Abstract
In “Moral Luck” Bernard Williams describes a lorry driver who, through no fault of his own, runs over a child, and feels “agent-regret.” I believe that the driver’s feeling is moral since the thought associated with this feeling is a negative moral evaluation of his action. I demonstrate that his action is not morally inadequate with respect his moral obligations. However, I show that his negative evaluation is nevertheless justified since he acted in way that does not live up to his moral values. I then use this distinctive negative moral evaluation to distinguish agent-regret from guilt and mere regret.
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Notes
See Aristotle (2002, Book IV, Chapter One).
See Aristotle (2002, Book III, Chapters Six through Nine).
See Williams (1981). All the references to and quotes by Williams are drawn from this article.
Williams, rightly by my lights, does not appeal to the strength of the feelings to distinguish agent-regret from remorse or guilt. One can feel a moderate amount of guilt in response to a small infraction while one, such as the driver, can feel an intense amount of agent-regret in response.
I plan to put aside the issue of how these thoughts and feelings are related, that is, whether thoughts constitute, cause or are caused by feelings.
Jaworska (2006) draws a distinction between valuing and value judgments. In this paper I am always referring to values judgments.
It might be typical for drivers in Los Angeles to become enraged when cut off in traffic, but it is neither understandable nor rational. It is understandable that a parent would become extremely angry when his child suffers a minor harm, but it is not rational. That is, the extreme anger is not justified or appropriate. A feeling is rational only if it has the appropriate object, duration, intensity, and so on. See Aristotle (2002, Book III, Chapters Six through Nine and Book IV, Chapter Five). See also D’Arms and Jacobson (2000).
In this paper I do not argue for or against the claim that the driver’s feelings are rationally (or morally) required, but rather than they are justified. If a feeling is required, then lacking the feeling would be unjustified.
This is Williams’ phrase, not mine. As I noted earlier, I am not committed to whether the thoughts associated with agent-regret constitute, cause or are caused by the feeling.
See, for example, Kant (1998, section two).
Failure to achieve the ideal of good tennis playing needn’t be a moral failure. Perhaps the other player is simply better and out hit me. It needn’t be that I’m lazy or careless. And are laziness and carelessness always moral failings anyway? Or are they moral failings only when they get in the way of successful moral activity?
Of course, one can also speak of deliberation as an activity, but I am not using “activity” in this broad sense.
I will consider other substantive moral views later in the paper.
Kant (1998, section one) describes such a view.
Not all Kantians agree that the end of respecting this rational capacity is of overriding importance relative to the agent’s other ends. See Hill (1991).
The relation between the end and sub-ends is a rational connection. If one adopts the end, then one must, on pain of irrationality, adopt the relevant sub-ends.
I use the phrase “negatively impact” rather than “undermine” or “disrespect” since not all killings are instances of undermining or disrespecting rational capacity. Insofar as Kantians wish to capture the intuition that killings are presumptively morally problematic, it is important to think of killings as problematic because they negatively impact a person’s rational capacity.
For a nuanced Kantian account along these lines, see Herman (1993).
I am focusing on cases in which there is a connection between an agent’s values and the content and relation of his ends. Consider a person who values money. Such a person will adopt the end of making money and not losing money. Moreover such a person will be on the lookout for which of his actions make or lose money. Similarly for an agent with moral values (that is, an agent who values rational capacity unconditionally): he will adopt the moral end of respecting rational capacity and the related sub-ends. Sometimes a person experiences a conflict of values, such as when one has conflicting ends, or when one evaluates the ends that one has as lacking value while nevertheless retaining the end. And in some cases a creature’s ends might not reflect any values at all, as might be the case with animals and some akratics.
Some Aristotelians eschew the talk of morality all together.
See Foot (1978).
Scanlon claims that “an act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement” (1998, p. 153). Is this view performance or deliberatively oriented? The answer depends on the content of the principle and the reasons for its rejection. For example, if no one could reasonably reject a principle disallowing an action that negatively impacted rational capacity (except in cases in which the injured party’s rights are waived, forfeited, or overridden), then the view is performance oriented and the driver’s action is wrong. If one could reasonably reject this principle on the grounds that it makes no exceptions regarding the agent’s deliberations, then the view is deliberatively oriented and the driver’s action is not wrong.
Is the driver’s action a killing or does the child kill himself by walking in front of the car? Suppose the child had tripped in front of the car. In such a scenario it does not seem right to say that the child killed himself. But notice that even if the child does kill himself when he walks unsuspectingly in front of the driver’s car, this is compatible with the driver also killing the child. Imagine that I am trying to kill another person, who, in a suicidal impulse, moves into my line of fire making himself an easy target. In such a case it seems plausible to say both that I killed him and that he killed himself.
In Tannenbaum (2006) I argue that it is possible to fail to satisfy one’s obligation without thereby violating one’s obligation. However, as I will argue later in this section, the driver does not have an obligation to not kill the child in the way that he does, and so his action is neither a violation of an obligation nor a mere failure to satisfy an obligation.
Morris (1987) has an interesting challenge to this claim.
If I carelessly make two incompatible promises, I cannot do what I ought. Or if I am unable to avoid killing someone while driving drunk, I cannot do what I ought. However, this impossibility does not rebut the claim that I am obligated to keep both my promises and not to kill pedestrians. In these cases it is through a fault of my own that I cannot do what I ought. Can you end up vicious, and so without resources to act virtuously, through no fault of your own? And are such vicious people under an obligation not to do the vicious acts that they do? If so, then this is a serious challenge to the slogan “ought implies can” as I interpret it.
The driver is not at fault for his false belief. He does not fail to meet some epistemic standard of justification for his false belief.
Does he have an obligation not to kill the child? Yes, in the sense that if he were to stop the car and get out and shoot the child, or were he to intentionally or negligent to run the child over, he would violate his obligation. But his hitting, and so killing, the child in the manner that he did was not what he had an obligation to avoid.
There are other ways of morally categorizing actions, such as morally permissible and morally supererogatory. However, I don’t see that these other categories will be of much help in explaining why the driver’s feeling agent-regret is moral and rational.
I appeal to Kantianism merely for illustrative purposes. I believe the points I make in this section could also be made by appealing to other moral theories.
Kantians traditionally do not embrace the claim that states of affairs have moral value. For example, Herman claim that “the objects of moral assessment are not events or states of affairs,” (1993, p. 94). But I believe the view I describe nevertheless warrants the label “Kantian” since a good will is the ultimate source of moral value.
It is not just that a bad thing happened, which would be true if a fire consumes a Picasso. Rather a morally bad thing happened because something of moral value, as opposed to aesthetic value, is destroyed.
Although this thought is not distinctive to agent-regret, notice that it does involve a negative moral evaluation of an action without thinking of the action as a failure to meet one’s moral obligation.
When an unexpected increase in wind speed contributes to the ball landing out, is it appropriate to say that I hit the ball out or merely that the ball landed out? I think the former is appropriate. The wind almost always plays some causal role on an outdoor court. One can be properly attentive to the wind while nevertheless often failing to predict what the wind’s precise effects will be. In such cases the wind’s contributory effects do not prevent us from saying that I hit the ball in or out.
This view includes but extends beyond the deliberative-Kantian view discussed in section two.
I want to thank Paul Hurley for raising this issue.
For a helpful discussion of which cases of withdrawing aid are killings and which are letting die see McMahan (1993).
The fact that some agents fail, though no fault of their own, to embody their moral values, does not fly in the face of my interpretation of the slogan “ought implies can” since there is no obligation to embody one’s moral values.
This example is from Thomson (1990, p.229).
I want to Dan Guevara, Matt Hanser, Barbara Herman, Paul Hurley, Agnieszka Jaworska, and the participants of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, the Agency Workshop at the University of California, Riverside and the Society for Women in Philosophy.
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Tannenbaum, J. Emotional expressions of moral value. Philos Stud 132, 43–57 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9056-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9056-x