PEA Soup

Justified Normative Judgments

Sometimes we believe we ought to do things.  Sometimes we then do them.  I'd love to know how the normative status of normative judgments (which I'm taking to be beliefs about what ought to be done all things considered) are related to the normative status of the things we do.  I think that this is right: if your belief that you ought to Φ is justified, Φ-ing is justified.  (If you ought to believe that you ought to Φ, you really ought to Φ.)  I've written up a short little piece attacking a view (a.k.a., 'The View') that uses some principles I like but uses them for nefarious purposes (attacks on epistemic purism, attacks on views of the ontology of practical reasons that identify them with states of the world or worldly facts).  I've attacked The View before (in 'The Myth of the False, Justified Belief' (here)), but my argument rested on intuitions about the moral significance of facts that an agent is non-culpably ignorant of that some people think are dodgy.  (Fwiw, I've found much better rhetoric to use to get people to have the right intuitions than I used in that paper.)  It can't be that facts you're non-culpably ignorant of determine what your obligation is, if you fail to take account of them, that's just bad luck.  Or something like that.  I'll try something different here and try to hit The View where it hurts.  (Because I know the targets and we seem to be on reasonably friendly terms, I'm a bit more glib than I would be otherwise.  Since they seem to be rather glib in attacking the views I cherish, I hope they'll forgive me as it's clearly not intended to be disrespectful.)

Scanlon on Moral Responsibility & Blame (Part 1)

I’ve just read T.M. Scanlon’s chapter on blame in his latest book Moral Dimensions. The discussion is subtle, provocative, and quite insightful. It has already caused me to rethink some of my own views on moral responsibility in general and blame in particular. Nevertheless, I have a few questions/worries about the account that may be worth discussing over the course of a few posts. In this post, I’ll just focus on his account of moral responsibility, and in later posts I hope to focus on his accounts of blame and the ethics of blaming. (And I apologize in advance for the length of this post.)

Punishments Versus Prices

I once heard someone maintain something absolutely absurd: A life in prison is just the price for committing murder, he said, and you are "free" to commit murder as long as you are willing to pay that price.  Clearly this is crazy.  A life in prison, execution---these are not "prices" for committing murder; they are punishments.   But what exactly distinguishes a "price" from a "punishment"?

Responsibility Without Identity

It’s taken to be a platitude of folk morality that I can only be morally responsible for my own actions.  Call this The Platitude.  Sometimes The Platitude is presented in a more expansive form: (a) I can be responsible for my own actions; and (b) I cannot be responsible for anyone else’s actions.  This platitude is then taken to entail what I’ll call The Slogan: moral responsibility presupposes personal identity.  Classical philosophers who have embraced The Slogan include Locke, Reid, and Butler, and contemporary philosophers who do so include DeGrazia, Glannon, Haksar, Madell, Parfit (on one reading), Schechtman, and Sider.  Nevertheless, The Slogan is false.  Responsibility doesn’t presuppose identity, even if The Platitude is true.

Shoemaker on Moral Responsibilty and Moral Ignorance

It is often  supposed that people are not morally responsible for their behavior when that behavior is the product of non-culpable ignorance, but the issue becomes considerably more complex when the ignorance in question is concerned only with moral truths.  Suppose that an agent knows all of the relevant non-moral facts but simply fails to know the moral truths that would allow her to figure out that a particular action is wrong.  Is she morally responsible for her action? 

Unfortunately for those who think that this question admits of an easy answer, our own David Shoemaker has just conducted a dazzling experimental study that raises some very interesting and difficult new philosophical issues here. 

First, he presented subjects with a case modeled on Susan Wolf's story of JoJo:

JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, JoJo does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant and punches him in the face, just like his father would have done. He feels no guilt afterwards.

Other subjects were presented with a case exactly like this one except that it described  JoJo  as having all of the relevant moral knowledge.  Just as one might expect, subjects thought that JoJo was less morally blameworthy when they were told that he suffered from moral ignorance than they were when they were told that he had the relevant moral knowledge.  So far, no surprises. 

But now comes the surprising part.  In another condition, Shoemaker presented subjects with a story in which JoJo's action is morally praiseworthy:

 

JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, he does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant to punch him in the face, just like his father would have done. As he’s pulling back his fist, though, he suddenly feels compassion and discovers that he can’t bring himself to punch the peasant, even though he still believes it’s the right thing to do. He thus backs away and lets the peasant go free, even though he believes that doing so is immoral, and he feels quite guilty afterwards.

Here again, the intuitions of  subjects who received this story could be compared with intuitions of subjects who received a story that was almost exactly the same except that JoJo had all of the relevant knowledge.  But this time, there was no difference in moral judgments.  Subjects thought that JoJo was no less praiseworthy when he didn't know he was doing the right thing as when he did know.   

In other words, there seems to be an asymmetry such that moral ignorance makes people think an agent is less blameworthy but does not make people think the agent is less praiseworthy.  I actually find myself having the very same intuitions, but it's hard to see exactly why this asymmetry is arising.  Is there some more general principle from which all of the intuitions we see here can be derived?