Tragic dilemmas and the priority of the moral

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 191-209

  Weber, Todd Bernard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Bernard Williams; Inescapable wrongdoing; Modern moral philosophy; Moral dilemmas; Moral luck; Moral nonmoral distinction; Practical deliberation; Priority of the moral; Virtue ethics

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005060453     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009864421398     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. An excellent mind can be destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, or good looks by a disfiguring accident. One's musical talent might fail to develop fully because one's parents couldn't afford lessons.
2. Another question is whether an agent, through prior wrongdoing, can create a situation in which further wrongdoing is unavoidable. I am setting this question aside.
3. Someone might think that there can be dilemmas in which all ways of acting are wrong, but which do not involve conflicting obligations. Some writers do discuss "balanced" dilemmas (such as the "Sophie's Choice" dilemma) in which the conflict is not between different general obligations, but between two instances of the same general obligation. (In the Sophie's Choice case the general obligation is to protect the lives of one's children.) In this paper, what I refer to as "obligations" are particular instances of general obligations. So the Sophie dilemma would be described as a conflict between these two obligations: Sophie's obligation to protect the life of child A, and Sophie's obligation to protect the life of child B, both of which, admittedly, are instances of a single more general obligation. I look upon this discrepancy as a matter of terminology. If one wants to reserve the term "obligation" for more general obligations, one can restate my argument in terms of particular moral reasons in a deliberation.
4. In such "balanced" tragic dilemmas it may be the case that neither conflicting moral reason (or particular obligation) obviously outweighs the other. While I will not specifically discuss such cases, my conclusions will apply to them: having to choose between options which both involve horrible loss will be wrenching for an agent, and in such cases, clearly, genuine loss will be inescapable. But wrongdoing will not be inescapable. (I wish to thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for raising these points.)
5. For instance, this axiom of G.H. von Wright's system: Pp V P(∼p), which asserts that either performing an action is permissible, or not performing it is permissible. This axiom explicitly rules out one type of dilemma, in which the same action is both obligatory and forbidden. (See G.H. von Wright, "Deontic Logic,"Mind, LX (1951), pp. 1-15.)
6. I will say more in the next section about the "very broadly Kantian" object of the morality critics' criticism.
7. For a detailed description and classification of these people, see Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and the Morality Critics,"Ethics 107 (1997), pp. 250-285.
8. By, for instance, Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (New York: Cambridge, 1986), p. 5 (note):
9. I glean these points from Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 10.
10. G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy XXXIII (1958), pp. 1-19.
11. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 10. Of course, the fact that the tenets of the morality system are later accretions does not in itself make them objectionable. What makes the morality system objectionable, when embodied in moral philosophy, is that such philosophy cannot account for important features of our ethical experience. What makes the morality system objectionable when thought of as "part of the outlook of almost all of us" is that the "basic ethical ideas" of the Greeks were in "better condition" than ours are, and that "we rely on much the same conceptions as the Greeks, but we do not acknowledge the extent to which we do so" (Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 4). Williams seems to take himself to be criticizing both the moral theories ofphilosophers and the less systematic moral thinking ofeveryone else. But Brian Leiter thinks instead that Anglo-American critics of morality, such as Williams, are "only critics of particular philosophical theories ofmorality" (and sometimes of the idea ofmoral theories in general), whereas Friedrich Nietzsche was a critic ofmorality "as a real cultural phenomenon" (Leiter, p. 252).
12. Someone might have specific ideas about the term "obligation" which make her uneasy about my use of it here, or with my description of tragic dilemmas as conflicts of obligation. Because the literature dealing with tragic dilemmas talks about conflicts of obligation, I do too. But if the term carries too much theoretical baggage, one can describe a tragic dilemma as one in which an agent has reasons which cannot both be acted on, each of which, if not acted on, would appropriately occasion blame and guilt for wrongdoing. One might think that such a conflict falls short of being a conflict of obligation, but still describe it as a conflict of individually definitive moral reasons. My argument can then go on to say that asserting that such conflicts are possible privileges moral reasons, which (privileging) is at odds with denying the priority of the moral.
13. Reprinted in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 166-186.
14. Reprinted in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 114-123.
15. Harman distinguishes four senses of "ought": a sense expressing expectation, one expressing desirability, one expressing obligation, and one expressing prudence. According to Harman, "ought" in the first two senses is a predicate of states of affairs, while "ought" in the moral sense and in the prudential sense is a relation between an agent and an action. Williams agrees that "ought" is not univocal, but argues that its senses should not be distinguished by logical form. They should be distinguished, rather, by distinguishing "between different kinds of states of affairs that ought to be the case, and between different ways in which it can come about that things ought to be the case." Obligation, in particular, "does not require a new logical structure for ought sentences, but only a special kind of reason why it ought to be the case that someone do a particular action" [Williams, Moral Luck, pp. 115, 116.
16. Also see Gilbert Harman, review of Roger Wertheimer's The Significance of Sense, in Philosophical Review 82 (1973); pp. 235-239;
17. and Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford, 1977), pp. 84-87].
18. Williams, Moral Luck, p. 121.
19. This characterization of "obligation" - that obligations " just are" oughts or reasons with blame and guilt attached - is a stronger (and more specifically Williamsian) claim than my argument needs. I will bring this out at the end of this section.
20. Williams' view that 1) obligations do not become less than actual because they are overridden, and that 2) to be obligations (rather than nonmoral reasons) they must already have blame and guilt attached to them - must, that is, be actual, in-force obligations - appears to make it the case that every moral conflict is a conflict of actual obligations which results in inescapable wrongdoing. I think that this result is, in fact, implied by Williams' view. But the harshness of this result is lessened considerably when we consider that most obligations which come into conflict are trivial. My having, for instance, inescapably to break a causal promise to you about an unimportant matter which neither of us takes very seriously would, technically (in Williams' view), be inescapable wrongdoing. But the guilt, blame, and need to make amends for such a trivial (though real and inescapable) infraction would be slight or even negligible. Further, in cases ofsomewhat more serious obligation, the fact that my violating my obligation to you was the result of my acting for the best in a moral dilemma might ground an obligation on your part: an obligation to accept my sincere apology, and perhaps to tell me that it really wasn't my fault.
21. In short, Williams thinks that moral reasons have weight for an agent if that agent cares about or finds important what morality takes seriously - if, in other words, the agent sees things from the moral point of view.
22. For Williams, since moral reasons do not always take priority over nonmoral reasons, the fact that I have a moral reason to choose Bob and only nonmoral reasons for Franz and Joe does not in itself end the deliberation. Given what Williams says about Gauguin (in "Moral Luck," reprinted in Williams, Moral Luck, pp. 20-39), I might ultimately be justified in choosing Franz - justified in the eyes of a grateful, string-quartet-loving posterity, though probably not in the eyes of Bob.
23. This seems fairly clear: If we don't look upon a reason as a moral reason, then we certainly won't think that a person should be morally condemned or should feel guilty for not acting on that reason.
24. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 183.
25. One might ask whether what gives moral reasons weight is also what grounds blame and guilt. Williams' view does suggest a common cause. If what morality takes seriously is also important to me - if I care about what morality "cares about" - then it seems reasonable to say not only that moral reasons will have weight for me, but also that I will view with condemnation (or at least distress) acts which do not conform to what morality requires. More needs to be said to explain why this condemnation or distress takes the form of blame and guilt. But my finding important what morality takes seriously at least begins to explain why I feel guilty and blame others, as well as explaining why moral reasons have weight for me. (I wish to thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for raising this point.)
26. As I mentioned at the end of section III, the second and third assertions are not unique to Williams, and my argument concerning them does not depend on the specifics of Williams' particular brand ofmorality criticism. Assertion four, however, and my argument about it in section IV, are specific to Williams' view.
27. This makes moral reasons parallel nonmoral reasons when their respective characteristics sanctions attach: for both kinds of reasons, one is sanctioned for acting against a reason only if that reason was the weightiest - the one most appropriately acted on.
28. Though a moral reason in this new picture is one to which blame and guilt could appropriately attach, that fact does not give the moral reason any weight in the deliberation, since guilt and blame are not a possibility unless the reason turns out to be the weightiest.