Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between monadic and bipolar forms of normativity. As the distinction is usually drawn, monadic normativity concerns whether a given action is right or wrong while bipolar normativity concerns who, if anyone, is wronged in any putative instance of wrongdoing. My central thesis is that in the moral realm, we do well to discard the notion of monadic normativity altogether and focus instead on the contours and limits of bipolar normativity. For by placing greater weight on the significance of wronging particular others, as opposed to simply doing something wrong, we get a more compelling picture of the distinctive importance of morality and its relationship to other norms that govern our lives.
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Notes
As Thompson characterizes the distinction, monadic judgments are of the form “X did wrong in doing A” or “X did wrong in not doing A” and do not identify a specific other who has been wronged. By contrast, forms of bipolar normativity do make such identifications and thus include judgments such as “X wronged Y by doing A” and “X wronged Y by not doing A.” See Thompson (2004, pp. 333–338).
Owens (2012, p. 46).
Ibid., p. 45.
The claim that our moral thought is better off without the notion of monadic normativity is consistent with the idea that various other sorts of normativity appropriately govern other spheres of human activity. Thus, there may be epistemic norms that set standards for our doxastic practices, and these norms may very well be monadic in form. For example, “Believe on the basis of good evidence” is a plausible epistemic norm that is clearly monadic. Thus, as I will suggest toward the end of the paper, embracing the distinctively bipolar structure of our moral thought is entirely consistent with thinking that there are more general norms of human virtue or flourishing that may be monadic in form. The claim that we are better off to discard the notion of monadic normativity is, therefore, intended to apply only to distinctively moral norms.
Invoking the significance that individuals attach to a certain kind of acknowledgment echoes Owens’s claim that we have normative interests such that “normative phenomena can be good (or bad) for us quite apart from their impact on our non-normative concerns” (2012, p. 2). In other words, the victims of various wrongs want the perpetrators of those wrongs to acknowledge their wrongdoing in a particular way even though it is unclear that such an acknowledgement has any other obvious effect on their lives. Owens discusses the specific nature of the interests we have related to wrongings in Owens (2012, Chapter 2).
It must be granted that if no satisfactory answer can be given to this question, then the sorts of examples I have been discussing will identify a pervasive concern that answers to nothing—a kind of moral desiderata that will go unsatisfied. I do not intend to offer anything approaching a full-blown account of what it is to wrong someone in the present work. Rather, I have the much more modest aim of highlighting the significance that such an account might have. For a compelling discussion of difficulties associated with elaborating a satisfactory account of bipolar normativity, see Thompson (2004).
Kumar (2003, p. 109).
Brewer (2009, p. 166).
Murdoch (1999, p. 215).
Ibid.
Darwall (2006).
Darwall (2013, p. 32).
Ibid., p. 34. The language of obligation is Darwall’s, and so I will preserve his terminology when discussing his view. However, it is not clear to me that Darwall’s view of the relationship between bipolar normativity and monadic normativity depends on anything peculiar to the notion of obligation (as opposed to normativity more generally). In other words, one could be skeptical of the notion of obligation and still accept Darwall’s account of bipolar normativity and monadic normativity. By the same token, one could reject that account while still thinking that we have bipolar obligations, monadic obligations, or both. This is not to suggest that Darwall does not invest the notion of obligation with significance. He clearly does. It is rather to suggest that his views on the specific matter under consideration do not crucially depend on the notion of obligation.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 39.
There may, of course, be other ways that the son can more directly wrong his father by, for example, stealing from him or punching him in the stomach for no reason. In those cases, the father may play a kind of double role as he draws attention to the ways in which he has been wronged and also serves as a moral instructor.
Wallace (2007, p. 31).
The term “nonwronging wrongdoing” is from Feinberg (1988, p. xxviii).
Feinberg (1988, p. 21).
The idea that we can wrong ourselves has, I think, been pressed most forcefully by Kantians. Thus, Robert Johnson has recently argued that a duty of self-improvement rests on “whether one’s reasons for withholding self-development now can be justified to oneself in the future, who then may well lack developed capacities as a result of decisions made by your present self” (2011, p. 68). And Christine Korsgaard seems to suggest that we can have duties to ourselves on the grounds that all moral claims are self-originating. On this issue, see also Wick (1960) who argues that all moral duties require a duty to oneself because a moral duty requires that one be accountable to one’s own conscience.
Given the structure of their arguments, it is an interesting question whether either Johnson or Korsgaard would categorize wrongs done to oneself as violations of purely monadic normativity, since both views have a distinctively bipolar flavor. In Johnson’s case, to wrong oneself is for one of one’s selves to wrong another of one’s selves, and that relation is arguably bipolar in nature. And Korsgaard’s view depends on the idea that we can occupy a reflective stance in which we regard ourselves as other. She thus writes: “[M]y reasons—and indeed practical reasons in general—are grounded in the authority the human mind necessarily has over itself. We might put this by saying that because of the reflective structure of human consciousness, I think that every agent stands in what Darwall would call a second-personal relation to herself—she has a second-personal voice within” (2007, p. 11).
As will become clear, I think there are good reasons to refrain from moralizing purely self-regarding actions (and, therefore, reasons to reject the Kantian account on this score). And it seems to me that even if we do sometimes regard ourselves as “other,” such a phenomenon is rather different than regarding someone else as “other.” (See Singer 1959, 1963). That said, it is worth noting that if such arguments are plausible, then the idea that we can wrong ourselves would potentially be consistent with the idea that moral norms are essentially bipolar in nature.
My armchair analysis of changing social norms about smoking seems to support the effectiveness of this kind of strategy. Smokers now seem to be viewed with a kind of moral suspicion in society, and that suspicion may have exerted a non-trivial influence on the choices people make about whether to smoke. Some people may be swayed by the health concerns alone. But others may find the supposed immorality of smoking to be a more persuasive consideration.
I don’t mean to suggest that parents who tell their children that sex before marriage is immoral are necessarily insincere in their proclamations. I mean only to point out that the moralizing of behavior is often thought to be useful in shaping the behavior of others and that such a view may lead some to moralize that behavior who might not otherwise be inclined to do so. Thus, it may be the case that some are reluctant to conclude that sex before marriage is not immoral because of their fears that it opens to door to behavior that they want to discourage.
Raimond Gaita has written compellingly about the nature and lessons of remorse. See, in particular, Gaita (2004, Chapters 4 and 5). His point seems to be that genuine remorse keys us into the seriousness of what we have done. While I am inclined to agree with Gaita on this score, the point I am trying to make here is somewhat different, namely, that the cogency of remorse or contrition depends not on the bare notion of wrongdoing but rather on the notion that wrongs can be done to particular others.
Of course, I do not mean to make any general statements about what is true of all suicide attempts. Perhaps some people who attempt suicide are at greater moral fault than others. Such conclusions would depend on the particular details of any given case. It should suffice for my purposes that the characterization I have given here applies to some suicide attempts.
On this points, see also Singer (1959), especially p. 205.
See Williams (1985), Chapter 10. Elizabeth Anscombe famously sounds a similar note when she argues that concepts “of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought,’ ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it” (1958, p. 1).
Strictly speaking, I think the view on offer is compatible with thinking that beneficence is properly regarded as a matter of morality or that it concerns some other non-moral virtue. Determining such matters will depend on one’s substantive account of what it is to wrong someone, an account I have refrained from giving in the present work.
Mark Lebar has recently argued that respect for others is one among many other goods which are constitutive of well-being. While we spell out the nature of that good differently, the overall structure of our views seems to be quite similar. See LeBar (2013, Chapter 12) (which is a slightly revised descendant of LeBar 2009). Valerie Tiberius also locates moral considerations in the broader context of living well (2008, Sect. 3). I would, rather less confidently, also characterize the view articulated by Philippa Foot in Natural Goodness (2001) in this way.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Emily Austin, Brad Cokelet, Christian Miller, Adam Pelser, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful feedback on this paper.
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Kadlac, A. Does it matter whether we do wrong?. Philos Stud 172, 2279–2298 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0410-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0410-0