Combine these two rather Stoic theses:
No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off
Doing what is morally wrong always makes you worse off
and you get:
- No one can make the fully virtuous person do what is morally wrong.
It is going to be crucial to this post that (3) includes cases of inculpably doing what is morally wrong. I myself think (1) is false, say for the that Aristotle cites, namely that severe pain makes even the virtous worse off. But nonetheless I want to defend (3).
It may be possible to first destroy a virtuous person’s virtue, and then get them to do what is morally wrong. Hitting someone on the head or brainwashing them can severely damage the psyche in a way that can remove the rational habits that constitute virtue. I do not count this a counterexample to (3), because in this case when the victim performs the wrong action, they have previously lost their virtue.
One might try to rule out the case of head injury and brainwashing by restricting (3) to culpable wrongs, but I don’t want to do that. I want to defend (3) in the case of inculpable wrongs, too.
A consequence of (3) is a fairly strong source incompatibilism about our action. Not only is it that neural manipulation cannot make you perform a free action, but it cannot make you perform an action. This fits well with dualism, but does not require it, because it might be that brain states that constitute acts of will have to have functional characteristics incompatible with outside control.
As a final clarification, I understand “making” as reliable, but not necessarily 100% reliable. Someone with significant free will cannot be 100% reliably made to do wrong, even if they are not virtuous. But at the same time, while a fully virtuous person cannot be reliably tempted away from right action, they might still have significant free will and be able to do wrong, so a temptation might unreliably get them to do wrong. Furthermore, I am thinking of “making” on something like a specific occasion. Thus, perhaps, if you tempt a virtuous person a million times, while restoring their brain to the pre-temptation state between temptations, by the law of large numbers you can expect them to fail at least once.
Let’s think about (3) some more.
Threats aren’t going to reliably get the fully virtuous person do the wrong thing. Sometimes, it is reasonable to bow to a threat. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to cover the side of your neighbor’s house with a giant smiley face graffiti, it’s reasonable to go along with it. But morality is reasonable, and where it is reasonable to bow to a threat, doing so is not only not culpable but simply not wrong. Indeed, it would typically be a failure of respect for human life to refuse to paint the graffiti when one’s life is threatened. In cases, however, where it is unreasonable to knuckle under, the fully virtuous person will reliably withstand the threat.
Physical control of another’s body or brain isn’t going to produce morally wrong action, because it doesn’t produce action at all. It is not wrong to kill someone by being pushed off a cliff on top of them, because it’s not an action to fall off a cliff. Similarly, if someone implants a remote control for one’s muscles, even if in the brain, then the resulting muscle spasms are not actions, and hence are not morally wrong actions.
Cases of omissions are interesting. It is easy to make someone fail to do what they promised, say by imprisoning them. If one thinks that such a failure counts as an inculpable wrongdoing, and if (3) is supposed to apply to omissions as well, then we have a counterexample. I do want (3) to apply to omissions. But I think that all that’s morally required by a promise is a reasonable amount of effort—where what counts as reasonable depends on the case. If you promise to come to a party but are in the hospital after a serious accident, it’s not morally required—indeed, it’s morally forbidden—that you rip the IV out of your arm and drag yourself on hands knees to the party. Indeed, (3) is a part of my reason for thinking that promises only require reasonable effort, so this is the first example where I have (3) giving us evidence for a substantive moral thesis. I think something similar is true in the case of commands, legislation and the like. You can’t ask for more than reasonable effort! Asking for more adds insult to injury. The parents whose children starve because the parents were unjustly imprisoned have not done wrong in failing to feed them.
Cases of ignorance are also interesting. If Alice is serving wine to her guests and Bob pours poison in the wine whe she isn’t looking, some might say that Alice has done wrong in poisoning her guests. Certainly, actual-result act utilitarianism implies this. But so much the worse for actual-result act utilitarianism. It is much better to say that Alice has done no wrong, as long as it was reasonable for her to have no suspicion of Bob. Cases of ignorance of through-and-through moral facts, on the other hand, are arguably incompatible with full virtue.
Where I think (3) becomes most interesting is in cases where we have a normative power over what is right or wrong for another to do. Using our normative powers, we can make someone who would otherwise have done wrong not be doing wrong. There is a story of a hasid whose house is being robbed, and when the thief is carrying his property away, the hasid yells: “I renounce my property rights.” In doing so, the hasid releases the thief from the duties of restitution, and makes it be the case that the thief is not sinning by continuing to carry the goods away.
Are there cases where we can use our normative powers to reliably make someone do wrong? Definitely. You can know that someone under your authority will very likely refuse to follow a certain command, and you can nonetheless issue the command. But this is obviously a case of someone who is lacking full virtue.
I think the best bet for using our normative powers to reliably make someone perfectly virtuous do wrong is when our exercise of normative powers creates a duty but does so in a way that the perfectly virtuous person does not know about. For instance, one might command the fully virtuous person in circumstances where they will likely not hear the command. Or one might pass legislation that they won’t know about. There are two ways to defend (3) in these cases. The first is to have a communication condition on commands and legislation—they are only morally binding when person subject to them either is informed about them or ought to be informed about them. The second is to say that all that’s morally required is that one make a reasonable effort to obey commands and laws in general, not that one make a reasonable effort to obey each specific command or law (since if one doesn’t know about a command or law, one doesn’t need to make a reasonable effort to obey it). I somewhat prefer the first option of a communication condition—the vicious lawbreaker does wrong in disobeying a specific law, and not just law in general (though according to James 2:10, they are also doing wrong in disobeying law in general).
In any case, I think (3) puts some significant constraints on the shape of moral obligation and the nature of action, but these constraints seem defensible. Though maybe I am failing to notice some better counterexample.
9 comments:
What about cases where a human authority 'makes' a perfectly virtuous person do wrong either by (a) giving a morally wrong command, or (b) giving a command whose rightness is complicated and can't be identified in time?
A human authority (let's say, a medical superior) might give orders on some morally complicated matter where even well-intentioned people can be expected to make moral mistakes.
Will the junior be doing wrong if he disobeys a morally reasonable order? Not necessarily: it's always wrong to do something you think, however mistakenly, is wrong to do. So misguided omissions can be blameless since actions have to be taken in good faith.
But what if you think mistakenly that you are required to DO something which (unbeknownst to you) is wrong but which your superior has commanded? In that case, there are two things you shouldn't do: the wrong thing in good faith and abstaining from that action in bad faith. It may be a split-second decision with no time to think further or change your mind.
So in giving the command to do what is objectively the wrong thing, your superior has 'made' you do the wrong thing (since you're committed to doing what your superior says and can't currently identify the complicated reason why you shouldn't).
Perfect virtue surely can't depend on perfect moral knowledge - so perfect though not omniscient people could inculpably do what is objectively morally wrong, either by disobeying a reasonable command or by obeying a morally wrong one.
Helen:
These are good questions, but I am not sure I buy: "Perfect virtue surely can't depend on perfect moral knowledge".
It seems odd to say that someone is perfectly virtuous, but nonetheless is invincibly ignorant of their duty.
I fear that a view that allows for such ignorance makes difficulties for the idea that Jesus could not materially sin--it makes Jesus' sinlessness a function of his theandric activity rather than his human activity, and that doesn't seem right to me. (One of my former students has a paper on these questions, but I don't know that he would agree with what I am saying here.)
I am still not sure how to come up with a plausible metaethics that allows one to maintain that a fully virtuous person cannot have the kind of gaps of moral knowledge that would lead to wrongdoing. Normally, we distinguish between ignorance of relevant moral facts and non-moral facts, and we certainly want to allow that a fully virtuous person can have ignorance of relevant non-moral facts. Perhaps what we should do is push some things that we tend to think of as moral facts into the category of non-moral *but still normative* facts.
For a toy theory, pretend that there are only two moral facts: "You should promote the teleology of the human organism and you should never intentionally act contrary to this teleology." On this toy story, a perfectly virtuous person cannot be ignorant of these two moral facts. But a virtuous person can still be ignorant as to what the teleology of the human organism is. This is ignorance of nomative matters--teleology is normative--but not of moral matters. But when they violate the teleology of the human organism in this ignorance, while intending to respect the teleology, they do not act wrongly (not even inculpably so).
I am not happy with this kind of an approach.
Alex
What is your position on the Child Jesus though - I agree it's inconceivable that Jesus could however blamelessly do something objectively wrong. But can we say that a perfectly virtuous child must know complicated moral truths (let's say involving Triple Effect) with a human mind? With a Divine mind, yes, and with infused knowledge in the human mind (though perhaps that need only relate to a moral conclusion).
A different issue but many Christians of course think of the Virgin Mary as perfectly virtuous but in no way omniscient. We would not expect her to know (except perhaps by another kind of infusion of knowledge) very complicated moral truths, including as a child or when a split-second decision was required.
I think it's true that mistakes on factual but still as you say normative matters can't mean that one is doing the wrong thing morally. Otherwise doctors in prescientific times especially will be doing immoral things all the time despite trying their very best to heal their patients. And a doctor so seriously mentally ill he thinks a decapitation will benefit his patient (the head will grow back healthy or is not part of human teleology) will be acting in a way which is not just psychotic but morally wrongful albeit blameless - which doesn't sound right.
Helen:
While it is standard Catholic belief that Mary never sinned, this need not imply she was perfectly virtuous. Her sinlessness was a gift of God's grace, and one of the ways that this grace could have worked was by ensuring that either she would not be in situations beyond her ability to figure out what is right or that this ability would be aided by grace. (I am assuming here that her never sinning includes her not committing any material sins.)
I don't know what to say about the child Jesus. That's a really hard question. What do you think? It does seem to be the dominant view in the Tradition that Jesus humanly knew all humanly knowable truths. I have never been comfortable with this, but God doesn't have to make me comfortable.
Here is an intermediate thought. It is not unlikely that humans before the Fall had natural powers beyond ours. Augustine thinks, for instance, that bodily functions were fully under voluntary control. I've wondered in the context of discussions of enhancement vs treatment how we know that some of the things we think of as enhancements aren't actually treatments. Perhaps it is normal for all of us to be genetically resistant to cancer like elephants, to run 3.5 minute miles, and to have an IQ of 300, and all of us are impaired in these regards.
Now, Jesus was exempt from some but not all effects of the Fall. Aquinas says that Jesus was exempt not just from sin but from the fomes of sin, but obviously Jesus wasn't exempt from the physical frailty of the body. The principle is that Jesus was exempt from the effects of the fall that are incompatible with perfect virtue.
Suppose that having perfect practical moral judgment is in fact a part of natural human function. Then lack of this perfect practical moral judgment would be relevantly like the fomes of sin, something that detracts from the perfect possession of virtue in a way that frailty of the body does not. (I am distinguishing practical moral judgment from theoretical moral judgment. The practical moral judgment just says "Do this, don't do that", without necessarily explaining why, and only applies to cases at hand rather than theoretical cases.)
On this theory, how early in Jesus' life would this work? Well, the practical moral judgment is only needed when one is making moral decisions. Infants don't do that. So it wouldn't need to be present right away.
Another possibility is that there are cases where perfect virtue requires us to consult God in prayer, and that there is some kind of a divine guarantee that is a part of God's common grace that God will ensure we have a way of knowing. I worry that this hypothesis doesn't fit very well with the condemnation of "testing God". But it does seem plausible that our natural virtue includes a natural relationship with God that includes some divine illumination.
Here is a line of thought. There are obviously practical cases where a perfectly virtuous person isn't going to make a moral mistake. A mentally ill doctor might be inculpably ignorant of the fact that it's wrong to intentionally kill their patient to rid them of a minor headache, but there is no way that one could have such ignorance and yet count as a "decently virtuous" person. But there are harder cases where a merely decently virtuous person might make the wrong practical judgment, but a perfectly virtuous person couldn't get it wrong. For instance, plausibly, if someone wouldn't judge that they should redirect the trolley in the standard trolley case, I think they are lacking perfect virtue--but a merely decently virtuous person might get this wrong, due to an excessive concern about keeping their hands clean. The more virtuous an agent is, the more cases they are going to get morally right.
So what cases is the *perfectly* virtuous agent going to get right? It would be odd to say: "They'll get right the ones with complexity level 19923 or below." Level "19923" just doesn't sound like *perfection*. We would like something neater and more principled. Here are two suggestions that appeal to me:
- they would get right all cases that a human being could find themselves in
- they would get right all cases that a human being could find themselves compatibly with the laws of nature.
The second option allows for the possibility of error in cases where a supernatural being puts us in some kind of supernatural decision scenario (e.g., maybe something involving sacraments).
Alex
Interesting but difficult! You know much more about the theology than I do.
Perfect practical moral judgement is hard for me to get my head around without a 'top-up' from Divine illumination - even if our natural moral abilities were once much more impressive than they are now.
A perfectly virtuous person would be in the habit of asking God for guidance but does God always give such moral guidance today to extremely well-intentioned (even if not perfectly virtuous) people every time they ask for it? It's not clear that's the case - any more than extremely well-intentioned people receive religious faith as soon as they wish to receive it: some interested people take years to convert to Christianity despite (apparently) very much wishing to do so, praying, studying etc. as much or more than their quickly-converting peers. True, all this is post-Fall, and lack of some relevant virtue MAY be getting in the way but my point is, God's ways are mysterious and we sometimes have to wait for illumination.
You're right that lack of a clearly relevant virtue can obscure moral judgement as with the over-squeamish person and the simple trolley case as you say (though we're still left with the problem of perfectly virtuous, merely-human people of lower age or intelligence).
But imagine some perfectly virtuous, merely-human adult person of normal intelligence confronted with a extra-complex trolley-system set up by an evil genius. OK, they might not need to know the moral principles but I find it hard to imagine the person having unerring natural moral intuition however complex this naturally-possible set-up. And I'm not sure we can assume that every time they sent up a split-second prayer, God would necessarily illuminate them - as opposed perhaps to protecting them from any conscious wrongdoing (e.g. pressing the right lever but in bad faith). With Mary, yes, but Mary was a special case - and as you say, one way of God to protect her was to prevent her being in a situation she (however blamelessly) couldn't see her way through.
Indeed, it's very difficult.
Here is a version of a "nuclear solution" I've toyed with in the past. I'll give a Christian version; for a Kantian one, replace "love" with "respect". There are two assumptions:
1. Every action performed by a fully virtuous person is intended to express love for all persons involved in the action.
2. No matter what you do, you do not do wrong if you do it with the intention to express love for all the persons involved.
Here's how the story works. I take it that torture never expresses love. So what happens if you are dreadfully morally confused--to an extent not compatible with perfect virtue--and think that torturing people sometimes expresses love for them, and you torture with the intention to express love? By (2), you do not do wrong. However, your action is also a failure in the straightforward sense: you do not achieve the intended goal, which was to express love by torturing. The reason you do not achieve the intended goal is that the goal is an impossible one, just like trisecting an angle, since it is impossible to express love by torturing. But the goal of the action was a good, though impossible, goal. If per impossibile you were able to express love by torturing, you'd be doing a good thing by torturing. One might object that there is a moral failure here. Yes, and indeed two kinds: first, anyone who thinks you can express love by torturing fails to be even decently virtuously; second, it is a moral failure because the reason the action fails is that *morality* makes it impossible to express love by torturing. But it is still not a *wrong* action, any more than it is wrong to try to trisect an angle to claim a cash prize that you plan to give to charity when you don't know that trisecting an angle is impossible.
Here is a heuristic (perhaps having some exceptions) I employed above:
3. An attempt to do A is wrong iff doing A would (perhaps per impossibile) be wrong.
So how does all this work in the case of the really complicated trolley problem? Well, the perfectly virtuous person who gets the problem wrong thinks that some action or inaction expresses love for all concerned, and performs the action or inaction to express love, and since the action (or inaction) does not express love, the action is a failure. But it is not wrong, since per impossibile if one were to succeed in expressing love through that action, one would be doing the right thing.
Interestingly, this solution undercuts my reasoning for a strong view of promulgation of law. For it is not wrong to scratch one's head with the intention of expressing love for all concerned when one is unaware that a legitimate authority has forbidden such scratching, though one fails to express love for all concerned in doing the action.
To me, (a) sounds too demanding (a preoccupied but perfectly virtuous person may not be *intending* to express love for each person as he works his way through a large crowd, for example). What he does is compatible with love but need not be intended to express it. And (b) may not differentiate enough between moral and non-moral mistakes - where we normally think of the former as 'doing wrong' however inculpably.
Isn't identifying love but also, any expression of love simply about wishing well, rather than about whether everything you wish for *in fact* benefits the person in permissible ways or otherwise treats them appropriately?
With factual errors (i.e. on what surgery will help a patient) it sounds natural to say that what the factually misguided doctor does is an *actual* (albeit thwarted) expression of love/good will/respect. (I think that applies to moral mistakes too, even if we don't want to collapse the distinction between moral and non-moral mistakes.) Because the doctor aims to achieve an actual appropriate benefit (healing) and there are no other wrongmaking features such as wrongful means, the factually misguided doctor is not doing anything morally wrong.
Whereas the person who tortures (or euthanises etc) out of love or even the morally confused trolley-director is well-motivated and may intend to love/respect everyone in the abstract but is also intending a genuine but utterly unsuitable *expression* of love which is in fact morally wrong. The torturer may be intending the wrong means to his end of benefiting the person even in what would be genuine ways (increasing the person's courage, for example). We surely want to say torture is always morally wrong and that's difficult to say if acts of morally misguided torturers are not only not culpable but not even morally wrong.
Helen:
Regarding the too-demanding, I once read a spiritual writer advising that one should live one's life like an official in the court of a stern king who does all his work on the floor in front of the throne. The official is always aware that the king is there, and all that the official does is colored by that awareness. Similarly, I think everything in our lives should be colored by our awareness of the loving God and should be intended as a response to that love. How else can one say that one loves God with all one's heart. If one loves with all one's heart, one cannot be distracted, since being distracted shows a region of the heart that one is not loving God with. (Oh how far I have to go!)
I guess I took "expression" to mean something like proper or appropriate expression. In a case where someone intends torture as an appropriate expression of love, they necessarily fail in their action, because the torture is not an appropriate expression of love. On the view I was considering, in such a case the person didn't do wrong, but also failed to do what they intended. Their action can be criticized for being an attempt at the impossible. That may initially seem like a non-moral criticism. But the reason why the action is an attempt at the impossible is a moral one--due to the nature of morality it is not possible for torture to appropriately express love. So the criticism is basically a moral criticism.
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