Abstract
This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude (where inappropriateness is understood, tentatively, as a failure to recognize the separateness of others). In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects (as opposed to Slote’s sentimentalism), while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding.
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Notes
Depending on how one reads Kant, one may prefer to explain this wrongness in terms of not being able to universalize one’s maxim. However, since Kant viewed his formulations as equivalent, there should be no tension with the explanation given here. Specifically, explanation in terms of universalization still focuses on the intention embodied in the maxim (and so still counts as agent-centered), and the autonomous nature of human beings still plays a grounding role in ferreting out contradictions in the universalization of one’s maxims.
Slote discusses a third kind of view, based on Hursthouse’s interpretation of Aristotle, which he calls an agent-prior view. Such a view is grounded in independent aretaic character evaluations, and so is not agent-focused; however, those character evaluations are in turn grounded in eudaimonia, and so are not fundamental. It is this failure to position the character evaluations as fundamental that makes it the case that the view is not agent-based. (Slote 2001) For simplicity’s sake, I have focused on the agent-focused interpretation of Aristotle that Slote discusses, because it highlights most clearly the way in which Slote’s view takes psychological facts about the agent to ground ethical evaluation, rather than independent judgments of “the right or good thing to do”.
Slote discusses both universal benevolence and partialistic caring as the normative ground of his agent-based ethics; although he sees them as being theoretically close, he discusses the advantages of one over the other, and ultimately endorses partialistic caring as the ground (Slote 2001).
Slote offers Plato as an example (Slote 2001).
One might worry that this entails that in a world in which malevolence has good results for those at whom it is directed, malevolence is not morally wrong. However, the claim here is not that malevolent acts are only wrong if they have bad results for their objects. In what follows, it will be argued that being malevolent involves a way of seeing and engaging with sentient creatures that is inappropriate, because it fails to take them seriously as creatures with a good. One might end up doing beneficial things malevolently, but that does not make the actions that display that malevolence right. It is the attitude that makes the action wrong, even though the evaluation of the attitude is in general responsive to normative facts about it objects.
This is a version of the kind of case discussed by Thomas E. Hill, Jr. in “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments” (Hill 1983).
There are, of course, many ways to understand this claim; for Kant’s arguments, see pp. 229–230 of Kant’s Groundwork (Kant 2003).
This objection has been discussed in a number of ways in recent literature concerning the role of right action in virtue ethics; the discussion here is meant to generalize a kind of objection to various specific ways of understanding right action on a virtue ethical view (Das 2010; Jacobsen 2002; van Zyl 2009). Though the view advanced here is different from the kinds of agent-focused and agent-based understandings of right action discussed in the literature, it is open to the general worry.
For a nice elaboration of this kind of example, see Das’ discussion (Das 2010).
John Stuart Mill, for example, makes much of the distinction between the evaluation of motives and of acts (Mill 1979).
van Zyl makes a similar point in defending Slote’s agent-based view against this objection (van Zyl 2009). Her discussion of Slote’s trouble with action-guidance is instructive, and her solution would be available here for any parallel objection.
For interesting discussion of some of these issues, see Steven Sverdlik’s arguments in ‘Motive and Rightness’ (Sverdlik 1996). Sverdlik’s discussion of racism in a real estate transaction seems supportive of the view that one’s reasons make a critical moral difference in the performance of what are externally identical acts. However, Sverdlik argues that intentions can sometimes play a role, but not that they always do; his discussion is helpful for understanding what motivates the view on offer here, though he would not endorse the wholesale grounding of morality in facts about the agent.
In her recent book, Christine Swanton discusses consequentialist challenges to the virtue ethical view she endorses, specifically the attempt to derive “truisms” about moral action from “trusims” about value (Swanton 2003). Though her ultimate purposes are different from mine here, her response to the challenges appeals to various ways in which humans engage with value, and the importance of what that engagement says about the agent. I wish to emphasize the latter not in terms of virtuous engagement, but appropriate engagement, which means de-emphasizing traits and virtuous activities, and emphasizing ways of seeing others.
See Rosalind Hursthouse’s discussion in “Virtue Theory and Abortion” for an Aristotelian account along similar (though differently grounded) lines (Hursthouse 1991).
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Foreman, E. An Agent-Centered Account of Rightness: The Importance of a Good Attitude. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 941–954 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9491-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9491-2