Welcome to our latest Ethics discussion forum, on James Grant’s “Moral Worth and Moral Belief”. You can find the paper open access here.
We kick off the discussion with a critical précis by Julia Markovits:
This is a little gem of a paper, and I urge all of you to read the real thing, if you haven’t already. It’s not very long, highly readable, jargon-free, and packs a lot into its short length without seeming to. My own view is among the targets of Grant’s argument, and he has given me plenty to think about.
I have defended a view Grant calls the “Coincidence Thesis”, which holds that “Doing the right thing has moral worth iff you do it for the reasons why it is right.” (p. 217) To say an act has moral worth, here, is to say the agent deserves moral credit or praise for it, or that the act reflects well on her character. (p.219) This thesis about moral worth stands in contrast to a rival view (often attributed to Kant), according to which right actions are worthy if and only if they’re performed because they are right (Grant calls this the “Rightness Thesis”). (p. 216)
Cases of seemingly worthy actions performed by well-motivated agents who are ignorant of the moral rightness of their actions seem to tell against the Rightness Thesis and in favor of the Coincidence Thesis. Consider, for example, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, who helps his runaway slave friend Jim escape from his “owner”, Miss Watson, (arguably) for the reasons why that is the right thing to do—because he is a person, because he is Huck’s friend—despite believing himself to be acting wrongly in doing so. If Huck’s act is morally worthy, and it seems to be, then the belief that you are acting rightly seems not to be required for morally worthy action. Indeed, Huck’s belief that he is acting wrongly does not, itself, defenders of the Coincidence Thesis maintain, detract from the moral worth of his action.
Many defenders of the Coincidence Thesis therefore also support the “Belief Thesis” (p. 217):
When you do the right thing, your moral beliefs make no difference to the moral worth of your act.
The moral worth of your actions is just a matter of what’s motivating you to act, not (at all), independently, a matter of what you believe about the moral status of your actions.
Grant argues that the Belief Thesis is false: our beliefs about the moral status of our actions can impact the moral credit we deserve for those actions, in the same way and for the same reasons that our doing the right thing with pleasure or displeasure can impact our action’s moral worth—by making it the case that we are doing the right thing in the right or wrong spirit.
Grant’s argument is primarily driven by examples, and here is one central one:
Father. Will takes good care of his children but, because he is a chauvinist and believes only mothers have a moral obligation to care for children, he believes his actions are supererogatory, not morally required. He even thinks that he would have no obligation to provide such care if his wife stopped doing so and no one else stepped in. But nonetheless, Grant tells us, Will cares for his children for the right (motivating) reasons—namely, because they are his children. And he even sees this as a morally good thing do to. But as he sees it, when he, on some particular occasion, feeds his kids breakfast and drives them to school, he is doing them, and their mother, a favor.
Though Will appears to do the right thing (care for his children) for the right—i.e. right-making—reasons (because they’re his children), he does so, Grant tells us, in the wrong spirit—in the spirit of doing a favor instead of fulfilling a moral obligation. This wrongness of spirit consists (partly) in his false belief about the moral status of his action. And it detracts, at least somewhat, from the moral worth of Will’s action, making it less worthy than it would be if Will did not take himself to be doing his wife a favor. (pp. 220-221) That seems very plausible indeed.
So the Belief Thesis is false: sometimes our moral beliefs do make a difference to the moral worth of our actions, even when we do the right thing for the right (motivating) reasons.
Moreover, Grant tells us, the role of belief in shaping the spirit in which we act, which can, in turn, shape the moral worth of our actions, is part of a broader phenomenon: not just our beliefs about what we do, but also our feelings about what we do, can shape the spirit of our actions and impact their moral worth. If a judge takes sadistic pleasure in imposing a morally justified punishment on a guilty offender, that can make her right act less worthy, even if her sentence is motivated by the right-making reasons, not by her pleasure.
Grant next defends his conclusions on the basis of such examples against three sorts of objections.
The first objection holds that our intuitions about Grant’s cases reveal, not the fact that these agents’ problematic moral beliefs diminish the moral worth of their actions, but rather that those problematic beliefs reflect badly on the agents themselves, directly. Will’s taking care of his children is just as worthy as it would be if he recognized it to be morally required, but Will is less praiseworthy, because his view that his actions are supererogatory reflects badly on him. Similarly, the judge’s sadistic pleasure reflects badly on her, but not via making the act it accompanies less worthy.
Grant argues that pushing this line of response will be an “uphill struggle.” As he notes, the concept of moral worth was meant to capture how an action reflects on our character, and the spirit in which we do the right thing can reflect (well or badly) on our character just as the motives from which we act can. (p. 225) What’s more, Grant proposes, the claim that “It is to Will’s discredit that he took care of his children as a favor” does not seem true in virtue of reporting a creditworthy act and a discredit-worthy belief in the way that “It is to his discredit that he did the childcare and believes in apartheid” seems true (if it is true) in virtue of reporting a creditworthy act and a discredit-worthy belief. (p. 223) (Grant suggests the latter claim seems “either false or hard to assess”. I’m not sure it strikes me as false or hard to assess, but it does it does strike me as weird, which the former claim doesn’t.)
The second objection holds that it cannot be Will’s false moral beliefs that make his act less creditworthy, since we can imagine alternate versions of the story—e.g. Patriarchy, in which it is the exceptionally patriarchal society in which Will lives that is responsible for his sexist beliefs—in which his belief that his caring for his children is supererogatory does not seem to detract from his act’s moral worth. (pp. 226-227)
This objection, it turns out, is grist to Grant’s mill: Will’s action in Patriarchy is not made less worthy by his false moral belief that it is supererogatory because the fact that Will acts with this belief does not reflect badly on him in Patriarchy—it is excused. There is no similar reason to think the original Will’s beliefs don’t reflect badly on him, or lead him to act in the wrong spirit.
This reply provides the resources to respond to a third worry—that Grant’s rejection of the Belief Thesis is problematically in tension with our intuitive verdict about the case of Huckleberry Finn. If Grant is right, does Huck, too, protect Jim in the wrong spirit, and does that make his action (counterintuitively) less worthy?
No, Grant tells us. First, unlike Will, Huck does recognize that Jim’s personhood, and their friendship, generate a pro tanto obligation for him to act in Jim’s defense—he just takes this pro tanto obligation, like many obligations of friendship and beneficence, to be outweighed by another obligation—that of respecting property rights.
Second, Huck, like the Will in Patriarchy, has excuses for his false moral beliefs: for one, he is a child, and for another, he is, like Will, surrounded by others who repeatedly reinforce those beliefs. So his false moral beliefs, like Patriarchy-Will’s, may not be to his discredit.
And finally, relatedly, the difficult circumstances in which he acts—the fact that his good motivations had to overcome the bad influences of his contemporaries and elders—make it more difficult for him to be motivated well. And difficulty can enhance the moral worth of actions, just as false beliefs can diminish it.
Each of Grant’s arguments is plausible, and his verdicts about his central examples are particularly plausible. But I want to suggest that the intuitive plausibility of these verdicts may reflect what these examples suggest to us about their agents’ motivating reasons, rather than revealing the impact the agents’ moral beliefs, themselves, have on the moral worth of their actions. I’ll try to bring this out by building on the three objections Grant considers.
To begin with the first objection: Grant points out the naturalness of saying “It’s to Will’s discredit that he took care of his children as a favor” (in contrast to the oddness of saying “It’s to his discredit that he did the childcare and believes in apartheid”) as evidence for the claim that it’s the complete package—the action-as-colored-by-the-belief—that earns Will the discredit, rather than the bad belief on its own. But this contrast seems easily explained.
First, note that the mention of Will’s action—his caring for his children—does significant work in allowing us to efficiently identify the content of Will’s problematic belief in the case of the first, natural judgment (the belief that caring for his children has the moral status of a favor), but feels like an unhelpful irrelevance in the second, odd judgment. Compare: it seems to me that I can judge that “Huck’s belief that his decision to protect Jim was morally wrong is to his discredit” without thereby judging that Huck’s decision to protect Jim (as colored by that belief) is to his discredit. The mention of the action is necessary just to identify the (independently) discreditable belief.
Second, as the comparison with the judgment about Huck brings out, there’s another reason why “It’s to Will’s discredit that he took care of his children as a favor” seems most naturally read as expressing the view that it’s the complete package—action+belief—that discredits Will. The judgment about Will (unlike the corresponding judgment about Huck) can easily be read as attributing to Will as certain discreditable motive: namely, the motive of doing his wife or his children a favor. By contrast, we don’t interpret the claim about Huck’s action and belief as implying any undesirable motive in Huck (such as the motivation to do the wrong thing). And of course, if “It’s to Will’s discredit that he took care of his children as a favor” implies he was motivated to take care of them by the fact that he thought this would count as a favor to his wife, say, (which is not a right-making reason,) then the Coincidence Thesis on its own would seem to allow us to explain the discredit, with no need to deny the Belief Thesis to do so. Granted, the example stipulates that Will is not motivated by such a reason—he is motivated simply by the fact that these are his children. (I’ll come back to this stipulation in a moment.) But this possible—indeed, likely—reading of the statement that Will’s action+belief are to his discredit suggests that we perhaps can’t learn too much about the locus of the discredit by means of linguistic tests like the one Grant proposes.
Turning now to the second objection: Grant suggests that the denier of the Belief Thesis need not (problematically) conclude that false moral beliefs always earn the right actions they may accompany discredit, since they may not always reflect badly on the agents who believe them. For example, they won’t do so if the agent’s false belief is excused due to unfavorable belief-forming circumstances (such as those faced by Patriarchy-Will). I’m not sure I feel the force of this defense, or of this account of the difference in our intuitions about Father and Patriarchy . False beliefs, on Grant’s view, discredit the right actions they accompany when they make it the case that those actions are performed in the wrong spirit. Why should we think that false moral beliefs that are excused in this way can’t taint the spirit in which the corresponding action is performed? Isn’t it still the case that Patriarchy-Will performs in the spirit of a volunteer an act that should have been performed in the spirit of a conscript, as Grant evocatively puts it (p. 221)? Compare again the sadistic Judge: if we can supply her with a backstory that makes her sadistic instincts towards law-breakers seem excusable (perhaps she was herself the victim of a violent crime), that doesn’t really seem to change the spirit in which she issues her punishments—it seems rather to excuse her from responsibility for that spirit. But that may not be the verdict we were looking for in the case of Patriarchy-Will, and it’s not the verdict we wanted in the case of Huck, whose case Grant gives a similar treatment: we don’t judge Will and Huck, in these cases, to be morally-off-the-hook, because not responsible, for their poor-spirited acts—we judge them to be on-the-hook, but judge their acts praiseworthy despite their false beliefs.
What, then, explains the difference in our intuitions about the original Father case, on the one hand, and the Patriarchy and Huck Finn cases on the other? This brings me to the main question I wanted to raise for Grant’s central example: should we believe, as the example stipulates, that Will really is motivated to do the right thing—care for his children—by the right-making reasons, despite his false moral beliefs?
Well, what are the right-making reasons in this case? Grant proposes that Will should take care of his children “because they are his children,” and that this fact is what does motivate Will to do so. But this reasoning feels incomplete. There are a whole host of more fleshed-out reasons for Will to help with his children’s care, including: that doing so is in his wife’s best interests, because it will allow her some time to pursue her other interests and goals—time Will himself expects to have too; that doing so is in his children’s best interests, because they benefit from having both their parents more deeply involved in their lives; that doing so is expressive of love for his kids and will afford him the opportunity to get to know his children better…
The more such reasons we list, the harder it becomes to believe that Will really is motivated by them, and, crucially, to the right degree, despite believing, as Grant puts it, that he would have no obligation to feed his kids even if no one else would do it (p. 220). For one thing, Will’s belief that his care for his children is supererogatory likely means that, were his childcare obligations to come into conflict with his work obligations (obligations that he recognizes as such, because they fit into his chauvinist world view), he would sacrifice the former (mere “favors”, in his view) to fulfill the latter. And that, in turn, suggests that he probably is not sufficiently motivated by the right-making reasons—that is, motivated in accord with the normative force of those reasons, relative to the motivating and normative force of other considerations—in the case at hand after all. And that, again, is a deficiency that is well-captured by the Coincidence Thesis on its own, with no need to reject the Belief Thesis.
Where does that leave our more positive verdicts about Patriarchy-Will and Huck Finn? Shouldn’t we also suspect them of being insufficiently motivated by some right-making reasons, and perhaps motivated by other considerations—e.g. the demands of Will’s job, or Miss Watson’s property claims on Jim—well in excess of any moral significance they may have? And if so, does that entail that these agents’ actions, too, are at best imperfectly morally worthy? And can that be squared with our intuitions about these cases?
Though I don’t have space here to fully explain this here, I think the answer to all three of these questions must be ‘yes.’ Surely Huck Finn’s decision to protect Jim has at best imperfect moral worth, not because he thought it wrong, but because he felt motivationally torn. He was motivated, as Grant says, by some right-making reasons, but also by some considerations that had no moral weight at all, such as Miss Watson’s felt loss of her personal property. This lack of coincidence between the reasons motivating Huck (pulling him in two directions) and the reasons justifying his act (which all pull in the same direction) surely detracts from its moral worth, even if his good motivations end up tipping the balance. (Similar criticisms apply to Patriarchy-Will.)
Still, it seems we have the resources to explain why we nonetheless rightly admire Huck (and Patriarchy-Will) for their good deeds, given the difficult circumstances in which they act, and why we may not blame them for their reprehensible moral beliefs. These difficult circumstances, and the rareness of the concern for what actually matters morally that these agents develop despite their circumstances, justify our belief that it is unlikely we would have acted as well had we been in Huck’s (or Will’s) shoes. And this means we lack standing to blame Will and Huck for their (discreditable) beliefs and motivations, and have good standing to admire them for what they do, despite the imperfections.
Thank you so much for these comments, Julia. They are strong and insightful objections to the arguments of the paper, and they deserve more careful thought than I might be able to give them here. Apologies in advance if I misinterpret any of them in the time available to digest them – please correct me if I do.
First I’ll address the comments on my reply to the Confusion Objection (sec. III.A of paper).
The confusion objection is that Will’s moral belief is to his discredit, but his act isn’t. Against this, I argued that it is clearly to Will’s discredit that he did the childcare as a favor. This is a claim about his act. It concerns his act as colored by his belief. But it concerns his act all the same.
The objector, Markovits suggests, might first reply that the mention of the action is needed simply to identify the belief in question, which after all is a belief about the action. “Compare: it seems to me that I can judge that “Huck’s belief that his decision to protect Jim was morally wrong is to his discredit” without thereby judging that Huck’s decision to protect Jim (as colored by that belief) is to his discredit.”
I’m not sure these cases are comparable. The key point for me is that, in my example, an act is being correctly described as discreditable, not just a belief. Doing the childcare as a favor is to his discredit. That’s the important point for answering the confusion objection. By contrast, in the Huck example, a belief about a decision, but not the decision itself, is being described as discreditable. Believing that his decision is wrong is to his discredit.
The apartheid-belief example that I gave might be muddying the waters here. In the paper, I imagined the objector replying that, because ‘It is to his discredit that he did the childcare as a favor’ is about both an act and a belief, it comes out true if at least one of these is to his discredit. It is like a disjunction. And since the belief is to his discredit, as the confusion objection insists, the claim comes out true. In reply, I argued that it isn’t plausible to think that claims of the form ‘It is to his discredit that he …’ are disjunction-like. So I gave an example in which a discreditable belief is reported in the scope of ‘It is to his discredit that…’ and we get a weird result, not a clear truth. Refuting the ‘disjunction’ account was the only purpose of that example.
The second point Markovits makes in this connection is that, even if we agree that the action+belief package is to Will’s discredit, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that it is his motive that is responsible for the act’s diminished moral worth. ‘He did the childcare as a favor’ “can easily be read as attributing to Will a certain discreditable motive: namely, the motive of doing his wife or his children a favor.” So if doing the childcare as a favor is to his discredit, the Coincidence Thesis alone can explain why. This “suggests that we perhaps can’t learn too much about the locus of the discredit by means of linguistic tests like the one Grant proposes.”
There may be two separable points here. One is about the locus of the discredit and the other is about its source. The test I proposed is meant as a way of identifying the locus of the discredit, as against the confusion objection, which claims that it is not Will’s act that is discreditable. I don’t think the availability of the motive reading of ‘He did it as a favor’ undermines this as a test of the locus of discredit. Even if that reading is adopted, the truth of ‘It is to his discredit that he did it as a favor’ still shows that it is his act that is discreditable – even if it also shows that the source of the act’s discredit is the motive.
I find the source argument more difficult to answer, because I share the impression that the motive reading is available. Markovits is right to suggest that I tried to exclude the motive reading by my stipulation about what Will’s reasons were. Perhaps it makes most sense to discuss that when I come to her comments on that stipulation. Here I’ll just add that, elsewhere in the paper, instead of ‘as a favor’, I give examples that employ ‘in the belief’, e.g.:
It is to Eric’s discredit that he frees his slave in the belief that he has no moral obligation to his slave to free him.
It is to Will’s discredit that he does the childcare in the belief that it is only supererogatory.
Perhaps these are more suitable examples than the ‘as a favor’ ones. But I’d be interested in people’s intuitions about them.
Now I’ll address Markovits’s comments on my reply to the Generality Objection (sec. III.B of the paper).
The generality objection was that moral beliefs like Will’s do not always deprive the right act of perfect moral worth, and examples are given to support this. I replied that these are cases in which, unlike my original examples, the moral belief itself is not to Will’s discredit e.g. in cases where he has an excuse for his belief that childcare is supererogatory, or the belief actually expresses admirable traits like humility or compassion. So I suggested that these examples show that it is to his discredit that he did the right thing in the belief that it was supererogatory only if it is to his discredit that he believed that it was supererogatory.
Markovits comments that, even in the cases where the beliefs are excused, the agents are still surely doing the right thing in the wrong spirit. So it is unclear how I’ve provided the resources to account for the difference in our intuitions about the original case and the variants. “False beliefs, on Grant’s view, discredit the right actions they accompany when they make it the case that those actions are performed in the wrong spirit. Why should we think that false moral beliefs that are excused in this way can’t taint the spirit in which the corresponding action is performed?”
My view is slightly different. My thought was that the spirit in which or attitude with which you do the right thing discredits your act only if that attitude/spirit is itself to your discredit. It is not enough, for the act’s discredit, for the spirit to be the wrong one. The spirit of the act must be discreditable, not just wrong. Original-Will and Patriarchy-Will both do the right thing in the wrong spirit, but Will’s act is to his discredit because it is to his discredit that he does it in this spirit.
Note that it would compatible with this to hold that when you do the right thing in the wrong spirit, but not a discreditable spirit, you deserve less credit for your act, or it reflects less well on you, than if you did it in the right spirit. The act may not be to your discredit in any respect, but you deserve less credit for it. It doesn’t reflect badly on you, but reflects less well on you. I didn’t commit to this further view. But adopting it would permit us to say that, all else being equal, Will’s act would have had even greater moral worth if he’d done it in the right spirit than it has in the Patriarchy example.
I really enjoyed the paper, James! (And the exchange above!)
One question that I had was how far you ultimately wanted to take these arguments—which I think will depend (in part) upon how you are thinking about the relevant moral beliefs and the role that they are playing. This question was initially prompted by my impression that you were perhaps too hard on Will, the ‘moral volunteer’. You say of Will’s acts that ‘Perhaps they have some moral worth’ and that they ‘have, at best, imperfect moral worth’. (I personally didn’t find it so controversial that his acts had moral worth. )
As Will is described, he falsely “believes he has no moral obligation” to care for his children, even though he does care for them for the reasons for which it is right, and takes himself to be doing something morally good when he does so. But what does it mean to say that Will holds this belief? Do we have in mind (something roughly like) (1) a thought, or what some might call an explicit belief, or something more in the general neighbourhood of (2) an implicit belief?
If Will’s belief that he is not morally required to care for his children is understood along the lines of (1), then I take it we have in mind a belief that is in some sense “activated”; i.e., before our minds / being employed in reasoning / causally efficacious qua guide of behaviour. (I suspect that this rather than 2 is what you have in mind?) In that case, I think it might be helpful to distinguish (a) the explanatory role that that belief plays in accounting for *why* Will cares for his children, from (b) the sort of explanatory role that that belief plays in accounting for *how* (the manner in which) he does so.
Regarding (a), in the case as you describe it, the moral belief looks as though it is in some sense epiphenomenal; Will would still be strongly motivated to care for his children (for the reasons for which it is right) whether or not he believed that he wasn’t required to. Given this, it’s unclear how much of a role that belief is playing in explaining his action, and this might lead us to question how relevant it ought to be to that action’s moral worth. (The promise-keeper case seemed importantly different in this respect; Eric’s belief that he is morally required to keep his promise to his lover really does seem to explain why he acts as he does.)
Of course, it might still be that (b) Will’s moral belief affects the manner in which he cares for his children; for instance, he might always do so with a smug sense of self-satisfaction insofar as he conceives of this task as morally optional. (I suspect that it’s 1b rather than 1a that you’re mainly focusing upon?) But it’s unclear to me whether it’s really the false moral belief itself that’s the culprit here. After all, there’s also a different version of Will with the true moral belief that he is required to care for his children who is smug because he’s so reliable at doing right by them. So, the smugness seems detachable from the moral belief (in both cases), even if it is a potential downstream consequence of each of them. This might suggest to us that it’s really some background character trait of both versions of Will (e.g., his insufferable self-righteousness) that’s doing the work in eliciting the intuitions that the cases are supposed to elicit, rather than the moral beliefs themselves.
If we mean (2), then I take it we have in mind a belief that is in some sense stored away in one’s mind, available to be used in reasoning, but (let’s suppose) not as a matter of fact activated. So, on this way of seeing things, Will does implicitly believe that it is supererogatory to care for his children but this belief is never ‘activated’ when he attends to their needs. (This doesn’t strike me as implausible; people don’t always think in explicitly moral terms when attending to their loved ones.) Given this, we might again want to say that it’s unclear how much of a role that belief is playing in explaining his action, and this might lead us to question how relevant it ought to be to that action’s moral worth. But we might also worry that on (2), the problem over-generalises in a potentially problematic way. Consider a parent today who supports their daughter’s educational pursuits simply because they want to enhance their daughter’s well-being. Such a parent may very well have implicit sexist beliefs, but it’s not clear how much (if at all) these ought to bear upon the moral worth of what they do.
I really enjoyed this paper. As someone who doesn’t work directly on these questions, I found it very readable and engaging. I have a question that is not really about the specific views put forward (or objected to) but about the general topic. The topic is moral worth, and acts having moral worth are those that (a) reflect well on our character; and/or (b) are to our credit.
My question is whether (a) and (b) are clearly the same thing, and whether some views might be more plausible when understood as moral character-based views and others as credit-based views.
If something ‘reflects well on your character’ it is evidence of something independent – good character. It seems highly plausible that the spirit in which you undertake an action is highly relevant to this, and if your moral beliefs are relevant to how good your character is, which they surely are, then the way in which your acts reflect and instantiate your moral beliefs will in turn reflect well, poorly, better or worse on your character.
But ‘moral credit’ isn’t a reflection of, or evidence of, something independent. Moral credit is a plus (or minus) in your moral ledger. Acts that are to your moral credit are something new, they are not evidence of something else. It is less clear to me that moral beliefs matter for moral worth in *this* sense.
So my main worry is that giving these two independent formulations of moral credit may be misleading. Is this right? My second worry is that how plausible different views are may turn on which formulation we choose. I don’t know if this dual formulation is common in the literature.
Thank you for an interesting paper, James! I’m also enjoying the discussion.
I find your idea of doing something in the right or wrong spirit very intriguing. But I have some questions about it.
As I understand your paper, you’re embracing what we might call Belief S, which holds that when you do the right thing, the moral worth of your action is diminished if your moral beliefs are such that you’re doing it in the wrong spirit. Belief S implies that your action will have more moral worth if your moral beliefs are such that you do it in the right spirit.
We can distinguish Belief S from Belief R, which holds that when you do the right thing, your action only has moral worth if you do it in the belief that it’s the (all things considered) right thing to do.
Belief R is incompatible with the Coincidence Thesis. But I wonder whether even Belief S is too strong. Here’s the problem I have in mind.
What does it mean doing the right thing in the right spirit? Is doing the right thing in the belief that it’s the (all things considered) right thing to do doing it in the right spirit? You might not want to say that, because it makes the view vulnerable to objections that are raised against the Rightness Thesis (e.g. the one thought too many objection). Does it mean that you believe correctly that doing it has something morally going for it? That seems to fit the Huck case as you describe it. But if that’s the story, how do we explain that there is a tipping point, such that some correct moral beliefs are required for acting in the right spirit, but fully correct moral beliefs might undermine it?
This problem leads me to wonder whether the cognitive aspect that you intend to capture with the idea of right spirit and wrong spirit needs to be accounted for differently than in terms of beliefs about what the right / wrong / supererogatory thing to do is. In other words, I wonder whether we should reject Belief S in favour of something weaker?
Hello James,
Thanks for the really interesting paper, and to Julia for a terrific reply. I had a comment which I think is somewhat similar to Jessica’s (though this is quite a way from my main interests, so I might be all over the place).
Jessica’s comment suggests this plausible view:
Moral Worth Depends on Explanation: Some mental phenomenon x of a person, P, bears on the moral worth of some action v that P performs only if x explains P v-ing (causally, or in some other similar way).
But then, the moral worth of an action depends on moral beliefs only if moral beliefs explain actions. However, suppose that v is required. X v-ing can have full moral worth where X believes that v-ing is required even where this belief does not explain their action. Where a person acts from the right reasons, and has the right moral beliefs, their action has full moral worth even where the right belief does not bear on the action. Such a person need not perform the action with a defective spirit; their spirit in acting on the right reason is sound. But if that is right, a person with the wrong moral beliefs also need not perform the action with a defective spirit. For that person’s act might be explained in exactly the same way as the person who has the right moral beliefs, but whose beliefs don’t explain their action. And it is hard to see what difference there is between the moral worth of the actions performed if Moral Worth Depends on Explanation is right.
This argument, if it is right, rules out a strong thesis: that a person who is required to v necessarily acts in a way that lacks full moral worth they fail to believe that they are required to v.
However, this argument leaves open a weaker thesis: that defective moral beliefs can causally bear on an action in a way that reduces the moral worth of that action. And this idea seems to explain what goes wrong with Will in your parenting example. His defective moral belief leads him to conceive of his act as a favour, and his seeing it as a favour causally bears on his conduct. He is not merely acting for the sake of his children, which is the duty-grounding reason that he has. He is acting out of some further set of motives. And these motives stem from his moral beliefs. As they are problematic and they do causally bear on his action, they can affect the action’s moral worth.
This might also suggest a deficiency in the way the belief thesis is framed. The belief thesis, as stated, is: ‘When you do the right thing your moral beliefs make no difference to the moral worth of your act.’ Construed broadly this thesis implies that incredibly perverse moral beliefs that lead a person to do the right thing have no bearing on the moral worth of the action. And that can’t be right. But is that really what your opponents have in mind? Don’t they have in mind this narrower thesis:
Belief Thesis 2: Where X is required to v, X can v with full moral worth without believing that they are required to v.
That thesis seems plausible because X can just act on the reasons that ground the duty to v And the argument from explanation offered above seems to support it.
The second point I want to make is I think partly anticipated by some of the earlier comments above. The main argument of the paper is against the Belief thesis:
Belief thesis
When you do the right thing, your moral belief makes no difference to the moral worth of your act.
The Belief thesis is potentially ambiguous. Does it mean that moral beliefs never make any difference to the moral worth of your act? Or that they sometimes do not? Does it mean that a moral belief in its own regard makes no difference to the moral worth of your act? Or that a moral belief can never influence anything that in turn affects the moral worth of your act?
The latter claim is surely not very plausible. Everyone agrees that my motivations can affect the moral worth of my act, and surely everyone agrees that my moral beliefs can, sometimes, affect my motivations.
So what about the claim that a moral belief in its own right can affect the moral worth of my act. This seems to me quite plausible. What is not so clear to me is that they affect the moral worth of my act without affecting my doing the right thing for the right reasons.
The “Moral Volunteer” Will is supposed to be an example of someone who does the right thing for the right reasons – he takes good care of his children, because they are his children – but does not believe he has a moral obligation to do so. And this is not because he is not thinking about moral obligations at all, but because he thinks mothers have a moral obligation to look after their children but fathers don’t.
But it is not entirely clear what Will’s reasons for action are here. “Because they are his children” is obviously not a full reason for action. Clearly, he is not reasoning as we might expect: “they are my children and I have a responsibility to look after my children”. So why is Will looking after them rather than playing video games? Because he momentarily feels like it? That is not the right reason. Is it because he wants to do a favour to his wife? That is also not the right reason. (Notice that with these motivations, it is also true that he is accidentally doing the right thing)
The best way I can reconstruct of Will actually acting for the right reason is if we imagine him as deeply caring for his children, having a wholehearted commitment to them, feeling that he and they benefit from that commitment, and acting on that basis. But now it is less clear to me that his action doesn’t have moral worth. Given his commitments, it is not accidental that he does the right action. It is plausible that he is acting for the right reasons (and perhaps better than if he actually did regard himself as a conscript). I still think his moral belief is wrong, and reflects badly on his character and this might come out in his other actions. But I would want to distinguish the moral worth of the action here, from the evaluation of moral belief and character.
Still, in order to argue against the Belief thesis, Jim does not have to show the moral belief always makes a difference to moral worth, only that at least sometimes it does. And he does not, it seems to me, have to argue that it makes a difference to moral worth, without making a difference to the reasons for which one acts. If Will, having reflected on how, as it seemed to him, the children were really his wife’s responsibility, decided to look after them for once as a favour to her, his action really would have little moral worth, and precisely because he was not acting for the right reasons.
Sorry – the first comment didn’t appear so I am reposting it!
I also really enjoyed the paper and the discussion – thanks everyone!
I’m going to make two points and as they are quite long, I’ll split this in to two comments.
The first point I want to raise is a question about what moral worth is. It is widely agreed that morally worthy action requires more than doing the right action. But what more is required is contested. One popular contender:
Moral worth (accident)
An action has moral worth iff it is non-accidentally right.
Is not mentioned in the paper.
Another lead contender is I think implicit in the paper:
Moral worth (right reason)
An action has moral worth iff it is done for the right reasons.
We might see the Rightness thesis (an action has moral worthy iff it is done because it is right) and the Coincidence thesis (an action has moral worth iff it is done for the reasons why it is right) as rival accounts of what it is to act for the right reasons.
However, neither of these are the fundamental definition of moral worth, according to Jim, who instead has two accounts of what it is:
Moral worth (credit)
An action has moral worth iff it is to your credit.
Moral worth (character)
An action has moral worth iff it reflects well on your character.
It is not obvious that any of these four possible definitions are coextensive with each other; indeed one of the main arguments of the paper is that Moral worth (credit) and Moral worth (character) are not coextensive with Moral worth (right reasons), as there are (supposedly) instances where moral beliefs make a difference to the credit of your action and how it reflects on your character, but not on whether you act for the right reasons.
However, it is worth noticing that the character definition of moral worth is not a standard definition. In fact, if we return to the origins of the term in Kant, moral worth appears to be explicating the idea of a good will, which is contrasted by Kant with a good character. Something may reflect well on your character (e.g. what you take pleasure in) without reflecting on your good will and therefore the moral worth of your action (since pleasure, for Kant, is not the kind of thing that you can will).
Now, the idea of moral worth has moved on considerably since Kant, and it is perfectly legitimate to define it differently. Nevertheless, I take it that it is an open question which of the four definitions above is the most fundamental and it is not obvious that “the concept of moral worth is meant to capture how an act reflects on your character” (p, 225). That you don’t act “in the right spirit” might reflect badly on your character, but not on the moral worth of your action if we prefer one of the other definitions of moral worth (which we might prefer, because we think it independently important whether your action was non-accidentally right, or whether you did the right thing for the right reasons, as well as whether the action reflects well on your character).
Markovits’s principal claim is that the deficiencies in moral worth in these examples can be explained by appeal to these agents’ failure to be motivated by (some of) the reasons why what they are doing is right, and/or by appeal to deficiencies in the degree to which they are motivated by the right-making reasons. This is an account of degrees of moral worth that some advocates of the Coincidence Thesis favor. She argues that when we consider the full range of reasons why it is right for Will to take care of his children (his wife’s interests, his children’s interests, the expressive value of doing so, etc.), it becomes hard to believe that he is motivated by these reasons and motivated by them to the right degree. His belief that childcare is supererogatory likely means that he would neglect it if he saw it conflict with e.g. work obligations that are (in fact) weaker. “And that, in turn, suggests that he probably is not sufficiently motivated by the right-making reasons—that is, motivated in accord with the normative force of those reasons, relative to the motivating and normative force of other considerations—in the case at hand after all.”
My first thought is that it should be possible to test this claim by considering cases where an agent’s motives are the same (in content and in strength) as Will’s, but the other agent’s moral beliefs are true. If Will’s act is more deficient in moral worth, the motive account would not explain why, and the natural explanation would appeal to the difference in their moral beliefs instead. This would be so even if both agents’ acts are deficient in moral worth to some degree (for instance, because neither is motivated by enough right-making reasons to a sufficient degree). As long as Will’s act is more deficient in moral worth, the belief explanation would have the advantage over the motive explanation. (I consider a similar case on pp. 225-6 to make a different point.)
It is not obvious to me that Will could not be motivated by all and only the reasons why what he does is right, while still believing (to his discredit) that what he is doing is only supererogatory. But for the sake of this argument, we can assume that Will is motivated by only some of the reasons why what he does is right. It still seems possible for him to be motivated by some of them (Markovits does not deny this). And it seems possible for someone who knows that what they are doing is right to be motivated by only some of the reasons why what they are doing is right. Perhaps that is often the case when an act is morally worthy and there are a lot of reasons why what is done is right.
Equally, it seems possible for Will to be motivated by these right-making reasons to the same degree as someone who knows that what they are doing is right. The belief that what you are doing is only supererogatory sets no upper limit on the degree to which you can be motivated by what are (in fact) the right-making reasons. You can be highly motivated to do something that you regard as only supererogatory. At least, insofar as I feel able to compare two agents’ degrees of motivation, I don’t see why we can’t dial up Will’s degree of motivation to match that of someone who knows that what they are doing is right.
So let’s imagine another father, Joe, who also does the childcare, but knows that it is right for him to do it. The reasons why it is right for him to do it are the same as the reasons why it is right for Will to do it. The reasons why Joe does it are some of the reasons why it is right for him to do it, and they are the same reasons why Will does it. Perhaps he takes care of his children because they are his, because it is in his wife’s best interests, and because it is in his children’s best interests. Likewise for Will.
Joe and Will are also motivated by these reasons to the same degree. They would have neglected the childcare under exactly the same counterfactual circumstances. We have a choice about how to conceive of their degree of motivation. We can suppose either that it is relatively weak or relatively strong. I conceived of Will’s motivation as relatively strong, as he is feeling particularly full of affection for his family on the day in question. But let’s suppose the motivation of both is relatively weak, along the lines of Markovits’s elaboration of Will: both would have neglected the childcare if they’d had certain work obligations that are (in fact) weaker than their childcare obligations.
It may be true that, here, Joe’s conduct has less moral worth than it could or should have had. Maybe it’s to Joe’s discredit that he does the right thing without a higher degree of motivation by the right-making reasons.
But it seems to me that his case is still importantly different from Will’s. Joe is not doing the childcare in the belief that he is going above and beyond the call of duty by taking care of the children. He is doing it in the knowledge that he owes this to his wife and children. Joe isn’t even doing the childcare in the belief that it would be permissible for him to neglect it in those circumstances in which (in fact) he would neglect it. He thinks – or anyway we can suppose he thinks – he would be doing something wrong. He knows he is not free, morally, to do otherwise than he is doing. Will, by contrast, does it in the discreditable belief that he is free to leave his wife to do all the work, though it is morally good of him that he doesn’t.
It may be to both Joe and Will’s discredit that they do the childcare without greater motivation by the right-making reasons. But it is, in addition, to Will’s discredit that he does the childcare in a sexist spirit and with the wrong attitude to his children. There is something obnoxious about Will’s conduct, which is not captured by the claim that he is too weakly motivated by the right-making reasons. By contrast, there is something disappointing about Joe’s conduct, his weakish motivation. But it is disappointing rather than (to the same extent) obnoxious. At any rate, these impressions are what make me reluctant to say, as the motive theory requires, that Will’s conduct is just as deficient in moral worth as Joe’s.
There is a bit more to be said, particularly about the final part of Markovits’s comments, and I’ll aim to address this tomorrow.
Thank you very much for these comments Jessica!
The main line of the argument, I take it, is this. Either Will’s false moral beliefs help explain something about his act (e.g. the smug manner in which he acts) or they don’t. If they don’t, it’s hard to see how they can affect its moral worth. If they do, then on a natural elaboration of how they do, it’s not clear that the beliefs are what diminish its moral worth (or at least elicit the intuition that moral worth is diminished): rather, it seems like some background trait, such as his insufferable self-righteousness, is doing the work. Such a trait might be caused by the belief, but it’s downstream of it.
Insofar as I gave any thought to the distinction between beliefs that are before his mind and beliefs that aren’t, I suppose I was thinking that his moral belief diminishes his act’s moral worth whether the belief is before his mind or not. That’s just by way of clarification. Whether I want to stick with that position will depend inter alia on whether I can answer both parts of the argument above.
First, I suppose I’m questioning the idea that beliefs (and other attitudes) have to play a role in explaining the action in order to affect its moral worth. The other examples I give of cases in which the spirit in which you do something affects the act’s moral worth (pp. 223-225) needn’t (I think) be cases in which the attitude explains something about the act. The judge who sentences the defendant with glee need not be sentencing her in a gleeful manner (with a smile on her face and a lilt in her voice). Her delivering the right sentence needn’t have been conditional on her taking delight in doing it. But it’s still to her discredit that she punishes her with delight.
(As these examples suggest, I don’t think doing something in the wrong spirit is reducible to doing it in the wrong manner. It’s worth distinguishing, for instance, between doing something in a smug spirit and doing it in a smug manner. You can do something with a smug sense of self-satisfaction without doing it in a smug manner (without your smugness expressing itself in your behaviour).)
Second, my sense is that the problem with the spirit of Will’s act is not (or not only) its smugness. It’s (principally) that he acts in a sexist spirit and with the wrong attitude to his children. That is less clearly downstream from the moral belief than his smug attitude might be thought to be. The sexist spirit in which he acts is partly constituted by his moral belief about his act. His flawed attitude to his children is likewise partly constituted by his moral beliefs.
Third, I think I’d need to hear more to assess the threat of over-generalisation described at the end of Isserow’s comments. The case of parents with implicit sexist beliefs might be relevantly different from Will if their beliefs are not about their act (of helping with their daughter’s education), and don’t affect the spirit in which they act.
So I guess this is what I’d say. It’s probably cleanest, and more in keeping with the general points I want to make about acting in the right spirit, if we conceive of Will’s moral beliefs as not explaining something about his act. There are other cases where such attitudes seem relevant to moral worth nonetheless. But if that’s a mistake, and beliefs have to help explain something about the act in order to affect its moral worth, then I’d appeal to the fact that these moral beliefs are partly constitutive of the characteristics that are eliciting the intutions, not just causes of these characteristics.
Thank you very much for these comments Patrick!
Footnote 10 in the paper has references to those who gloss ‘moral worth’ in terms of either moral credit or an act reflecting well on one’s character. My recollection is that some employ just one of these glosses and some employ both. But I don’t know of anyone who examines them closely. I share the sense that this is worth doing.
Can I check I’ve understood what you mean by the moral ledger? I take it that the contrast is between assessing someone’s character and assessing their record. The moral ledger you are referring to is (so to speak) their record of moral achievement. Your suggestion is that credit-talk is about their record and reflection-talk is about their character.
On the general point – My impression is that there is at least one reading of ‘an act that reflects well on your character’ in which it does not mean an act that is evidence of good character, where that means ‘overall good character’. Consider someone with bad character who, uncharacteristically, does the right thing for the right reasons. I’d be inclined to say that this reflects well on them. But if that meant that this is evidence that they have good character, then it would be misleading evidence, because they don’t have good character. That seems wrong: we can make the point that it reflects well on them, without meaning that it is evidence that they have good character after all. So perhaps the reply to that is simply to say that this locution means the act is evidence that their character is good in some respect, rather than overall. That reading will bring the creditworthy acts and the reflecting-well acts closer together (though it may not mean they coincide). At least depending on how you conceive of character, any plus on the agent’s moral ledger will be evidence (decisive evidence?) that their character is good in some respect. (Which doesn’t mean the converse is true, of course.) That might explain why the two formulations are used interchangeably.
On the specific point – Your sense is that moral belief is more clearly relevant to an act’s moral worth in the sense of the act’s providing evidence of good character, rather than in the sense of the act’s constituting a plus on the moral ledger. I think it would be a more interesting conclusion if moral belief is relevant to moral worth in the credit/moral record sense. Whether I can persuade you of that may depend on how plausible you find my suggestion (in section III.A) that (a) an act can be to your (dis)credit in some respects but not in others, and (b) in my examples, ‘It is to Eric’s discredit that he freed his slave in the belief that he was doing him a favor’ picks out a respect in which these acts are to the agent’s discredit.
I do mean these to be (at least) claims about the agent’s record. I’m inclined to say that Eric’s moral record is diminished by the fact that he freed his slave in the belief that he was doing his slave a favor. Freeing his slave is a plus on his moral ledger, but freeing him in that spirit is a minus. It’s also evidence of his flawed character. But I think it’s a blot on his record too.
Thank you very much for these comments Fabienne!
As I say in the paper (p. 224), the general idea of doing the right thing in the wrong spirit is (to my knowledge) not much discussed in philosophy, though some instances of it (such as doing the right thing with unwarranted displeasure) are. I don’t have a general theory of it. The idea of doing something in the right or wrong spirit is deployed in everyday moral judgment, and I’m relying in the paper on intuitive judgments to the effect that this or that was done in the wrong spirit, or with the wrong attitude. These strike me as natural descriptions of what’s awry about these cases. I’d like to have a more general account of it, though, and I’m conscious that such an account might help with the defense and elaboration of some of the claims in the paper.
Peter suggests that, if I hold that you need to do the right thing in the belief that it’s right in order to do it in the right spirit, and that an act’s moral worth is diminished if you don’t do it in the right spirit, then my account will be vulnerable to the counterexamples to the Rightness Thesis, such as the one thought too many problem. On the other hand, if I say only that you need to believe correctly that there are moral considerations in its favour in order to do it in the right spirit, then there is the problem of explaining why some correct moral beliefs are required for the right spirit, but fully correct moral beliefs might undermine it. Peter therefore suggests that the idea of the right and the wrong spirit should be accounted for differently than in terms of moral beliefs.
There are several things to say about this. First, I think some counterexamples to the Rightness Thesis, including the one thought too many problem, would not be counterexamples to the view that doing the right thing in the right spirit requires the belief that you are doing the right thing. As I understand it, the problem with the husband in Williams’s example is that he saves his wife because it is right. The problem is not that he believes that it is right. It is that he is motivated (or exclusively motivated) by its rightness. I’m not sure there are any examples where possessing fully correct moral beliefs would itself undermine the spirit in which you do the right thing, or diminish your act’s moral worth, even if there are cases where being motivated by the act’s moral status does.
Rather than worrying about these kinds of case, the person who thinks doing the right thing in the right spirit requires believing you are doing the right thing needs to say what they think about Huck Finn-type counterexamples to the Rightness Thesis. They’ll need to address those who think that Huck’s act is performed in the right spirit, even though he thinks it wrong.
Second, I don’t myself commit to the view that either (a) undiminished moral worth or (b) doing the right thing in the right spirit requires believing you are doing the right thing. And I’m not confident that this view is true. I am more confident in this claim:
Holding certain moral beliefs is sufficient for doing the right thing in the wrong spirit.
Than in this claim:
Believing you are doing the right thing is necessary for doing the right thing in the right spirit.
My reluctance to endorse the second claim doesn’t depend on Huck Finn, either. Suppose someone does the right thing in a split second, such as pushing someone out of the way of a car. They might have great virtue and this act might manifest it. The moral worth of their act, and the spirit in which they act, might be in no way deficient. But perhaps they had no time to form the belief that they are doing the right thing. This will depend, of course, on what is involved in forming such a belief (you might think this person instantly perceives, therefore believes, that this is the right thing to do). But I wouldn’t want to bet the farm on the claim that such a person believes she is doing the right thing. So I’d prefer to remain open to the possibility that there are various states of moral belief compatible with doing the right thing in the right spirit. What I insist on in the paper, instead, is that there are certain moral beliefs that are sufficient for doing the right thing in the wrong spirit.
Third, I agree that there is more to the spirit in which you do something than your beliefs, though obviously I want to say that belief is or can be part of it. Some of my examples of other cases in which the spirit in which you do something affects your act’s moral worth (pp. 224-5) suggest this. Notably, the pleasure, displeasure, shame, or disgust with which you do it can also be part of the spirit in which you do it.
Hi James,
Thanks so much for these super helpful replies to my comments, and apologies for not weighing back in sooner.
Everything you say is responsive to the worries I raise, and I’ll need to think more about all of it to see where I end up.
Re: the confusion objection—
I agree with you: my point that “It is to Will’s discredit that he helped his children as a favor” could be read as attributing to Will the motive of doing his wife a favor, and that this explains the discredit judgment, doesn’t show that the locus of discredit can’t be shown, by our willingness to assent to this judgment, to be in the act. It just can’t show that the source of the discredit is Will’s belief (independently of its impact on his motives).
So let’s look at one of your “in the belief that” formulations instead, which are less likely to be read as attributions of motive. (Although even here, I worry that hard-to-set-aside assumptions about how moral beliefs shape and reveal motives may be doing some intuition-driving.) Consider, for example,
It is to Will’s discredit that he does the childcare in the belief that it is only supererogatory.
The question is whether our readiness to assent to this judgment suggests that the locus of the discredit is (also) in Will’s action, not just his belief.
I guess my worry is that this test won’t help us forward very much. If we’re inclined to think that the belief in which Will acts determines his creditworthiness independently of its impact on his motives, then we’ll see the locus of discredit as being (also) in the action. If we’re inclined to think that the belief with which Will acts does not impact the creditworthiness of his action (in the absence of any impact on his motives, and we accept there’s no such impact here), then we’ll be more likely to think our assent to the judgment just reflects the fact that his false moral beliefs discredit Will directly. That is, we’ll think the statement “it is to Will’s discredit that he does the childcare in the belief that it is only supererogatory” communicates the same information as “it is to Will’s discredit that he believes his caring for his children to be supererogatory.” To the extent that we can then be persuaded that it says something beyond this, we should be less willing to assent to it. (In this case, the original judgment may strike us as a little cumbersomely expressed. But it won’t seem as weird as the apartheid judgment, since (as I suggested) it makes sense in this case to talk about Will’s action in a judgment about the creditworthiness of his belief, as a way of giving content to the relevant belief.)
In other words, the test begins to look a bit question-begging. I’m not sure that the discussion here can put to rest the confusion objection, as opposed to simply clarifying what those who push that objection are disagreeing with you about.
Hi James. Many thanks for the paper – I’ve learned a lot from it, and from the above discussion.
My comment is about whether you should have gone further – perhaps cases like Will the Father really does challenge not only the Belief Thesis but also the Coincidence Thesis (and the challenge to the Belief Thesis would be less plausible – or perhaps not very plausible – if we don’t also challenge the Coincidence Thesis).
Suppose that an act X is in fact right, and that it is in fact right because of reason R (R makes X right). An agent who does X can [1] believe that X is not right (required) – specifically, that it is wrong (impermissible); or [2] believe that X is not right – that it is supererogatory; or [3] have no particular beliefs about the moral status of X; or [4] believe that X is right (and have no further beliefs about the moral status of X); or [5] believe that X is right, and that R makes X right.
Will the Father is a case in which [2] is true. In your reply to Fabienne, you said you were less sure about whether [4] (and presumably [5]) was necessary for X to have perfect moral worth. You gave a case in which [3] seemed sufficient for X to have perfect moral worth. And, as I understand it, part of the disagreement between you and other commentators (like Julia, Jessica, and Alison) concerns whether it is possible for [2] to be true while for Will to still be motivated by R. You thought R could be “because they are my children”, and others suggested that this was incomplete, and once we fleshed out R, it would not be possible for [2] to be true while still for Will to be motivated by R.
My thought is that why shouldn’t we simply accept that, in Will the Father, for X to have perfect moral worth, Will needs to be motivated by both R and the belief that X is right (that it is required). This seems quite plausible to me – it seems plausible that for X to have perfect moral worth, Will has to at least partly be motivated by the thought that “they are my children *and* taking care of them is my duty”. It would be a problem if he is motivated only by the thought that “taking care of my children is my duty”, but it also seems insufficient if he is not also motivated by this. And it seems to me that this is clearer when we consider other cases – cases like promise-keeping, for example. It seems that for my act of keeping a promise to have perfect moral worth, I need not only be motivated by whatever reasons that make my act right – I need also be motivated by the thought that I am required to keep my promise.
If this is right – if it is right that, for an act to have perfect moral worth, the motivational component includes (though not only) the belief that the act is right – we can reject the Belief Thesis rather straightforwardly (one cannot be motivated by the belief that X is right without having that belief). This, of course, means rejecting the Coincidence Thesis.
Thank you very much for these comments Victor!
As I said in my reply to Isserow, I think I am rejecting Moral Worth Depends on Explanation. I think some examples I gave are counterexamples to that, because they are cases in which some mental phenomena (e.g. glee, disgust) bear on the moral worth of an act without explaining that act. As I say in my reply to Peter, I also don’t endorse the strong thesis that, for acting rightly to have full moral worth, the agent must believe they are acting rightly.
On the formulation of the thesis that is my target – I think at least one core idea that I reject, and that my opponents accept, is this: when you do the right thing, your possession of any given moral belief cannot itself affect the moral worth of your act. (See pp. 225-226 of the paper.) What affects its moral worth is (for instance) your acting for certain reasons. It might be possible to act for certain reasons only if you possess certain moral beliefs. If so, then possessing certain moral beliefs will be a precondition of certain enhancers or diminishers of moral worth. But the act’s moral worth won’t be enhanced or diminished in virtue of the fact that the agent has any given moral belief. Possession of the belief won’t itself be an enhancer or diminisher of moral worth. Maybe this would have been a better way to state the target thesis.
In addition, among supporters of the ‘precondition’ view, there may be another difference worth noting. Supporters of the Rightness Thesis will (presumably) think that believing you are doing the right thing is a precondition of doing it for the right reasons. But supporters of the Coincidence Thesis will (presumably) not think that believing you are doing the right thing is even a precondition of doing it for the right reasons, since they think the right reasons are the reasons why it is right rather than the fact that it is right. Whether they think any other moral belief is a precondition of doing it for the right reasons will depend on what they think the right reasons are. Their examples of the reasons why something is right tend to be non-moral facts (e.g. ‘because Jim is a person’), but there’s no reason why they have to think this is always the case. However, even if they think moral beliefs are never a precondition of doing the right thing for the right reasons, they can agree that certain moral beliefs are a precondition of doing the right thing for some of the wrong reasons. Notably, doing it because it is right is, on their view, doing it for one of the wrong reasons, so the belief that it is right will turn out to be a precondition of doing it for one of the wrong reasons.
Hi again, James!
Re: the generality objection—
What you say here is very helpful indeed. Thanks for the clarification.
My initial thought was that your examples made plausible the idea that the overall quality of will our actions exhibit is constituted not just by the motives driving our actions but also, in part, by the spirit in which we act, so that someone who takes praiseworthiness to be a measure of quality of will should take into account both motives and spirit in assessing the moral worth of actions. If that’s right, then even when the false moral beliefs that make it the case that Patriarchy-Will does his good deeds in the wrong spirit are excusable, they still make it the case that he acts with less than perfect quality of will.
But you’re concerned, not just with the quality of will which Will’s acts reveal, but also with the extent to which he is responsible for that quality of will. So on this account, Patriarchy-Will, like Original-Will, still performs the right act for the right reasons but in the wrong spirit. It’s just that because he’s not responsible for performing the act in the wrong spirit (given the poor epistemic position, or the social pressures, under which he acts and forms his beliefs), his doing so isn’t to his discredit.
My vaguely expressed (and still somewhat inchoate) worry about this way of explaining our different intuitions about Patriarchy-Will (and Huck), compared to Original-Will, is that its not clear to me we want to judge P-W, or HF, to be not-discreditable-because-not-responsible, due to the poor circumstances in which they acts and do their moral reasoning, given that we still do want to hold them responsible (by giving them some credit!) for their well-motivated actions. What justifies treating them as fully responsible for those choices, but less than fully responsible for their corresponding moral beliefs?
In my original comments on your paper, I suggested an alternative way of explaining why we’re less inclined to discredit P-W and HF for their acting in the wrong spirit—an explanation appealing to our standing to blame them for this, given the likelihood that we would not have acted better in their shoes.
But I want to now suggest a different possible explanation for why we’re less inclined to see P-W’s action as being (to some extent) to his discredit than O-W’s action, despite the fact that both, it would seem, perform their action in the wrong spirit. I think the backstory we’re given to explain P-W’s false belief that his caring for his children is supererogatory helps ease, a little bit, my expressed reluctance to swallow the stipulation that Will really is motivated to care for his kids by the right (that is, right-making) reasons, and to the right degree. The same is true for the larger story about the circumstances in which Huck acts.
In the case of O-W, it’s hard to imagine the pattern of motivation and belief that would explain how he could at once be committed to the idea that he has no obligation to care for his children (even if no one else will if he doesn’t!) and yet be so well-motivated to care for them, precisely by the sorts of factors (the impact on their wellbeing, the impact on his wife’s wellbeing, the impact on their relationship etc) that we would ordinarily take to generate at least pro tanto obligations. Similarly, if we remove HF from his cultural circumstances, it would be somewhat mysterious how Huck could really accept the belief that Jim is property that ought to be returned to its rightful owner and while being genuinely concerned for Jim’s wellbeing, his personhood, and the requirements of their friendship.
The broader contexts (in P-Will’s case, of the patriarchal society in which he lives, in Huck’s case, or the racist society in which he lives) make more plausible the stipulation that these agents really could be motivated by fully right-making reasons, despite their terrible moral beliefs. That’s because these broader contexts make it plausible that these agents may have simply accepted these moral beliefs fairly unreflectively, by rote, as handed down to them by the moral authorities in their environments, instead of infering them from, or even checking how they fit, or fail to fit, with their own patterns of concern. If so, then maybe our resistance to judging that P-W’s and HF’s actions are to their discredit, compared to O-W’s action, reflects a greater willingness to accept the stipulation about the agents’ motives in these cases. (Although, as I argue in my commentary above, I actually think this stipulation is false in Huck’s case—Huck clearly isn’t perfectly motivated, by the right-making reasons to the right degree, given that he clearly is motivated, to some extent, by the belief that Jim is Miss Watson’s lost property, which is why he is so on the fence about protecting Jim.)
One more thought about this, which might support the explanation I just suggested:
It seems to me that this sort of backstory might make me less inclined to judge that Will’s [action + false moral belief] combo to be somehow to his discredit EVEN WHEN I judge the belief itself to be to Will’s discredit. I’m curious what your intuitions are about the following case:
Imagine that Will not only doesn’t believe his caring for his children is morally required–he doesn’t believe it to be supererogatory either. In fact, he has believes in a bunch of “macho” norms that entail that there’s something somewhat shameful and embarrassing about a man’s being overly concerned with the interests and needs of his wife and children–that his desire to do his fair share in household and caregiving tasks is a sign that he’s not a “real man.” Will has, to his embarrassment, in fact always felt a strong concern for these sorts of domestic matters, and a strong desire to be close to his children in the same way that his wife is. So he is strongly motivated to care for his children by the reasons why his doing so is the right thing to do–because it benefits them, because it benefits his wife, because it strengthens their relationships. But far from being smug about it, he’s somewhat ashamed about all this (and might even pretend, in the presence of his buddies, not to care nearly as much as he does).
I’m quite ready to judge that these beliefs of Will’s are to his discredit. They reflect poorly on his character. But in this case it seems to me also plausible that Will is nonetheless genuinely motivated to care for his children by the reasons why this is the right thing for him to do. And I’m inclined to view his caring actions as praiseworthy (indeed fully praiseworthy) for that reason. He is well-motivated despite his morally discreditable beliefs, and that is to his credit. His feeling ashamed of the good care that he takes of them does not (according to my intuitions anyway) take away from that credit.
So, in response to Kida’s recent comment, I wasn’t intending to commit myself to the claim that it’s not possible to be motivated by the right-making reasons to the right degree without believing that one’s action is right.
(But I am finding it, admittedly, increasingly difficult to establish whether any discredit I’m inclined to direct towards Will is due purely to his beliefs, leaving his actions fully creditworthy, or to his actions-in-light-of-his-beliefs.)
Thanks very much James for these really nice comments. You are probably right that Moral Worth Depends on Explanation is false – I guess your thought here is that a mental state might affect the quality of an act, affecting its moral worth, without playing a causal or other explanatory role.
I wonder whether, when thinking about whether the coincidence thesis is true, we need a cleaner example where a person fully recognises and understands all of the preconditions of rightness, recognises that these preconditions have the value they have, recognises that the person has a decisive reason for action as a result, but just doesn’t draw the conclusion that they have a duty on the basis of these facts. For example, suppose that Will recognises the significance of his children, recognises that the fact they are hi is and that he has a parenting role gives him powerful reasons for action, recognises that his partner as done a lot of the childcare, and so there is a decisive reason for him to do it rather than her, because she is his equal, etc etc. He is also disposed to conclude that he is required to look after them if he thinks about it. But it never crosses his mind. He just looks after them because he recognises that he has decisive reason to do so rather than being required. Do you still think that he acts with a deficiency of spirit? That at least doesn’t seem to right to me, but perhaps you can give an account of spirit that shows it to be true. Kida seemed sympathetic to the view that this is true, but I wasn’t sure. Even if there isn’t one thought too many when Will is motivated by being required, there seems an unnecessary thought for full moral worth.