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The Nature of Immorality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Jean Hampton
Jean Hampton
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of California, Davis
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Extract

This article is concerned with the nature of individual moral failure. This has not been a standard issue for exploration in moral philosophy, where questions surrounding moral success have been more popular: in particular, the questions “What is it to do the moral thing (i.e., how do I identify moral success)?” and “Why am I supposed to do the moral thing (i.e., what is morality's authority)?” I want to change the subject and pursue answers to three importantly related questions about people's failure to be moral.

First, I want to explore an issue in moral psychology: why do people behave immorally? I suspect this question has been largely ignored by philosophers because they have thought it a question for psychologists, and one that, at any rate, has an easy surface answer. Isn't it our immorality simply the result of our excessive self-interest? Yet we shall see in what follows that this answer is not nearly good enough, and that philosophers have a lot to contribute in determining what would count as a satisfactory answer. We shall also see that different meta-ethical theories purporting to explain the authority of moral action implicitly assume different and often mutually inconsistent accounts of why (and when) we fail to be moral, and our analysis will show that none of these accounts of moral failure is unproblematic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1989 , pp. 22 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1989

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References

1 Nagel, Thomas, “Moral Luck,” in Free Will, ed. Gary, Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 174–75.Google Scholar

2 ibid., p. 184.

3 Reprinted in Foot's, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 151–73.Google Scholar

4 ibid., p. 167.

5 ibid., p. 162.

6 Anscombe, G.E.M., “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Collected Works, Volume III: Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 30.Google Scholar

7 Plato, , Protagoras, 357d-e; trans. Lamb, W.R.M. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 243.Google Scholar

8 Plato, , Meno, 77e; trans. Lamb, W.R.M. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 289.Google Scholar

9 Foot, p. 162.

10 I am indebted to Julie Health Elliott for discussions on Aristotle's view of wickedness, in which she persuaded me that he does not take a consistent position on what the wicked man is like.

11 All references to the Nicomachean Ethics in the text will be to the translation by Ross, W.D. in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard, McKeon (Chicago: Random House, 1941)Google Scholar; the quote is from 1150b35.

12 ibid., 1152a23.

13 ibid., 1150a20–23. My emphasis.

14 ibid., 1166b10–30. My emphasis.

15 ibid., 1176a15–19.

16 ibid., 1110b26–29.

17 ibid., 1114a3–11. My emphasis.

18 Aquinas noted this vacillation, and proposed a way of reconciling the Aristotelian claims that wrongdoers were ignorant and yet knowledgeable of something that makes them culpable; see note 39.

19 ibid., 1148a4–10. My emphasis.

20 ibid., 1150b30.

21 ibid., 1102b15–18.

22 Romans 7:14–20.

23 Aristotle, 1111b12–15.

24 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Paton, H. J. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 80.Google Scholar

25 Doctrine of Virtue, trans. Gregor, Mary J. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1964), p. 37.Google Scholar

26 Aristotle, 1111b12.

27 See Allen Wood's use of this term to describe such an approach to immorality in his Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 214. John Rawls also uses the term in this way in unpublished lectures on Kant, and it was he who first prompted me to think about the approach.

28 See Smart's, “Free Will, Praise and Blame,” Mind, LXX, no. 279 (July 1961), pp. 291–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?”, in Essays in Action and Events (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 35.

30 See Kant's, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Greene, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H., ed. John, Silber (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), pp. 52–53.Google Scholar

31 So nothing in this paper aims to show that compatibilism is wrong: the compatibilist's challenge is to show how the idea that actions are chosen by the self is compatible with those choices being determined.

32 Inferno, Canto V, quoted by Davidson, p. 35. This is also the approach to explaining immorality which Augustine (himself an opponent of the Manichees) took: “As [God] is the creator of all nature so he is the giver of all power, but not of will. Evil wills are not derived from him, since they are contrary to nature, which is from him.” City of God, bk. v, sec. 9; quoted from the translation by J.W.C. Wand (London: Oxford, 1963), p. 98.

33 Genesis 2:16–18.

34 Genesis 2:24–26.

35 Genesis 3:1–7.

36 It can't explain the origin of evil itself, however. After all, the snake was already evil, and who made the snake?

37 See Morris's, “Lost Innocence,” from Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 139–61.Google Scholar Morris is one of the few philosophers who appreciates how philosophically interesting the Adam and Eve tale is, and I am indebted to him for suggesting to me its relevance to the task of explaining immorality. He contends about Adam and Eve that

in disobeying God each was, if one accepts that they were required to obey, guilty, in an attenuated sense, of at a minimum, disobedience, and being guilty of this, they were no longer innocent of wrongdoing. Being guilty and no longer innocent in this sense, however, does not seem to imply, given their child-like nature at the time of disobedience and their ignorance of good and evil, moral culpability in disobeying. In the act of disobedience, then, there was moral innocence. And any vices manifested in this act would also have been those of innocent persons. In eating of the tree, however, each acquired knowledge; and it is this knowledge, not the fact of their disobedience nor any moral culpability in disobeying nor the presence of any vice in disobeying, that must in some way account for their losing innocence, (p. 141)

Morris is essentially trying to differentiate conduct which is wrong but morally innocent from conduct which is wrong but morally culpable. Whether or not this first category exists is a question I shall not pursue here. But I do want to question whether the eating of the fruit by Adam and Eve falls into this category.

38 There is, however, one way to read the story so as to make something like the distinction Morris wants, but retain the idea that Eve was culpable. On this reading, Eve had knowledge of, and defied, God's authority, but such knowledge does not count as moral knowledge, something which she only attained after she ate the fruit. She therefore acted wrongly, but she did not commit a moral wrong. Indeed, on this view, her wrongdoing would presumably be worse than a moral wrongdoing, insofar as she defied a higher authority than morality. It is, on this reading, this (non-moral) defiance which makes here (non-morally) culpable.

39 However, Aquinas seemed to think it did. Although Aquinas's natural laws were derived from God, they were nonetheless hypothetical imperatives. In considering why people do not follow them, he seemed to be struck by Aristotle's uncertainty as to whether wrongdoers were ignorant that their deeds were wrong or aware of that fact. He attempts to reconcile the Aristotelian position by maintaining that wrongdoers are ignorant, but not in a way that excuses them, for their ignorance is willful – they know they should learn what the good is, but refuse. So, in the end, Aquinas makes defiance, rather than ignorance, the ultimate source of wrongdoing. Yet why someone would defiantly refuse to learn the good is never explained. See Summa Theologica first part of the second part, question 6, article 8, “Does Ignorance Render An Act Involuntary?”

40 According to Kant, a person is the author of evil deeds and his own evil character when he orders the incentives to action (Anlagen) incorrectly. They are ordered correctly when the moral law (which he believes can motivate us to act) is placed first, such that nothing is performed which that law does not sanction. But immorality results from an ordering in which the moral law is subordinate to the desires:

man (even the best) is evil only in that he reverses the moral order of the incentives when he adopts them into his maxim. He adopts indeed, the Moral Law along with the law of self-love; yet when he becomes aware that they cannot remain on a par with each other but that one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the moral law; whereas, on the contrary, the latter, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former, ought to have been adopted into the universal maxim of the will. (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 31–32.)

So the immoral person is the one who sides with his own inclinations over morality; insofar as he reverses the proper order of the incentives, he rebels against the authority of the moral law, and it is in virtue of that rebellion that he is condemned.

41 For more on the connection between this idea and retribution, see ch. 4 of my Forgiveness and Mercy, written with Murphy, Jeffrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 52n. My emphasis.

43 See “Mens Rea,” in Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1990); this issue is forthcoming as Crime, Culpability, and Remedy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).