Thought Experiment 97: Moral Luck

6/12/2017

Drat. Not a four-leaf clover in the bunch. Guess that makes me evil.

Hooray! This week's thought experiment gives us another chance to poke holes in consequentialist moral philosophy. See what you think of this scenario.

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Mette looked into the eyes of her estranged husband, but could find no flicker of remorse.
   "You tell me you want us back," she said to him. "But how can we do that when you won't even admit that you did the wrong thing when you left me and the children?"
   "Because in my heart I don't think I did wrong, and I don't want to lie to you," explained Paul. "I left because I needed to get away to follow my muse. I went in the name of art. Don't you remember when we used to talk about Gauguin and how he had to do the same? You always said he had done a hard thing, but not a wrong one."
   "But you are no Gauguin," sighed Mette. "That's why you're back. You admit you failed."
   "Did Gauguin know he would succeed when he left his wife? No one can know such a thing. If he was in the right, then so was I."
   "No," said Mette. "His gamble paid off, and so he turned out to be right. Yours didn't, and so you turned out to be wrong."
"His gamble?" replied Paul. "Are you saying luck can make the difference between right and wrong?"
   Mette thought for a few moments. "Yes. I suppose I am."

Source: The eponymous essay from Moral Luck by Bernard Williams, 1981.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 289.
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I haven't left my wife behind for my art and my philosophy, but I have left a lot of money and socially productive work behind. And I don't think I've had my lucky break yet to make this all worth it. Does that mean my actions have been morally bad too? I'll be back on Friday to discuss Paul's choice, my choice, and how I think this moral question can be considered in general. In the meantime, let me know what you think about this in the comment section below. I can't guarantee it, but that just might turn out to be the right thing for you to do.

6 Comments

Disagreeable Me link

6/14/2017 04:15:07 pm

I'm broadly a consequentialist, but I don't believe in moral luck, meaning I disagree with Mette.

Firstly, I'm skeptical that even Gauguin's gamble paid off morally. Seems to me he was likely working to pursue his personal passions rather than trying to better humanity, and I'm not all that convinced that we are all that much better off for having his paintings, but let's set that aside and assume that his project was to cure some disease or something.

None of us can know the consequences of our actions. All we can be expected to do is to try to make the choices that we believe will have the right consequences. This is what a good person does, and for me at least, this is what consequentialism is about. It's primarily a way to think about what actions we ought to take in the moment, given what we know. It can also be applied to making character judgements (does a person try to bring about good consequences). It's not about retrospective judgements about what turned out to be morally right or wrong in hindsight.

All we can say in hindsight is whether a person did what they believed was right and whether that would still be the right choice if they knew how it would ultimately turn out. It's perfectly coherent to be a consequentialist and yet believe that a choice which turned out to have drastic consequences was the most morally defensible one at the time it was made, given what was known at the time.

Ed Gibney link

6/15/2017 09:08:11 am

Thanks DM! I prefer not to scoop my Friday blog post by giving away all my analysis in these comments, so I'll just ask a question. Given what you say about our inability to fully Know (capital K) the consequences of our actions (which I absolutely agree with) and your emphasis on *making the right choices*, how do you think that differs from being a virtue ethicist? In your mind, is that school of thought unconcerned with consequences?

Disagreeable Me

6/15/2017 09:31:31 am

Hi Ed,

I think it is quite different from virtue ethics. A true virtue ethicist views certain virtues as important (for some reason) and thinks the right thing to do is to behave in a manner consistent with those virtues, whatever the consequence.

One of my problems with virtue ethics is that the choice of virtues and the priorities they are given seems a little arbitrary, so it doesn't really work very well as a guide to moral decision making, while it does work quite well for thinking about what kind of person you would like to be.

For example, suppose a virtue ethicist regards duty as a primary virtue, and suppose that virtue ethicist is a nuclear launch officer under the Trump administration. If Trump goes mad and orders a nuclear launch on France because Macron dissed his hair, that officer's duty is to launch the missiles, and so launching the missiles might well be the virtuous thing to do. But if he is a committed consequentialist, I would expect him to refuse -- he might even have to kill colleagues in order to ensure that the missiles are not launched.

Now, you could say I've constructed a straw man. We might also imagine a virtue ethicist in that situation who values instead the virtues of courage, of compassion, selflessness, confidence and so on, who would do just as the consequentialist. And that's true too, but then there might yet be other situations where those virtues in turn could be turned towards undesirable consequences. It may be that in some situations the best thing for everyone turns out to be self-serving and cruel, e.g. to save your own job and your company by firing half your staff, but in so doing keep the other half employed when a more virtuous, compassionate employer might have gone out of business and left everyone out of work.

Of course you could have as your one overriding primary virtue the desire to find the best consequences for everyone, and if that's your virtue ethics then it is indeed rather like consequentialism, but then I don't think it's really best described as virtue ethics.

On the other hand, we can go the other way. We can derive certain virtues from a consequentialist point of view, and choose and prioritise the virtues based on what kinds of consequences they are likely to promote. All the same, a true consequentialist will be willing to entirely disregard these secondary virtues if demanded by the circumstances. If this is the kind of person you are -- prizing virtues because of the consequences they tend to bring about, but willing to set them aside in unusual circumstances where they may lead to adverse consequences, then to me you seem to be fundamentally more of a consequentialist than a virtue ethicist.

Ed GIbney link

6/15/2017 10:16:22 am

Thanks again DM. I think that's an excellent breakdown of the possible uses of virtue ethics - directed in both poorer and better ways. In previous posts, I've said the three main camps of moral philosophy are roughly concerned with the three tenses of time--past, present, and future. Virtue ethics is concerned about your prior intentions. Deontological rules govern in-the-moment actions. Consequentialism judges the future results. Of course, in real life, we take a total perspective of the whole and can easily recognise when someone had A) the best intentions, followed the rules, and things ended badly; or B) selfish intentions, broke a few rules, but things turned out well; or some other combination of the three. I wonder what you think of that view of the schools of moral philosophy. I can't say I've seen it elsewhere, but I doubt it's really unique.

Of course, the big question still remains for all of them as to "what is good?" What is a good virtue/rule/consequence? I've tried to answer that with my paper on how to bridge the is-ought divide, but that's another much larger conversation.

Disagreeable Me

6/15/2017 10:41:46 am

Hi Ed,

I haven't seen the temporal break down of the three schools before.

You could probably make a good case for this breakdown, but to me that's something like an act of literary interpretation -- an interesting and perhaps insightful way of looking at it but not necessarily getting at anything that is objectively really there. You could break it down in other ways too, for instance I'm not sure that virtue ethics is any more about judging past intentions than deontology is. You can use virtue ethics to determine what you ought to do in the moment, and you can use deontology to assess whether past actions were moral or not. I would agree with you that consequentialism is particularly future-oriented.

As to "what is good?", well, I'm not a moral realist. I think it's up to each of us to decide for ourselves. That's not quite moral relativism though, as I judge the morality of the actions of others by my own standards of morality, so I'm quite happy to call the practices of another culture immoral if they seem so to me -- but I make no claim that mine is an objective standard. It is just the one that I prefer and so the one I use when called upon to make moral judgements.

I come to my moral preferences through a combination of evolved human psychology, conditioning and philosophical introspection. I think the most coherent way to build a framework around my most fundamental moral intuitions is utilitarianism, and so by and large I embrace that, although I am aware taht it has its problems. The definition and measure of utility is pretty vague, and there are problematic thought experiments that expose some pretty bad holes (The Repugnant Conclusion and The Utility Monster for example) if we try to take a naive utilitarianism as a final answer applicable to all moral questions.

And yet I think that in almost all practical scenarios it suffices for determining what choices are moral and what are not. It doesn't bother me excessively that it doesn't work in far out hypothetical scenarios because I am not a moral realist and so I do not require that my account of morality be perfectly consistent in situations which are not ever going to arise. All I require is a framework which helps me explain approximately what I mean when I speak and think about morality.

Ed Gibney link

6/15/2017 11:52:18 am

Thanks, those objections/points you raised are helpful and I find it encouraging that you haven't seen that template for analysis before. I would say that deontology is concerned with the *action* not the intention leading up to it nor the consequences after it, so while those actions may now be in the past, the deontological judgment is concerned with the momentary action, in the present tense that it happened. Confining virtue ethics the past tense is tricker, because yes, virtuous intentions do lead to an action, but I think that moral school of thought is more concerned with what is going on in the mind of the actor *prior to* an action (how virtuous are they trying to be) rather than the virtue of one action in isolation. For example, if someone cowered in fear about doing the right thing for weeks and months but then in the moment ended up acting courageously, I think virtue ethics would judge them less virtuous than someone who courageously prepared for a right action all along. As you say though, this may just be a lens I use to help bring all three schools of thought into a better, more complete picture. I think this helps show why all three have something to contribute to the discussion, but none has been able to throw off the others.

If you don't mind, I'll duck the question of moral realism for now because I have a busy day in front of me. I'll try to pick that thread up another time with you though as I'd value your feedback on my academic paper on this. Cheers!

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Thought Experiment 97: Moral Luck

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