Absolutely clean hands? Responsibility for what's allowed in refraining from what's not allowed

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 189-209

  Uniacke, Suzanne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG   (Australia)

Author keywords

Absolutism; Categorical norms; Consequentialism; Moral prohibitions; Responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249122127     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/096725599341884     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Consequentialism's non-absolutist critics also argue this. Throughout the paper 'consequentialism' refers to act consequentialism.
2. See, e.g., the essays in Joram Haber (ed.) Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).
3. Kai Nielsen, 'Against Moral Conservatism', Ethics, 82 (1972), p. 230.
4. Jonathan Bennett, 'Whatever the Consequences', Analysis, 26 (1965-6), p. 93.
5. See Samuel Scheffler's discussion, The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 2.
6. 'Modern Moral Philosophy', reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 34.
7. Charles Fried claims that hedonistic utilitarianism is absolutist, Right and Wrong (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 10.
8. See, e.g., Richard Brandt, 'Utilitarianism and the Rules of War', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1971-2).
9. Thomas Nagel, 'War and Massacre', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1971-2), pp. 129-30.
10. Ibid., pp. 128-9.
11. For comments along these lines see Fried, op. cit., pp. 10-13.
12. See ibid., p. 12;
13. Nagel, 'War and Massacre', p. 126.
14. Compare Alan Donagan's discussion, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), ch. 6.
15. See Haber op. cit., pp. 4-7.
16. Fried, op. cit., p. 12. Some of the literature on purported irresolvable moral conflict and unavoidable wrongdoing also suggests this, e.g., Thomas Nagel, 'The Fragmentation of Value', and Bernard Williams. 'Ethical Consistency', both reprinted in Christopher Gowans (ed.) Moral Dilemmas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
17. See Thomas Nagel's outline of absolutism in 'War and Massacre'.
18. Throughout the paper 'allows' refers to cases of allowing harm by inaction: simple non-intervention. Arguably not all cases of allowing harm are cases of inaction. See Philippa Foot, 'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect', reprinted in Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978);
19. Jeff McMahan, 'Killing, Letting Die, Withdrawing Aid', Ethics, 103 (1993). Below at n56 I remark on absolutist ascriptions of responsibility where allowing harm involves active withdrawal of aid.
20. The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 140-4. With strong means, harm is inflicted on someone as a means of improving the position of others; weak means involve infliction of harm on a person as a means to an end that the agent would have been able to achieve even were it not for the existence/state of this person.
21. The delivery boy's death would be intended. (See, more generally, Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing: The Self-defence Justification of Homicide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 4.) The conditions listed are necessary because some acute examples arguably meet the conditions of the principle of double effect, and so do not clearly violate the relevant categorical norm; some examples are arguably cases of permissible self-sacrifice or cases of justified defence; other cases invite the comment that the one who is killed to save others is doomed anyway. The last condition (that the greater harm is not due to human agency) I take up in section 4.
22. 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', p. 95 (italic in the original).
23. The charge of 'culpably clean hands' may be levelled at absolutism by some other non-consequentialists. See, e.g., Michael Walzer, 'Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands', Philosophy and Public Affairs (1972);
24. Michael Stocker, 'Dirty Hands in Everyday Life', in Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
25. Williams supra at n19 is an example.
26. The distinction between doing and allowing is itself difficult and controversial, of course.
27. See, e.g., Fried, op. cit., pp. 20-7. Nagel urges the moral relevance of a distinction between what one (deliberately) does to people and what merely happens to them as a result of what one does, 'War and Massacre', pp. 129-31.
28. This may not be true of Kantian categorical norms, which forbid coercion and deception. Coercion and deception require intention, but both are cases of doing rather than allowing. For some versions of absolutism, the obligation of respect for persons can prohibit our intending to let certain things happen to them. Fried, op. cit., pp. 20-1, maintains that 'categorical norms are morally possible because they are concerned with what we do, not with what we allow to happen', and that 'their absolute force attaches only to what we intend'. But he also says that 'the concept of intention supplies specification to the notion of doing as opposed to allowing to happen'. Kagan, op. cit., p. 129, notes that the constraint against intending harm is not limited to harms that I do, but also covers harms that I allow.
29. A fortuitous accident might even save Cain the bother of killing his brother. James Rachels's much-discussed examples in 'Active and Passive Euthanasia', New England Journal of Medicine, 292 (1975) are relevant here.
30. The distinction between intention and foresight that is central to the principle of double effect is at the core of absolutist constraints. See Fried, op. cit., p. 21;
31. Richard Brook, 'Agency and Morality', Journal of Philosophy (1991), pp. 193-4.
32. For instance, Jonathan Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), ch. 1.
33. Williams, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', op. cit., p. 94 (italic in the original) and p. 99.
34. Christine M. Korsgaard maintains that it is 'inconsistent with respect for others to regard their actions as simply a consequence of what you do', 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 18 (1989), p. 102 (italic in the original). However, the sense of 'brings about' necessary to ascriptions of indirect, partial responsibility does not imply that someone else's voluntary actions are simply a consequence of what you do.
35. 'Are There Any Absolute Rights?', Philosophical Quarterly, 31 (122) (1981).
36. These so-called absolutist distinctions are more widely relevant to non-consequentialist moral evaluation.
37. Gewirth evaluates these distinctions singly, but they are also jointly insufficient. The distinctions themselves, and their claimed moral relevance, are controversial, but that is not to the point here.
38. Gewirth, op. cit., p. 12.
39. Ibid., p. 10
40. Ibid., p. 10.
41. He maintains, for instance, that Martin Luther King was not responsible for the riots to which his marches gave rise since, by the principle of intervening action, it was King's opponents who were responsible.
42. Gewirth, op. cit., p. 12.
43. 'War and Massacre', p. 32.
44. See also Fried's discussion, op. cit., pp. 21-2.
45. 'Incidental' here does not imply insignificance; it means, rather, that Abrams does not intend these deaths either as his aim in acting as he does or as a means of achieving his aim in the circumstances.
46. Kant rejects the principle of intervening action in holding that one would be responsible for the unforeseen, undesirable consequences of well-intentioned lying in this sort of case: 'if you lied and said . . . [the intended victim] had really gone out (though unknown to you), so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death' (Immanuel Kant, 'On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives', reprinted in Kant's Critique, of Practical Reason and Other Works on The Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927), pp. 362-3).
47. See Foot, op. cit.;
48. Williams, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', Gewirth, op. cit. On the other hand, there is the concern that adherence to absolutist constraints can involve one unwillingly in someone else's evil project. Christine M. Korsgaard, 'The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 15 (1986), argues that Kantian absolutism requires special principles for dealing with evil that would, under certain conditions, justify violation of the categorical norms of an ideal system.
49. Williams, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', p. 99.
50. 'War and Massacre', op. cit., p. 132 (italic in the original).
51. This example might seem not to meet one of the conditions of acute cases outlined in section 1, since the would-be victim is otherwise endangered (lsaacs's mother is drowning). However, the relevant condition is meant to exclude cases in which the would-be victim will die whether or not the agent violates the moral constraint (see supra n18).
52. Statements of non-consequentialist ethics are often infected by consequentialist concepts.
53. See, e.g. Brook, op. cit., pp. 190-7, where the 'obligation not to cause harm' is said to be more stringent for deontological ethics than 'the obligation to prevent [comparable] harm'.
54. Agent-centred restrictions are held to be a distinguishing feature of non-consequentialist ethics more generally. See Samuel Scheffler, 'Agent-Centered Restrictions, Rationality and the Virtues', Mind, 94, (1984);
55. Korsgaard, 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency', pp. 101-2. See also Brook's discussion, op. cit.
56. Brook, op. cit., p. 195, claims that such statements ambiguously lump together two distinguishable senses in which agency is used to make a moral difference, these two senses being special responsibility for one's own actions as opposed to the actions of others, and intention. However, absolutist constraints incorporate both senses.
57. McMahan, op. cit., pp. 276-7.
58. Ibid., p. 278.
59. Ibid., p. 274.
60. Ibid., p. 278.
61. Heidi Malm draws attention to an important difference between contrast examples and conflict examples, 'Killing, Letting Die, and Simple Conflicts', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 18 (1989), p. 242.
62. More generally, to regard a particular non-doing of x as an omission implies some expectation that x is something that the agent will do or ought to do.
63. See Malm, op. cit., p. 242.
64. A strong version of absolutism denies that Thomas and Abrams are in any sense morally responsible for what they allow because the act of prevention is morally impossible. (I owe recognition of the relevance of the concept of moral impossibility to my reading of Stocker, op. cit., p. 11.) A weaker version of absolutism may hold that in some acute cases, although prevention of the harm is not morally impossible, it is not morally required because of the type of act that prevention would involve. (See, e.g., Williams's discussion of Jim and the Indians, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', pp. 98-9.)
65. Absolutist ascriptions of responsibility in cases of active withdrawal of aid seem to require similar analysis: agents are morally accountable for the outcomes of their withdrawal of aid where the continuance of this aid is, in the absence of sufficient justification or excuse, the morally expected course of events. However, absolutists could regard a particular instance of active withdrawal of aid as being equivalent to Thomas's case only if the agent's continuance of aid would require an action of a type that is prohibited or, on a weaker version of absolutism, never morally required.