Suppose I do an action that I know benefits Alice and harms Bob. The action may be abstractly perfectly justified, but if I didn’t take into account the harm to Bob, if I didn’t treat the harm to Bob as a reason against the action in my deliberation, then Bob would have a reason to complain about what my deliberation if he somehow found out. If I was going to perform the action, I should have performed it despite the harm to Bob, rather than just ignoring the harm to Bob. I owed it to Bob not to ignore him, even if I was in the end going to go with the benefit to Alice.
But suppose that I am perfectly virtuous, and the action is one that I owed Alice in a way that constituted a morally conclusive reason for the action. (The most plausible case will be where the action is a refraining from something absolutely wrong.) Once I see that I have morally conclusive reason for the action, it seems that taking other reasons into account is a way of toying with violating the conclusive reason, and that kind of toying is not compatible with perfect virtue.
Still, the initial intuition has some pull. Even if I have an absolute duty to do what I did for Alice, I should be doing it despite the harm to Bob, rather than just ignoring the harm to Bob. I don’t exactly know what it means not to just ignore the harm to Bob. Maybe in part it means being the sort of person who would have been open to avoiding the action if the reasons for it weren’t morally conclusive?
If I stick to the initial intuition, then we get a principle of perfect deliberation: In perfect deliberation, the deliberator does not ignore any reasons—or, perhaps, any unexcluded reasons—against the action one eventually chooses.
If this is right, then it suggests a kind of a flip side to divine omnirationality. Divine omnirationality says that when God does something, he does it for all the unexcluded reasons that favor it.
Maybe this:
ReplyDeleteWhen you perform an action while ignoring the harm to Bob, you do not thereby acquire a new reason to make it up to Bob. But when you perform an action despite the harm done to Bob, you do. Exactly what constitutes making it up to Bob will be highly context dependent. Sometimes, nothing could make it up to Bob in any way. Other times, the best that you might be able to manage is a symbolic gesture. At other times, you might be able to do something that balances out the harm in part or in whole. But if you are ignoring the harm, you have no reason to do any of these things.
Interesting suggestion, but I would think that ignoring the reason does create a new reason to make it up to Bob.
ReplyDeleteAt least if not-ignoring does.
ReplyDeleteBy ‘acquire’, I meant something like ‘attend to’. The reason is there but it isn’t yours until you attend to it. At least, that was the idea.
ReplyDelete