Virtue and value

Suppose you have a choice between a course of action that greatly increases your level of physical courage and a course of action that mildly increases your level of loyalty to friends. But there is a catch: you have moral certainty that in the rest of your life you won’t have any occasion to exercise physical courage but you will have occasions to exercise loyalty to friends.

It seems to be a poor use of limited resources to gain heroic physical courage instead of improving your loyalty a bit when you won’t exercise the heroic physical courage.

If this is right, then the exercise of virtue counts for a lot more than the mere possession of it, as Aristotle already noted with his lifelong coma argument.

But now modify the case. You have a choice between a course of action that greatly increases your level of physical courage and feeding one hungry person for a day. Suppose that you don’t have the virtue of generosity, and that feeding the hungry person won’t help you gain it, because you have a brain defect that prevents you from gaining the virtue of generosity, though it allows you to act generously. And as before suppose you will never have an occasion to exercise physical courage. It still seems clear that you should feed the hungry person. Thus not only does the exercise of virtue count for a lot more than mere possession of virtue, acting in accordance with virtue, even in the absence of the virtue, counts for more than mere possession of virtue.

Next, consider a third case. You have a choice between two actions, neither of which will affect your level of virtue, because shortly after the actions your mind will be wiped. Action A has an 85% chance of saving a life, and if you perform action A, it will certainly be an exercise of generosity. Action B has a 90% chance of saving a life, and the action will be done in accordance with physical courage but will not be an exercise of virtue. Which should you do? It seems that you should do B. Thus, that an action is an exercise of a virtue does not seem to count for a lot in deliberation.

The impact of right action on virtue

One of Socrates’ great discoveries is that moral goodness is good for us.

Virtue ethicists think there are two ways that acting morally well is typically good for us:

1. The action itself is a constituent of our well-being, and

2. The action promotes our possession of virtue.

Now, (1) is not just typically present, but always: good actions are constituents of human well-being. But unless we can count on miracles, there is no guarantee that (2) is always there. We can easily imagine cases where if you don’t do something immoral, you will captured and made to live among people whose vice will rub off on you to a degree where you are likely to become more vicious than you would have been had you done that one immoral thing. But those cases involve highly unusual situations. You might think that (2) is true except in highly exceptional cases.

Are there more common cases where morally good action fails to promote virtue? Well, acting morally well sometimes puts one in a position of temptation. This is not at all uncommon. You take a paycut to work for a charitable organization. But this results in financial pressures and now you are tempted to embezzle from your employer. For the sake of justice you work as a judge. And now you may be offered bribes, or simply be tempted to pride because of your social position. You drive to the grocery store to buy a treat for your child, and then along the way you are tempted to unsafe driving practices.

In a number of such cases, if you fall to the temptation, you become morally worse than you would have been had you omitted the initial morally good action. It is better to work for Morally Neutral Conglomerate, Inc. than for a charitable organization if you would be embezzling from the latter but not from the former. And we empirically know that people do fall to such temptations.

Thus we know there are ordinary cases where an instance of acting morally well has led to moral downfall.

But whether these cases are also counterexamples to the universality of (2) depends on how we read the “promotes” in (2). If we read it purely causally, then, yes, these are cases where doing the right thing was an important causal factor in someone’s moral downfall. But likely we should read (2) in a probabilistic tendency way. Perhaps we have something like this:

3. The mathematical expectation of the level of virtue is higher upon doing the action than upon omitting it.

Again, in the highly exceptional cases this need not be true, unless you can expect a miracle. You may be in a position to be pretty confident that you will morally deteriorate unless you escape a corrupting environment but have no way to escape it except by doing something immoral.

But in typical ordinary cases, (3) seems pretty plausible. At least this is true: there are going to be few cases where the expected level of virtue is significantly lower upon doing the right action. For if that were the case, that would constitute a strong moral reason not to do the action, and hence except in a few cases where that strong moral reason gets overridden, the action won’t be right after all.

All that said, I wonder how good our empirical data is that (3) is true in the case of most ordinary actions.

Exhibiting character flaws

Take a science fiction movie scenario. Carl is trapped near a device set to explode, and cannot be freed until too late. However, it is possible to go and defuse the device. Unfortunately, getting to the bomb requires going through a tunnel where one will get a dose of radiation that will result in severe injury within a day.

Alice and Bob are bystanders with no special obligations to the trapped people. They also know what effects the radiation would have on them. If Alice went, she would permanently lose her eyesight. If Bob went, he would lose his eyesight and his mobility. In both cases, their life would be worth living, and both agree that the injuries would be better than dying. I assume (if not, ratchet up their prospective injuries) that it would be be praiseworthy but not obligatory for either Alice or Bob to go rescue Carl.

Alice then puts enormous effort into trying to persuade Bob to go and defuse the device, vividly describing to them the terror that Carl is feeling, the joy on the faces of Carl’s children if he are rescued, and gives an excellent account of how the exercise of heroic virtue is the most important thing in life, far more valuable than sight and mobility. All of this falls a little bit flat given that Alice has no inclination to go herself, which would be even better objectively speaking. When asked by Bob the natural question of why she doesn’t do it herself, she just says: “I am not obligated to, and while I could, I choose not to sacrifice my life for this guy I don’t know. But it would be really good if you did.”

What Alice is doing seems to be the second best of three options. The best thing would be to go defuse the device herself. The least good would be to do nothing. Persuading Bob to go is second best, since if Bob goes, instead of a person dying, a person loses sight and mobility.

Yet I feel that even though Alice isn’t doing anything wrong, her actions are a manifestation of a particularly bad character. While there is nothing immoral about trying to persuade someone else to make a greater sacrifice than one you are willing to make, there is some kind of a serious character flaw here, and that flaw is being exhibited in the action, even though the action is a good one.

Cases like this make me suspicious of virtue ethics. Manifesting character flaws is different from acting wrongly.

The variety of virtue ethical systems

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems can be depending on how one answers the question of what it is that makes a stable character trait T be a virtue? Consider, after all, these very varied possible answers to that question, any one of which could be plugged into a virtue ethical account of rightness as what accords with virtue.

• having T is partly constitutive of eudaimonia (Aristotelian virtue ethics)

• having T is required by one’s nature or by the nature of one’s will (natural law virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to gain utility by having T (egoist virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to contribute to total utility by having T (utilitarian virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of oneself as having T (hedonistic virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of another as having T (Humean sentimentalist virtue ethics)

• God requires one to have T (divine command virtue ethics).

The resulting ethical systems are all interesting, but fundamentally very different.

A variant virtue ethic centered on virtues and not persons

I’ve been thinking a bit about the virtue ethical claim that the right (i.e., obligatory) action is one that a virtuous person would do and the wrong one is one that a virtuous person wouldn’t do. I’ve argued in my previous posts that this is a problematic claim, since given either naturalism or the Hebrew Scriptures, it is possible for a virtuous person to do something wrong.

Maybe instead of focusing on the person, the virtue ethicist can focus on the virtues. Here is an option:

1. An action is wrong if and only if it could not properly (non-aberrantly) flow from the relevant virtues.

This principle is compatible with a virtuous person doing something wrong, as long as that wrong thing doesn’t flow from virtue.

The “properly” in (1) is an “in the right way” condition. Once we have allowed, as I think we should, that a virtuous person can do the wrong thing, we should also allow that a wrong action can flow from virtue in some aberrant way. For instance, we can imagine a wholly virtuous person falling prey to a temptation to brag about being wholly virtuous (and instantly losing the virtue, of course). The bragging flows from the virtue—but aberrantly.

A down-side of (1) is that it is a pretty strong condition on permissibility. One might think that there are some permissible morally neutral actions which can be done by a perfectly virtuous person but which do not flow from their virtue. If we accept (1), then in effect we are saying that there are no morally neutral actions. I think that is the right thing to say.

The big problem with (1) is the “properly”.

Naturalists shouldn't be virtue ethicists

Virtue ethics is committed to this claim:

1. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to having chosen A and was in these circumstances would not have chosen A.

But (1) implies this generalization:

2. A person who has the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to a choice never chooses wrongly.

In my previous post I argued that Aristotelian Jews and Christians should deny (2), and hence (1).

Additionally, I think naturalists should deny (1). For we live in a fundamentally indeterministic world given quantum mechanics. If a virtuous person were placed in a position of choosing between aiding and insulting a stranger, there will always be a tiny probability of their choosing to insult the stranger. We shouldn’t say that they wouldn’t insult the stranger, only that they would be very unlikely to do so (this is inspired by Alan Hajek’s argument against counterfactuals).

And (2) itself is dubious, unless we have such a high standard of virtue that very few people have virtues. For in our messy chaotic world, very little is at 100%. Rare exceptions should be expected when human behavior is involved.

(Perhaps a dualist virtue ethicist who does not accept the Hebrew Scriptures could accept (1) and (2), holding that a virtuous soul makes the choices and is not subject to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics and the chaos of the world.)

There is a natural way out of the above arguments, and that it so to change (1) to a probabilistic claim:

3. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to having chosen A and was in these circumstances would be very unlikely to have chosen A.

But (3) is false. Suppose that Alice is a virtuous person who has a choice to help exactly one of a million strangers. Whichever stranger she chooses to help, she does no wrong. But it is mathematically guaranteed that there is at least one stranger such that her chance of helping them is at most one in a million (for if p_n is her chance of helping stranger number n, then p₁ + ... + p_1000000 ≤ 1, since she cannot help more than one; given that 0 ≤ p_n for all n, it follows mathematically that for some n we have p_n ≤ 1/1000000). So her helping a particular such stranger is very unlikely to be chosen, but isn’t wrong.

Or for a less weighty case, suppose I say something perfectly morally innocent to start off a conversation. Yet it is very unlikely that a virtuous person would have said so. Why? Because there are so very many perfectly morally innocent ways to start off a conversation, it is very unlikely that they would have chosen the same one I did.

Christians and Jews should not be Aristotelian virtue ethicists

If virtue ethics is correct:

1. An choice is wrong if and only if a person with the relevant virtues and in these circumstances wouldn’t have made that choice. (Premise)

If Aristotelian virtue ethics is correct:

2. An adult lacking a virtue is defective. (Premise)

But:

3. Humans became defective because of the choice of Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. (Premise)

And it seems that:

4. Adam and Eve were adult humans when they chose to eat the forbidden fruit. (Premise)

Thus it seems:

5. When Adam and Eve chose to eat the forbidden fruit, they were not lacking relevant virtues. (By 2–4)

6. Thus, persons (namely Adam and Eve!) with the relevant virtues and in their circumstances did choose to eat the forbidden fruit. (By 5)

7. Thus, their choice to eat the forbidden fruit wasn’t wrong. (1 and 6)

8. But their choice was wrong. (Premise)

9. Contradiction!

Here is one thing the classic virtue ethicist can question about this argument: the derivation of (5) depends on how we read premise (1). We could read (1) as:

10. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to having chosen A and was in these circumstances would not have chosen A

or as:

11. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues while having chosen A and was in these circumstances would not have chosen A.

If we opt for (10), the derivation of (5) works, and the argument stands. But if we opt for (11) then we can say that as soon as Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit, they no longer counted as virtuous.

Could the virtue ethicist thus opt for (11) in place of (10)? I don’t think so. It seems central to virtue ethics that the right choices are ones that result from virtue. And that is what (10) captures. To a great extent (11) would trivialize virtue ethics, in that obviously in doing a bad thing one isn’t virtuous.

Virtue ethics and peer disagreement

Aristotelian ethics is committed to the claim that the virtuous person knows what actions and habits are virtuous and is justified in holding on to that knowledge, and indeed should hold on to it. There is a deep stability to virtue. This means that an Aristotelian virtuous person ought not adopt a conciliationist response to those who disagree as to what is virtuous, suspending judgment over the disagreed-upon items.

Indeed, one imagines that Aristotle’s virtuous person could say of those who disagree: “They are not virtuous, and hence do not see the truth about moral matters.” Aristotle’s virtuous person would reject the idea that someone who disagrees with them about virtue could be an epistemic peer. Virtuous habits give epistemic access to moral (and not only moral) truth.

Of course, the disagreer may think themselves virtuous as well, and may think the same thing about the virtuous person as the virtuous person thinks about them. But that does not shake the Aristotelian virtuous person.

This means that if Aristotelian virtue ethics is correct, there is a clear thing that a Christian can say about religious disagreement. The Christian thinks faith is a virtue, albeit an infused rather than natural one. As such, faith gives epistemic access, and someone lacking faith is simply not an epistemic peer, since they lack a source of truth. The fact that a person lacking faith thinks they have the virtue of faith should not move the person who actually has the virtue.

Of course, one might turn all this around and use it as an argument against virtue ethics. But I think Aristotle’s picture seems exactly correct as to the kind of firmness of moral knowledge that the virtuous person exhibits, the kind of spine that lets them say, without pride or vanity, to vast numbers of others that they are simply wrong.

Being a bad person and doing wrong

Until recently, I assumed everyone agreed to something like this principle:

1. If performing an action constitutes you as a bad person, the action is morally wrong.

Virtue ethicists, of course, make this a biconditional that defines wrongness, but I would have assumed that just about everybody would agree that the conditional (1) is true.

But I am now thinking that (1) is not accepted as widely as I thought it is. What makes me think this is the way that Thomson’s violinist case resonates with so strongly with so many people, and presumably continues to do so even if one adds the necessary proviso that the violinist is one’s own minor child (otherwise it wouldn’t be applicable to typical cases of abortion). Yet it seems utterly obvious to me to that:

2. If the violinist is your own minor child, disconnecting from the violinist makes you a bad parent and a bad person.

But one cannot consistently accept (1) and (2) and think it is morally permissible to disconnect from the violinist when the violinist is one’s own child.

I would love to see empirical data on whether people who find the violinist case compelling deny (1) or deny (2). Thomson herself probably denies (2).

Let's not exaggerate the centrality of virtue to ethics

Virtues are important. They are useful: they internalize the moral law and allow us to make the right decision quickly, which we often need to do. They aren’t just time-savers: they shine light on the issues we deliberate over. And the development of virtue allows our freedom to include the two valuable poles that are otherwise in tension: (a) self-origination (via alternate possibilities available when we are developing virtue) and (b) reliable rightness of action. This in turn allows our development of virtue reflect the self-origination and perfect reliability in divine freedom.

But while virtues are important, they are not essential to ethics. We can imagine beings that only ever make a single, but truly momentous, decision. They come into existence with a clear understanding of the issues involved, and they make their decision, without any habituation before or after. That decision could be a moral one, with a wrong option, a merely permissible option, and a supererogatory option. They would be somewhat like Aquinas’ angels.

We could even imagine beings that make frequent moral choices, like we do, but whose nature does not lead them too habituate in the direction of virtue or vice. Perhaps throughout his life whenever Bill decides whether to keep an onerous promise or not, there is a 90% chance that he will freely decide rightly and a 10% chance that he will freely decide wrongly, a chance he is born and dies with. A society of such beings would be rather alien in many practices. For instance, members of that society could not be held responsible for their character, but only for their choices. Punishment could still be retributive and motivational (for the chance of wrong action might go down when there are extrinsic reasons against wrongdoing). I think such beings would tend to have lower culpability for wrongdoing than we do. For typically when I do wrong as a middle-aged adult, I am doubly guilty for the wrong: (a) I am guilty for the particular wrong choice that I made, and (b) I am guilty for not having yet transformed my character to the point where that choice was not an option. (There are two reasons we hold children less responsible: first, their understanding is less developed, and, second, they haven’t had much time to grow in virtue.)

Nonetheless, while such virtue-less beings woould be less responsible, and we wouldn’t want to be them or live among them, they would still have some responsibility, and moral concepts could apply to them.

Thick and thin obligations

Suppose that all fundamental thick moral obligation terms can be put in the logical form: "required by virtue v". Then we have a plausible and neat account of thin obligation in terms of thick obligation:

1. A is obligatory if and only if there is a virtue v such that A is required by v.

Can we define the thick terms via thin obligation? A promising start is:

2. A is required by virtue v if and only if facts about v explain why A is obligatory.

But this is only a start, since there are obvious counterexamples. Suppose I promise you to give you ten dollars if courage is a virtue. Then a fact about courage, namely that it is a virtue, explains why it is obligatory for me to give you ten dollars, but I am not required by justice, and not by courage, to give you ten dollars.

To make something like (2) work, we would need to specify the way in which facts about v explain why A is obligatory. It is implausible to suppose that this can be done without recourse to something circular, like saying that facts about v explain in a requirement-inducing way why A is obligatory.

This suggests that it is easier to account for thin obligation in terms of thick obligation. And this, in turn, suggests that it is better to take as our fundamental concept of obligation not "is obligated to" but "is obligated by ... to".

A way to classify and discover virtues

Here is a way to classify virtues, which also leads to a way of discovering virtues. Start by what I will call "general virtues" ("structural virtues" is perhaps better, but the term is already taken). These are excellences that in their specification are neutral between particular human goods like health, friendship, reproduction, understanding, etc. Some examples of general virtues include:

• Courage: Excellence in risking real loss in respect of a good to self for the sake of a good to self or another.
• Generosity: Excellence in sacrificing a good to self for the sake of a good to another.
• Perseverence: Excellence in accepting a temporally extended loss of a good to self for the sake of a good to self or another.
• Wisdom: Excellence in choosing between incommensurable goods.
• Moderation: Avoiding excess in respect of goods.

You may well dispute my particular characterizations, and you will be right to do so, but it is the general form that I am most interested in here rather than details. Each of these general virtues talks of one's attitudes to goods, while being neutral on which particular goods these are.

However, it is well-known both at the folk level, and fits with psychological research on the domain-specificity of human excellences, that one can have one of these general virtues in respect of only some goods or pairs of goods, but not in respect of others.

Thus, we have virtues that are specifications of the general virtues. The specifications can be of two sorts: they can be further structural specifications or they can be substantive specifications. For instance, we can structurally specify courage into what one might call:

• Self-centered courage: Excellence in risking real loss in respect of a good to self for the sake of a good to self.
• Other-centered courage: Excellence in risking real loss in respect of a good to self for the sake of a good to another.

One might even have more specific structural specifications specifying one's relationship to others, the quantity of others, etc. We can also structurally specify perseverance into things like:

• Persistence: Excellence in accepting a lengthy temporally extended loss of a minor good to self.
• Heroic perserverance: Excellence in accepting a temporally extended loss of a major good to self.

But I want to focus instead on substantive specifications. The general and structurally specified virtues are neutral between the kinds of human goods. Substantive specifications are special cases where only particular kinds of human goods are in play. Some examples:

• Physical courage: Excellence in risking real loss of health to self for the sake of a good to self or other.
• Social courage: Excellence in risking real loss of social capital to self for the sake of a good to self or other.
• Physical-social courage: Excellence in risking real loss of health to self for the sake of social capital for self.
• Chastity, a substantive specification of moderation: Avoiding excess in respect of sexual goods.
• Political wisdom: Excellence in choosing between incommensurable communal goods.

Notice that such specifications nest. Physical courage still has a structural element: it does not specify which goods to self or other justify the risk. Physical-social courage, which while admirable is not as admirable as some other substantive specifications of courage, specifies the goods for the sake of which the risk is undertaken.

And it could be that there are even narrower virtues, with other kinds of specifications, including contextual ones, like military physical-social courage.

We can thus classify virtues by first finding a general form that is neutral between kinds of goods, with more or less of a structural specification, and then add a substantive specification in terms of the kinds of goods involved, sometimes, as in the case of courage, there being more than one place in the structure where kinds of goods need to be inserted.

This leads to a heuristic that could allow for the discovery of new virtues:

• Every virtue can be obtained in this way.

This heuristic may have exceptions, though I can't think of any right now. Given the heuristic, a virtue that makes specific reference to a type of good will be a substantive specification of a virtue that does not. And this means that when we have a substantive virtue, like chastity, we should be able to discover other substantive virtues by finding the underlying structure, and substantively filling it out in other ways.

Suppose that, further, one agrees that intellectual virtues are virtues, but ones that concern an epistemic good. Then this means that one will be able to discover new intellectual virtues simply by specifying structural virtues with epistemic goods, and new non-intellectual or not-specifically-intellectual virtues by finding the structures underlying the intellectual virtues.

Two examples. First, from the non-intellectual (or not-specifically-intellectual) direction to the specifically intellectual direction:

• Intellectual-intellectual courage: Excellence in risking real loss of epistemic goods to self for the sake of epistemic goods to self.

This comes into play when one investigates a matter where one already has well-established epistemic goods, accepting a risk that misleading evidence might cause the loss of these goods. Second, the other way. Start with:

• Intellectual open-mindedness: Excellence in risking loss of apparent epistemic goods for the sake of real epistemic goods.

And now we get the very interesting virtue:

• General open-mindedness: Excellence in risking loss of apparent goods for the sake of real goods.

For instance, by relying on an apparent friend, we risk finding out that the friendship is only apparent. But it is a risk worth taking on.

Paul Symington on Sophie's choice

Paul Symington has an intriguing post on Sophie's choice, where he defends the thesis that if virtue ethics is right she should have refused to cooperate. I disagree, but I think the post is really worth thinking about.

Ethics and therapy of the soul

Plausibly, ethics ought to be in part a practical discipline, one teaching us just how to become virtuous and avoid vice. In fact, this desideratum seems particularly fitting in the case of virtue ethics. I wonder how far ethics, and in particular virtue ethics, fulfills this.

In part, it does. I have learned some useful things from the Nicomachean Ethics about friendship. But in general, I rarely learn much that is useful for combating vice and pursuing virtue from secular philosophers, either ancient or modern. On the other hand, I learn a lot from Christian writers, both ancient and modern. These point out subtle dangers in the moral and spiritual life which I would not otherwise have noticed, and give useful advice on how to avoid these dangers and progress in virtue.

In part this is because many of the Christian writers are people who can draw on a rich experience of helping others, such as penitents, parishioners or spiritual directees, grow morally. This is a rich fund of data about the moral life which the secular philosopher has typically been completely bereft of. It seems clear that the secular moral philosopher who wishes to take seriously the therapeutic aspect of philosophy must study this fund of data.

But I also wonder if there isn't another reason for why secular ethics is only helpful to a point, a point that does not do much for one. For, ultimately, among fallen humans, moral progress is the work of the Holy Spirit, and in the moral life we contend not merely against what is human but also against the subtle intellects of demons.

Wrongness and vice

Consider these two cases:

1. Martha hears Patrick utter an insult against her husband. Incensed by the insult, she fights Patrick with her fists, trying to kill him in a "fair" way (Patrick is not weaker than she is, she is not sneaking up on him, etc.). She succeeds in winning the fight, and has, thus, deliberately killed Patrick.
2. Constantine tortures a small reptile, knowing the reptile to be entirely harmless.

What Martha has done is, intuitively, morally worse than what Constantine did. Martha killed a person, a creature in the image and likeness of God, a being endowed with dignity. She was provoked, but nonetheless acted deliberately to cause the death of a juridically innocent human being. On the other hand, Constantine caused wanton and inexcusable pain, but he did this to a being quite low down on the scale of moral concern. (If you disagree with my comparison between the two actions, then change the reptile into a ladybug.)

However, Constantine's action is the one that is more expressive of a vicious character: a character that is cruel, cowardly and irrational. Martha's action, while admittedly exhibiting disproportionate wrath, also exhibited loyalty and courage, albeit of a misguided sort. We wouldn't want to have Constantine among our friends. On the other hand, having Martha as one's friend would be an asset, as long as we were careful in our behavior around her.

If this is right, then there is a distinction between how wrong an action is and how expressive it is of a vicious character. This distinction has some interesting consequences. An obvious one is that it makes implausible Hume's account of punishment. Hume thought we punished actions insofar as they were evidence of a vicious character. But we would rightly punish Martha more severely than we would Constantine.

But a more important consequence is that it puts into question the virtue ethics project of grounding moral permissibility and impermissibility in virtue and vice. For, surely, if impermissibility is to be grounded in virtue and vice, then an action is more impermissible—more wrong—if it is more expressive of vice. But the above examples show that this is not so.

Two accounts of lying

There are two accounts of lying. If one asks a child, one will likely hear that to lie is to say something that isn't true, and the child is likely to count any statement she thinks is false as a lie. Adults do this, too, but reflective adults tend to grow out of this, and see a lie as a statement that the speaker takes to be false. On this more sophisticated view, a lie is opposed to sincerity, not truth. If one is mistaken about the truth, One can lie and say the truth, or one can speak falsely and not lie.

I think the more mature account is probably truer to the English word "lie". But the interesting question isn't about linguistics, but about ethics: The question is whether what morality in the first instance forbids (whether absolutely or prima facie—I think absolutely) is insincere speech or false speech.

I want to argue that what is forbidden in the first instance is false-telling. The obvious objection, of course, is that (a) one is innocent if one is convinced that the falsehood one tells is true, and (b) one is guilty if the truth one tells is something one believes to be false.

This objection, however, is one that the defender of the false-telling theory can easily handle. First, consider (b). If it is wrong to do A, it is wrong to do what one takes to be the doing of A. The person speaking a truth and believing it to be false takes herself to be speaking a falsehood, and hence she acts wrongly.

It is not obvious that claim (a) is actually correct. If I believe a falsehood p, but I have no right (moral or epistemic, say) to believe p, it is not clear that I am excused for affirming p. It is a merit of the false-telling theory that it draws one's attention to this. In any case, the false-telling theorist can say that when one sincerely affirms a falsehood p, and one has the right to believe p, then one is not culpable, though one has acted wrongly. One is like the person who handed out poison at the party, believing it to be water—it is wrong to hand out poison, but one is not culpable if one was not reasonably expected to know that it's poison.

The false-telling account has the advantage that it situates the paradigmatic case of lying as an offence against truth, rather than against sincerity, and that seems right. Moreover, it appropriately parallels the prohibition against lying with the prohibition against promise-breaking and similar objective moral rules. What is forbidden (at least prima facie) is to fail to do what one has promised. A person who thinks she is acting contrary to a promise is, of course, acting viciously, but she is not breaking her promise—she merely thinks she is, though in doing what she thinks is a breaking of a promise she does wrong. If one has fulfilled a promise without knowing one has done so, one is off the hook as far as the promise goes. And if one has innocently forgotten a promise, say due to amnesia, then one still has gone against the promise and acted wrongly, but one is not culpable. We would say the same thing about adultery. What is forbidden in the first instance is for a married person to engage in sexual relations with a non-spouse. It would be odd indeed to say that what is in the first instance forbidden is sexual relations with someone one takes to be a non-spouse.[note 1]

On an account on which what is in the first instance wrong about lying is insincerity, we need to posit an additional duty, the duty to ensure that what one speaks is not only sincere but sufficiently investigated by the speaker. To speak when one has made insufficient investigation of the matter on which one speaks is not a lie, but is nonetheless wrong, since in speaking one invites trust. But on the false-telling account, the duty to investigate the relevant matters follows from the general duty to make sure in all our actions that we have sufficiently investigated whether the action isn't wrong. For if what is wrong is the telling of a falsehood, then one must sufficiently investigate to ensure that one isn't unknowingly doing that, and this one does by investigating whether the matter is true or false. The false-telling account, thus, neatly fits with the idea that by speaking we put our authority behind something, inviting others to trust us—and we should only put our authority behind the truth.

I also think the false-telling account fits better with Example 1 in this older post.

On the other hand, the false-telling account of the wrongness of lying has the counterintuitive consequence that when we make a mistake, we have done wrong. Here I am willing to bite the bullet. In speaking falsely, I have said what was not to be said. If one thinks, as I do, that there is only one form of normativity, it is plausible that a moral misdeed was done here. One might try to press this harder—does the student who makes a mistake on an exam do morally wrong (assuming she studied hard enough)? Here, I could bite the bullet, but one might also question (I got this idea from one of our grad students in a different context) whether one makes assertions on exams.

A final reflection. It seems that if I am right, then personal virtue/vice here tracks not whether one has acted objectively rightly/wrongly, but whether one is subjectively praiseworthy/culpable. The person who speaks sincerely (at least if after sufficient investigation) is the honest person, and the insincere person is the dishonest one. That virtue/vice doesn't track right/wrong may seem implausible, at least to virtue ethicists. But the cases of promises and adultery suggest that this is indeed so—virtue does not seem to be lost in failing to keep a promise when you honestly think you've kept it but have innocently mistaken the terms of it, or by committing adultery with someone one believes to be one's long-lost spouse but who is in fact an impostor. (Nonetheless, there will likely be some trauma to the virtuous agent once she finds out what she did, and this might cause moral damage.) If I am right here, then virtue ethicists would be mistaken to try to derive rightness/wrongness facts from virtue facts.