligation to do so.

Thirdly, they could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs is necessary to avoid the intrinsic harm of being the object of bigoted beliefs. This third strategy starts off more promisingly as it is based on a correct observation. Most of us desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs. People who think about us in bigoted ways frustrate this legitimate desire, and so it seems that they thereby harm us. Yet even if we grant that bigoted beliefs harm their targets, we cannot conclude that the resulting harm is important enough to justify restricting our freedom of thought. People frustrate each other’s legitimate desires all the time. We frustrate our parents’ legitimate desire to see us flourish when we let our talents go to waste, and we frustrate our partners’ legitimate desire to continue the relationship when we break up with them. Cases like these show that frustrating someone’s legitimate desire is not sufficient for our behavior to count as morally impermissible. To make this strategy work, proponents of doxastic wronging must, in addition, argue that the desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs is so important that its frustration is morally impermissible. However, I contend that they can only do so by appealing to the impermissibility of either bigoted actions or vices that bigoted beliefs manifest. In other words, they can only do by falling back on one of the former two strategies. And since I’ve already shown that such strategies fail, so does this one.

If we reject the duty not to have bigoted beliefs – as I argue we should – what about our initial intuition? What is wrong with Jim’s assumption that a person of color is most likely a waiter rather than a guest , or with Anna’s assumption that a young woman at the conference podium is most likely an organizer rather than the keynote?

It seems to me that the best way to make sense of these cases is to explain them not in terms of doxastic wronging, but rather in terms of doxastic harming. People like Jim and Anna do not violate any obligations they have toward their targets when they think about them in racist or sexist ways. However, they do frustrate their desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs, and they thereby harm them. When we reproach people like Jim and Anna for their hurtful thoughts, we are accusing them not of having done something they were morally not allowed to do, but rather of having done something it would have been better not to do (even though they were morally allowed to do it).

The change in perspective I propose does not make light of the morally problematic nature of bigoted beliefs. On the contrary, it ensures that the criticism we level against people who entertain such beliefs hits its mark properly by avoiding moralistic overreach and by making morally grounded demands on what other people believe.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/3595/.

References

  • Basu, Rima (2018). “Can Beliefs Wrong?” Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 1–17.
  • Basu, Rima (2019a). “The Wrongs of Racist Beliefs”. Philosophical Studies 176 (9): 2497–515.
  • Basu, Rima (2019b). “What We Epistemically Owe to Each Other”. Philosophical Studies 176 (4): 915–31.
  • Basu, Rima and Mark Schroeder (2019). “Doxastic Wronging”. In Brian Kim and Matthew McGrath (Eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, 181–205.
  • Keller, Simon (2018). “Belief for Someone Else’s Sake”. Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 19–35.

About the author

Christine Bratu is a professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen in Germany. She received her PhD in philosophy from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests are in feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy (especially issues of disrespect and discrimination) and topics at the intersection between ethics and epistemology. 

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Eyal Tal and Hannah Tierney – “Cruel Intentions and Evil Deeds”

Pop-art depiction of a man and woman riding away in a car with evil intentions
“In the Car” (1963) © Roy Lichtenstein

In this post, Hannah Tierney and Eyal Tal discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Doing the right thing can be difficult. Doing the morally worthy thing can be even harder.

Accounts of moral worth aim to determine the kinds of motivations that elevate merely right actions—actions that happen to conform to the correct normative theory—to morally worthy actions—actions that merit praise or credit.

Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right (Herman 1981; Jeske 1998; Sliwa 2016; Johnson King 2020). Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right (Arpaly 2003; Arpaly & Schroeder 2014; Markovits 2010).

What sets these views apart is the kind of motivation each takes to be essential for an action’s moral worth.

When an agent is motivated to do the right thing because of the action’s moral rightness, she has a higher-order motivation to perform this action. When an agent is motivated to do the right thing because of a particular right-making feature of the action, she has a first-order motivation to perform this action. Higher-order theorists (Sliwa 2016; Johnson King 2020) argue that higher-order motivations are necessary and sufficient for moral worth, while first-order motivations are largely irrelevant. In contrast, first-order theorists (Arpaly 2003; Markovits 2010) argue that first-order motivations are necessary and sufficient for moral worth, while higher-order motivations are irrelevant.

In an important sense, higher-order and first-order views of moral worth are diametrically opposed. The motivations that one camp argues are necessary and sufficient for moral worth are the very motivations that the other camp argues are irrelevant.

Nevertheless, proponents of these opposing views share something important. With the exception of Arpaly (2003) and Arpaly & Schroeder (2014), they theorize about the nature of moral worth by focusing mainly on the moral worth of, and praiseworthiness or creditworthiness for, right actions.

Yet each of these properties has a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions. Just as agents can deserve praise or credit for doing the right thing, they can deserve blame or discredit for doing the wrong thing. While the former actions have moral worth, the latter actions have what we will call moral counterworth.

In our paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions. 

Compare the following cases: 

Selfish Gossip: Cecile learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. She knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and she does not wish to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity to be the centre of attention arises. Wanting to be popular, Cecile succumbs to temptation and reveals her friend’s secret. 
Cruel Gossip: Sebastian learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. He knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and he does not wish to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity arises to humiliate his friend by revealing the secret. Wanting to embarrass his friend, Sebastian succumbs to temptation and reveals his friend’s secret.

Though both Cecile and Sebastian are blameworthy for revealing their friend’s secret, they are not equally blameworthy. Sebastian is (much) more blameworthy than Cecile and his action possesses more counterworth than Cecile’s action.

What could explain this difference? The only difference between Cecile and Sebastian lies in their first-order motivations. Cecile’s motivation to reveal her friend’s secret is selfish—she cares more about being popular than her friend’s privacy. But Sebastian’s motivation to tell the secret is cruel—he desires to harm his friend by embarrassing them.

Sebastian’s cruel first-order motivation renders him more blameworthy than Cecile. If this is right, then first-order motivations are not irrelevant to moral counterworth—they can directly contribute to the degree to which an agent is blameworthy. 

Reflecting on cases of wrong actions indicates that higher-order motivations can impact moral counterworth as well.

Compare the case of Selfish Gossip, in which Cecile reveals a friend’s secret in order to be the centre of attention despite having the higher-order motivation not to perform wrong actions, to the following case:

Evil Gossip: Isabelle learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. She knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and she wishes to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity to be the centre of attention arises. Wanting to both be popular and do wrong, Isabelle reveals her friend’s secret.

While both Cecile and Isabelle are blameworthy for their actions, Isabelle is (much) more blameworthy. The relevant difference between Cecile and Isabelle lies in their higher-order motivations.

Cecile possesses a higher-order motivation not to reveal her friend’s secret—she knows that doing so is wrong and does not want to do the wrong thing. In contrast, Isabelle possesses a higher-order motivation to reveal the secret—she wants to reveal the secret because doing so is wrong. 

We submit that Isabelle’s motivation to do wrong renders her more blameworthy than Cecile. And if we are right that Isabelle’s motivation to do wrong enhances the degree to which she is blameworthy for doing wrong, then higher-order motivations are not irrelevant to moral counterworth. 

From here, we defend the following argument: 

(1)	First-order and higher-order motivations can each affect moral counterworth.
(2)	Moral counterworth and moral worth are relevantly similar, such that the kinds of motivations that affect the former can also affect the latter.
(3)	First-order motivations and higher-order motivations can each affect the moral worth of an agent’s action.

In our paper, we defend each premise from potential objections and conclude by explaining how reflection on moral counterworth serves to support recently developed accounts of moral worth that make room for the relevance of both higher-order and first-order motivations. (Isserow 2019, 2020; Portmore 2022; Singh 2020)

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2621/

References

  • Arpaly, N. (2003). Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. Oxford University Press. 
  • Arpaly, N. & Schroeder, T. (2014). In Praise of Desire. Oxford University Press. 
  • Herman, B. (1981). “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty.” Philosophical Review 66: 359–382.
  • Isserow, J. (2019). “Moral Worth and Doing the Right Thing by Accident.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97: 251–264.
  • Isserow, J. (2020). “Moral Worth: Having it Both Ways.” The Journal of Philosophy 117(10): 529–556. 
  • Jeske, D. (1998). “A Defense of Acting from Duty.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 32(1): 61–74.
  • Johnson King, Z. (2020). “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1: 186–206.
  • Markovits, J. (2010). “Acting for the Right Reasons.” The Philosophical Review 119 (2): 201–242. 
  • Portmore, D. (2022) “Moral Worth and our Ultimate Moral Concerns.” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, volume 12. 
  • Singh, K. (2020). “Moral Worth, Credit, and Non-Accidentality.”  Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, volume 10. 
  • Sliwa, P. (2016). “Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93(2): 393–418. 

About the authors

Eyal Tal received his PhD in philosophy from University of Arizona. He is interested in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy of psychiatry, and philosophy of science.

Hannah Tierney is Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in ethics and metaphysics, and she writes mainly on issues of free will, moral responsibility, and personal identity.