Abstract
This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral goodness is more multi-faceted. My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness: the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy.
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Notes
Markovits (2010).
Markovits (2010, pp. 230 and 238). Joshua Gert points out that the expression “morally justified action” is ambiguous: it could refer to an action we ought morally to perform, or it could refer to an action that is (merely) morally permissible. When I refer to reasons that morally justify an action, I have the former, stronger sense of morally justified action in mind.
As is often the case with explanations, these kinds of explanations need not crowd out rationalizing explanations—both may be true at the same time. For a useful discussion of the related idea of “interpretation” of an agent’s actions (and of the contrast between “interpretive” and “mechanical” explanations of behavior) see Walden (2012, forthcoming).
See also Scanlon’s discussion of the distinction between merely explanatory reasons and intentional agent’s reasons in What We Owe To Each Other: while there may be a reason (in the sense of an explanation) why a volcano erupts, we would not speak of the volcano’s reason for erupting (Scanlon 1998, p. 18).
See Markovits (2010, p. 221). To say this is not to say that all motivating reasons are facts we take to be normative reasons, and certainly not to say that they are facts we take to be sufficient to justify our actions. We might sincerely offer a “rationalizing” explanation even when we believe our reasons for acting did not justify our action. I might offer as my reason for snapping at you the fact that your voice is rather shrill for this time in the morning, even if I know that the tone of your voice is no justification for snapping at you at all.
For further discussion of why we might be mistaken about or ignorant of our motivating reasons, see Markovits (2010, pp. 222–223).
For more on a closely-related distinction between intrinsic and non-instrumental value, see Korsgaard (1997).
In Markovits (2010), I argue that if the Coincident Reasons Thesis captures a necessary condition of moral worth, then the truth of (at least simple versions of) utilitarianism would entail that many intuitively worthy right actions performed from Kantian or common sense moral motives would not count as worthy, because they would be non-instrumentally motivated by merely instrumentally right-making reasons. I argue that this is grounds for doubting the truth of (simple versions of) utilitarianism. (See especially §4.).
I set aside here a number of thorny questions having to do with normatively or motivationally overdetermined actions. For some initial discussion, see Markovits (p. 224 and n. 66 (p. 238)).
I haven’t really defended this broader claim here, but arguing for it was a central task of my earlier paper.
Or at least, by normative reasons sufficient to justify the act. Again, for present purposes, I set aside complications having to do with actions whose performance or justification is overdetermined.
Thanks to Sin yee Chan pushing me to recognize that moral significance, while not sufficient for an act to be heroic, may well be necessary.
Arpaly (2003, p. 72). Arpaly calls her thesis “Praiseworthiness as Responsiveness to Moral Reasons.”
Ibid. (pp. 87–89).
Ibid. (p. 87).
Ibid. (p. 87).
Arpaly calls the “die-hard”-ness of an agent’s moral motivations one of several features “associated, other things being equal, with strength of concern” (p. 85). She doesn’t say die-hard motivation is constitutive of such stronger concern. For all she says, she may take counterfactuals like the ones concerning her two imagined philanthropists to play a merely evidential role in determining the moral worth of their acts. As I’ve argued, I don’t think they play even this evidential role.
This conception of heroism, which I think captures our everyday understanding of the term “hero” quite well, may be, in two respects, broader than ordinary usage: first, it sets aside, as an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction, the implication—common to many dictionary definitions (including the OED)—that heroes are male; second, it sets aside the requirement, common but not ubiquitous, that heroic actions exhibit courage—especially physical courage or valor. But it reflects the classical roots of the term as a label for men of near super-human ability—an idea with obvious echoes in the modern idea of a superhero.
“Moral strength” in this analysis serves as a kind of placeholder for whatever it is about the agent’s character—courage, self-control, perceptiveness, the right desires—in virtue of which she can act well where most would act badly.
There’s an interesting related question: are ascriptions of heroism across clearly different communities ever apt? Does it make sense to ascribe heroism to the acts of some person who inhabits a moral culture that is manifestly different from our own? Or is an ascription of heroism apt only when the speaker can reasonably see herself and the agent as occupying a shared community? I’ll leave that question open, for the time being, because I don’t know what I think about it. But my instinct is that we may be hitting up against what Bernard Williams saw as “the truth in relativism”: certain forms of ethical appraisal are appropriate only when the gap between the appraiser’s moral culture and the agent’s is in some sense bridgeable. See Williams (1981).
Still, the old skeptical worry rears its head: how does the tumor differ from more ordinary ways in which our biology might govern our natures?
An act may be statistically rare but not extraordinary, in this sense: for example, if the circumstances under which the agent acts are rare, but it would not be rare for an agent in those circumstances to act that way.
Urmson (1958, pp. 198–216). Urmson actually distinguishes between “minor” heroism, and heroism “par excellence”—only the latter is non-obligatory on his view (p. 201).
Urmson (p. 213).
It might also be inappropriate to “expect” the action in the epistemic sense of that word.
Alex Guerrero has drawn my attention to the difficult case of Thomas Vander Woude: Vander Woude’s son, Joseph, fell into a septic tank in his back yard. Vander Woude rushed to the tank, tried to help his son keep his head above the muck, and when it became clear that his son was not able to keep his head up, Vander Woude jumped in and pushed his son onto his shoulders, remaining submerged himself. He died holding his son above him.
What should we think of this case? Does Vander Woude act heroically in saving his son? Would many of us have done the same were it our child? These questions are hard to answer, but I can feel pull of “yes” answers to each. Still, I think such examples should give us pause: we greatly admire parents who make such sacrifices for their children. But we are also willing to condemn them if they don’t make such sacrifices (consider how we would have felt about Vander Woude had he been unable to bring himself to save his son). We suspect, perhaps unfairly, there may be something deficient in such parents. This puts actions like these in a rather peculiar category: actions whose performance is seen as meriting special praise, but whose non-performance is seen as blameworthy. It seems to me there’s something irrational about categorizing any act that way; and the shifting standards of evaluation we hold others to in cases like this reflect our uncertainty about what standards we would ourselves be capable of living up to.
Wolf (1982, p. 419).
The “only” is not, I believe, required by the Coincident Reasons Thesis—an action may be motivationally overdetermined without that detracting from its worth. (I should say that I don’t share Wolf’s views about the necessary humorlessness or blandness of moral saints—I would think that a good sense of humor, at the least, would be an essential asset to any saint.) See Susan Wolf (1982).
Thanks to Louis deRosset and Steve Yablo for helpful discussion on the right way to put this point. Even in the actual world, there could possibly be a moral saint (in my sense) who is not a hero: someone whose life simply affords her no opportunities for extraordinary moral fortitude—to act rightly when others would not. In practice, I believe most of us have opportunities to do good that the vast majority of us don’t exercise—in that sense most of us pass up opportunities for heroism. But this may not be true of all of us.
Is it conceptually possible for us all to be heroes given that we aren’t all saints? Or is a world full of heroes, like Garrison Keillor’s imagined world full of above-average children, a sad impossibility? Fortunately, given our myriad imperfections, we might all be heroes, so long as we’re all exceptional in different ways. Thanks to Mark Balaguer for pointing this out. A super-hero analogy might be helpful in illustrating the point: Superman was, of course, no super-hero on Krypton, his home planet, where everyone else shared his super-human strength, powers of flight, and X-ray vision. But the X-Men could all be super-heroes, even if there were no ordinary humans around to act as foils, because they all have different super-powers. (I suppose our children could, similarly, all be above-average in some respect.)
Holmes (1985, p. 361). Soldiers in war also use the expression “tango down” to indicate that a hostile human “target” has been eliminated (“tango” 2010 represents the “t” in “target”), whereas they use the expression “man down” when one of their own fellow soldiers has been hit. See the online dictionary Wiktionary.
I don’t want to suggest that such desensitization is easy to justify or usually justified. Indeed, the fact, described by Holmes, that soldiers often must be desensitized in this way to be effective soldiers is, I believe, one of the reasons why wars are hard to justify. Not only do wars require participants to “corrupt” themselves to be effective soldiers (a cost with immediate and long-term effects that should not be underestimated), but the need for such self-corruption also creates a significant risk that soldiers will prosecute a potentially justifiable war in a manner that makes it unjustified; as Holmes says, “if the abstract image [of the enemy, internalized by soldiers in training] is overdrawn or depersonalization is stretched into hatred, the restraints on human behavior in war are easily swept aside.” (p. 361).
Katie Couric interviewed Captain Sullenberger on 60 Minutes, airdate February 8th, 2009.
There may be a difference between not (consciously) thinking about some consideration when one acts, and not being motivated by it. It might be suggested that Captain Sullenberger was motivated by the fact that landing the plane would save his passengers’ lives despite the fact that he was not thinking of them at the time. I’m not sure how to understand this suggestion—I’d want to hear more about what makes it the case that Sullenberger was motivated by this reason. It can’t just be that it was this reason that motivated him to coach himself not to think about these reasons in emergencies. Second-order motivations aren’t transitive in this way—they are discharged when the primary motives they target are formed. They needn’t linger on to co-motivate, so to speak, the actions motivated by those primary motives. In any case, even if Sullenberger can be characterized as sub-consciously acting for right-making reasons, the case of the desensitized soldier seems to me very hard to recharacterize along these lines. Thanks to Christina Van Dyke and Tom Dougherty for pushing me on this point.
It is noteworthy, however, that though neither the Captain nor the desensitized soldier, as I’ve described them, acts for right-making reasons, in both cases right-making reasons plausibly play a higher-order motivating role in the back-story of their actions. In both cases, as I’ve imagined them, it’s plausible that these agents were motivated by genuine normative reasons not to be motivated by such reasons when being motivated by them might undermine their ability to act as they have most reason to act. So even in these cases, right-making reasons seem to play a significant motivating role somewhere ‘upstream’ of the act. It may be that if they did not play this higher-order motivating role, we would not judge the ‘downstream’ actions to be heroic. (Thanks again to Christina Van Dyke for helpful discussion.).
Reported by Thomas Keneally (1982, pp. 396–397).
McGrath (2011, p. 115).
Hills (2009, p. 117).
McGrath (2011, p. 133).
Ibid. (p. 135).
Ibid. (p. 135).
As Joseph Raz has pointed out, parents of children who do the right thing but against their explicit instructions feel torn in their praise for just this reason: the whole point of, and justification for, the instructions was that the children were more likely to act rightly by following them than by relying on their own judgment. Acting on the parents’ instructions was, in this case, what the children had most subjective reason to do, even if it was fortunate that they disobeyed. See Raz (1999, p. 43).
The fact that a recognizable moral expert tells our agent to perform some action is, I’ve said, a genuine right-making reason to perform it. But it is not a non-instrumental right-making reason to perform it. If the agent performs the act just because that would conform to the expert’s advice, and not because he (legitimately) thought conforming to the expert’s advice would lead him to do what is (objectively) best, his action still has no moral worth. Compare the parallel case of non-moral deference: if my reliable doctor tells me to give my daughter penicillin, and I do, not because I think deferring to my doctor will be best for my daughter, but rather out of some bizarre non-instrumental motivation to do as my doctor tells me, I’m non-instrumentally motivated by a merely instrumentally right-making reason, and my act has no moral worth. (This is why my claim about evidence doesn’t entail that, e.g., right actions motivated by a desire for a reward are morally worthy, even if the reward is reliable evidence of the objective rightness of the act, and so, on my view, a right-making reason: it’s at best an instrumentally right-making reason.) Thanks to Paulina Sliwa for bringing this worry to my attention.
Arpaly, p. 80.
See Grann (2009).
Singer (1972).
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Acknowledgments
The author owes thanks to Vanessa Carbonell, Terence Cuneo, Louis DeRosset, Tyler Doggett, Tom Dougherty, Joshua Gert, Alex Guerrero, Elizabeth Harman, Richard Holton, Stephen Kearns, Rebecca Markovits, Richard Markovits, Graham Oddie, Miriam Schoenfield, Paulina Sliwa, and Christina Van Dyke, as well as to audiences at MIT, the University of Vermont, the 2011 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress for very helpful comments on this essay.
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Markovits, J. Saints, heroes, sages, and villains. Philos Stud 158, 289–311 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9883-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9883-x