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“BUT IT WOULD BE WRONG”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2010

Stephen Darwall
Stephen Darwall
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Yale University
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Abstract

Is the fact that an action would be wrong itself a reason not to perform it? Warranted attitude accounts of value suggest “buck-passing” about value, that being valuable is not itself a reason but “passes the buck” to the reasons for valuing something in which its value consists. Would a warranted attitude account of moral obligation and wrongness, not entail, therefore, that being morally obligatory or wrong gives no reason for action itself? I argue that this is not true. Although warranted attitude theories of normative concepts entail buck-passing with respect to reasons for the specific attitudes that are inherently involved in the concept, the concepts of moral obligation and wrong are normative not in the first instance for action, but for a distinctive set of attitudes (Strawsonian “reactive attitudes”) through which we hold ourselves and one another answerable for our actions. On this analysis, moral obligations are demands we legitimately make as representative persons, and the fact that an act would violate such a demand, and so disrespect the authority these demands presuppose, is indeed a reason not to perform the wrongful act that is additional to whatever features make the act wrong.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , July 2010 , pp. 135 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2010

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References

1 “Counterattack and Counterpoint,” Time (August 13, 1973)Google Scholar.

2 Here is what the transcript of the March 21, 1973, tape says: “president: How much money do you need? dean: I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh,—two years. (Pause) president: We could get that. dean: Uh, huh. president: You, on the money, if you need the money, I mean, uh, you could get the money. Let's say— dean: Well, I think that we're going— president: What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten. dean: Uh, huh.” (Watergate Trial Conversations, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, http://nixon.archives.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/trial/transcripts.php.)

3 See Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11Google Scholar; Dancy, Jonathan, “Should We Pass the Buck?” in Philosophy, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, ed. O'Hear, Anthony, supp. vol. 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 159–73Google Scholar; Stratton-Lake, Philip, “Scanlon's Contractualism and the Redundancy Objection,” Analysis 63, no. 1 (2003): 70–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zimmerman, Michael J., “The Good and the Right,” Utilitas 19, no. 3 (2007): 326–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scanlon, T. M., “Wrongness and Reasons: A Re-examination,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–20Google Scholar.

4 These include Dancy, Stratton-Lake, and Zimmerman (see previous note).

5 The latter term derives from Dancy, “Should We Pass the Buck?” When I speak of “good-making” or “right-” or “wrong-making” properties in what follows, I will have this sense in mind, namely, grounds or normative reasons for something's value, rightness, or wrongness. We might call this a normative sense, as opposed to a metaphysical sense of good-making or right- or wrong-making features (i.e., the features in which something's being good, right, or wrong consists metaphysically). I shall be arguing that an act's wrong-making features in the normative sense (i.e., the grounds of or normative reasons for something's being wrong) do not exhaust the reasons not to perform the wrongful act—that the fact that the act is wrong is itself a reason not to perform it. I should not be understood as claiming that if there is some complex fact or facts in which this latter fact consists metaphysically, the fact that an act is wrong is a reason that is additional to these facts, since, on the hypothesis in question, that is what the fact of an act's being wrong would itself consist in. I have been helped here by discussion with, among others, Janice Dowell and Peter Schulte.

6 Cf. Michael Smith on the de dicto desire to avoid wrongdoing as opposed to de re desires to avoid actions of wrong-making kinds: Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 75–76Google Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 I take this to be a more pointed version of the first line of thought mentioned above.

9 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 95–100.

10 That is, why not think that moral wrongness passes the buck to features that are wrong-making in the sense of providing normative grounds of an act's wrongness? This differs from any features that might be wrong-making in the sense of being what an action's being wrong consists in metaphysically.

11 See, e.g., ibid., 11; and Scanlon, T. M., “Wrongness and Reasons: A Re-examination,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–20Google Scholar.

12 See note 5 above.

13 Strawson, P. F., “Freedom and Resentment,” in Strawson, , Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. I defend this analysis in greater detail in The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

14 In my view, the warranted-attitude theory (or, more specifically, the fitting-attitude theory, which I shall discuss presently) is the most plausible approach to analyzing normative concepts. It is not necessary to the argument of this essay, however, that it actually succeeds. We shall simply assume that it does succeed as the most plausible line of thought leading to the view that wrongness is not itself a reason for acting. My point will be that accepting a fitting-attitude theory of wrongness would not commit us to this. To the contrary, on the fitting-attitude theory of wrongness that I shall propose, wrongness is indeed itself a practical reason.

15 Gibbard, Allan, “Knowing What to Do, Seeing What to Do,” in Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations, ed. Stratton-Lake, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 212Google Scholar.

16 Ewing, A. C., “Suggested Non-Naturalistic Analysis of Good,” Mind 48 (1939): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar.

17 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 25.

18 Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7Google Scholar. See also McLeod, Owen, “Just Plain ‘Ought’,” The Journal of Ethics 5 (2001): 269–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110 (2000): 722–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rabinowicz, Wlodek and Ronnøw-Rasmussen, Toni, “The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value,” Ethics 114 (2004): 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 The “toxin puzzle” refers to a situation Kavka described in which there is an instrumental reason to form an intention to drink a toxin (e.g., that one would be rewarded if one did), but in which this apparently gives one no reason to act on the intention. See Kavka, Gregory S., “The Toxin Puzzle,” Analysis 43 (1983): 33–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 D'Arms and Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value.”

22 For example, it might be a reason not just for a desire to eat an apple, but for a desire to eat an apple on account of its taste. (Rabinowicz and Ronnøw-Rasmussen, “The Strike of the Demon,” 414.) This is related to a suggestion of Falk, W. D.'s in “Fact, Value, and Nonnatural Predication,” in Falk, W. D., Ought, Reasons, and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 117Google Scholar.

23 Hieronymi, Pamela, “The Wrong Kind of Reason,” The Journal of Philosophy 102, no. 9 (2005): 437–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 66.

25 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 95.

26 For a defense of such a view, see Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

27 See Zimmerman, “The Good and the Right,” for a parallel argument against holding that wrongness creates an additional reason.

28 For our purposes, we do not strictly need to suppose that a fitting-attitude theory actually does entail buck-passing about value. The argument of this essay is that even if it were to support buck-passing about the relevant valuing attitudes in this way, a fitting-attitude account of wrongness of the sort I will propose would not entail buck-passing about wrongness with respect to reasons for action. Here again, then, we can just assume that a fitting-attitude theory of value of the sort Scanlon gestures to entails buck-passing about value with respect to the relevant valuing attitudes. I am indebted here to discussion with Ruth Chang.

29 See Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 91–118. There I define a set of second-personal concepts, which conceptually involve the idea of claims and demands that can be addressed (to an addressee, second-personally), and I argue that these include the concepts of moral obligation, wrong, rights, the dignity of persons, and the very concept of a moral person (as a subject of obligations).

30 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson uses the term “reactive attitude” to refer to a set of attitudes (which include indignation, resentment, guilt, and moral blame) that implicitly hold their objects responsible and thus regard them in a distinctively interpersonal (as I put it, “second-personal”) way. For ease of expression, I will sometimes speak of actions, and not agents, as blameworthy; strictly speaking, however, it is the agent who is appropriately blamed for performing a “blameworthy action” (speaking loosely).

31 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. V, sec. 14.

32 I use “blame” throughout this essay to refer to an attitude rather than to any specific activity or speech act. It is thus possible to blame someone without ever saying anything to him or to anyone. Blame in this sense also differs from a belief or judgment that someone is blameworthy. One might say, for example: “I know that she still blames me for what I did twenty-five years ago, though we haven't talked in many years.”

33 That is, it cannot provide such a reason on the assumption we have been making, namely, that a fitting-attitude theory of a normative concept entails buck-passing with respect to reasons for the attitudes that the concept conceptually involves.

34 Again, such features are “estimable-making” in the sense of being normative grounds of something's being estimable, not in the sense of being facts in which the thing's being estimable consists metaphysically.

35 Darwall, Stephen, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 By the “moral community,” I mean no actual community, but a regulative ideal like Kant's “kingdom of ends.” We could as well say that the authority is one we have as representative persons. I am indebted to David Velleman and Samuel Scheffler for discussion on this point.

37 See Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 81: “What I want to contrast is the attitude (or range of attitudes) of involvement or participation in a human relationship, on the one hand, and what might be called the objective attitude (or range of attitudes) to another human being, on the other…. To adopt the objective attitude to another human being is to see him, perhaps, as an object of social policy; as a subject for what, in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment; as something certainly to be taken account, perhaps precautionary account, of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained; perhaps simply to be avoided, though this gerundive is not peculiar to cases of objectivity of attitude. The objective attitude may be emotionally toned in many ways, but not in all ways: it may include repulsion or fear, it may include pity or even love, though not all kinds of love. But it cannot include the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships; it cannot include resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other. If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with him. You can at most pretend to quarrel, or to reason, with him.”

38 But might the concepts of moral obligation and moral wrong be analyzed in terms of morally conclusive reasons—a moral obligation being something there is conclusive moral reason to do, and being wrong being something there is conclusive moral reason not to do? But what is it for reasons to be morally conclusive? On the one hand, if we give this an epistemic sense, such that reasons are conclusive if they conclusively establish that a certain act is what morality most recommends, then this really adds nothing to the possibility just canvassed. On the other hand, if reasons are morally conclusive when they warrant a moral requirement or demand, then this possibility amounts to the one I go on to consider presently. In order for there to be some other possibility, we would have to have a notion of morally conclusive reason that we understand independently of the idea of moral requirement or demand, which we could then use to understand this latter idea. I doubt that this is so. I am indebted to Samuel Scheffler for discussion on these points.

39 For this reason, I argue in The Second-Person Standpoint that the normativity of moral obligation is not adequately captured by the Kantian idea that moral demands are demands of reason. Of course, it could still be the case that what is morally demanded is also demanded by reason. I argue that the most promising line of argument supporting this, indeed, proceeds from a second-personal account of moral obligation's normativity.

40 Indeed, the very idea of an “excuse” is not internal to the rules of logic; it must be understood in relation to a broader context that includes other norms.

41 I do not mean, of course, that logical errors are not subject to criticism, or that we do not sometimes use words like “blame,” as when a teacher says that he does not blame his student for a given error on a first try.

42 Skorupski, John, Ethical Explorations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29, 142Google Scholar. This claim is, however, too strong, since one may not blame someone for acting wrongly if the person has some adequate excuse for doing so.

43 Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, 42 (emphasis in the original).

44 See, e.g., Baier, Kurt, “Moral Obligation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1966): 210–26Google Scholar; Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Shafer-Landau, Russ, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 92–93.

46 Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

47 In addition to negative personal reactive attitudes, Strawson also mentions gratitude, which he regards as a (positive) personal reactive attitude—an attitude which, in this case, is felt as if from the perspective of a beneficiary.

48 Ibid., 79.

49 Ibid., 81.

50 Thus, an attitude can be second-personal in the requisite sense and be third-party or “impersonal” in Strawson's sense. And the phenomenon of guilt shows that it is possible to take a second-personal attitude toward oneself. What makes an attitude second-personal is its having an implicit addressee.

51 Again, by wrong-making features, I mean features that provide grounds or normative reasons for something's being wrong, not the features, if there are any, in which something's being wrong might consist metaphysically.

52 For convenience, I shall shorten “moral right” to “right.”

53 I take it that it would be incoherent to assert that one has a right to something but that someone would do no wrong, not even other things being equal, if she were to deprive one of it.

54 Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, ed. Cook, Walter Wheeler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923)Google Scholar.

55 Feinberg, Joel, “The Nature and Value of Rights,” in Feinberg, , Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 546CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 65–75.

58 For directed obligation, see Gilbert, Margaret, A Theory of Political Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for bipolar obligation, see Thompson, Michael, “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. Wallace, R. Jay et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

59 Again, “the moral community” refers here not to any actual social collectivity but to a regulative ideal like Kant's “kingdom of ends.”

60 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 72.

61 Ibid., 84–85.

62 Thus, if it is a conceptual truth that violations of rights (wrongings) are also, other things being equal, wrongs period—that violations of “bipolar” obligations to someone are also, other things being equal, violations of moral obligations period—then it follows that a personal reactive attitude, such as resentment, can be warranted only if an impersonal reactive attitude would be (at least, other things being equal). I believe this conceptual thesis is true, but notice that the claim that the fact that an action is wrong is a reason not to perform it (consisting in the fact that the act violates a legitimate demand we make of one another as representative persons) does not strictly depend on this conceptual thesis. I am indebted here to discussion with Verity Harte and Jules Coleman.

63 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sections 7–11.

64 Or, alternatively, though it violates your right and would be wrong (period) if I lacked this further justification, it is not wrong because the justification exists. What violates someone's rights would be wrong to do lacking some justification, just as what is wrong would be blameworthy if done without adequate excuse. It follows that what violates someone's rights would be blameworthy if it were done without either a justification or an excuse.

65 Scanlon, “Wrongness and Reasons,” 6.

66 See Williams, Bernard, “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame,” in Williams, , Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 40–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, 299–300; Skorupski, Ethical Explorations, 42–43; and Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence, 181–83.

67 For valuable insights about the relevance of prospective guilt, I am indebted to the work of Howard Nye.

68 It should be clear that I am not saying that this is a wrong-making feature, in the sense of a ground or of normative reason for an act's wrongness. I am saying that this is what being wrong consists in, and that this fact provides a reason not to perform the wrongful act that is additional to the act's wrong-making features (grounds of or normative reasons for its being wrong).