A praise-blame asymmetry

There is a certain kind of symmetry between praise and blame. We praise someone who incurs a cost to themselves by going above and beyond obligation and thereby benefitting another. We blame someone who benefits themselves by failing to fulfill an obligation and thereby harming another.

But here is a fun asymmetry to note. We praise the benefactor in proportion to the cost to the benefactor. But we do not blame the malefactor in proportion to the benefit to the malefactor. On the contrary, when the benefit to the malefactor is really small, we think the malefactor is more to be blamed.

Defining supererogation

Sometimes supererogation is defined by a conjunction of a positive evaluation of performing the action and a denial of a negative evaluation of non-performance. For instance:

1. The action is good to do but not bad not to do.

2. The action is good to do but not wrong not to do.

3. The action is praiseworthy but omitting it is not blameworthy.

It seems to me that all such definitions fail in cases where there are two or more actions each of which satisfies one’s obligations.

Suppose a grenade has been thrown at a group of people that includes me. There is a heavy blanket nearby. Throwing the blanket on the grenade is unlikely to save lives but has some chance of doing so, while jumping on the grenade is much more likely to save multiple lives. I am obligated to do one of the two things (there is no time to do both, of course).

I throw the blanket on the grenade. In doing so, I do something good and praiseworthy. And omission of throwing the blanket is neither bad, nor wrong, nor blameworthy, since it is compatible with my jumping on the grenade. But clearly throwing the blanket on the grenade is not supererogatory!

One might object that we should be comparing the throwing of the blanket to not doing anything at all. And if we do that, then the action of throwing the blanket does not satisfy the definitions of supererogation: for it is good to throw the blanket, but bad not to do anything at all. However, if that’s how we read (1)–(3), then jumping on the grenade isn’t supererogatory either. For while it is good to jump on the grenade, to do nothing at all is bad, wrong and blameworthy.

It is clear what goes wrong here. In a case where two or more actions satisfy one’s obligations, it can’t be that all the actions are supererogatory. The supererogatory action must go above the call of duty. It seems we need a comparative element, such as:

4. Action A is better or more praiseworthy than some alternative that satisfies one’s obligations.

I think (4) is not good enough. For it misses the altruistic aspect of the supererogatory. Consider a case where I can choose to make some sacrifice for you to bestow some good on you, and I am morally required to make some minimal sacrifice s₀. However, there is a non-linear relationship between the degree of sacrifice and the good bestowed, such that the good bestowed increases asymptotically, approaching some value v, while the degree of sacrifice can increase without bound. Once the amount of sacrifice is increased too much, the action becomes bad: it becomes imprudent and contrary to one’s obligations to oneself. But as the amount of sacrifice is increased, presumably what eventually starts happening is that before the action becomes actually bad, it simply ceases to be praiseworthy.

Let s₁ indicate such a disproportionate degree of sacrifice: s₁ is not praiseworthy but neither is it blameworthy or contrary to one’s obligations. Then, s₀—the minimal amount of sacrifice—becomes supererogatory by (4). For s₀ is praiseworthy, since it is praiseworthy to make a morally required sacrifice, and hence it is more praiseworthy than s₁, since s₁ is not praiseworthy. But s₁ satisfies one’s obligations. So, the minimal degree of permissible sacrifice, s₀, satisfies the definition of the supererogatory. But that’s surely not right.

I don’t know how to fix (4).

More on the side-effect harm/help asymmetry

Wright and Bengson note an apparent intuitive asymmetry in our side-effect judgments. We blame people for not avoiding bad effects, even when these bad effects are not intended, but we do not praise people for not avoiding good effects when these good effects are not intended.

I wonder if the explanation for this asymmetry isn’t this:

1. Typical good people strive to avoid bad side-effects to others

2. Typical bad people don’t strive to avoid good side-effects to others.

The reason for (2) is that typical bad people are selfish rather than malevolent: their badness consists in the fact that they put themselves before others, not in their going out of their way to deprive others of goods as such. But typical good people are positively benevolent, so we have (1).

Now, given (1), if you fail to avoid a bad side-effect, that makes you be worse than a typical good person. And that calls for significant castigation. But given (2), if you fail to avoid a good side-effect, that doesn’t make you better than a typical bad person. Granted, you could still be praised for being better than a very bad person, but that would be damning with faint praise. So, (1) and (2) neatly predicts the asymmetry in our practices of praise and blame.

But now imagine that we lived in a more polarized society, where typical bad people were actually malevolent rather than selfish. Against that background, it would make sense to praise someone for not avoiding a good effect to another. This is similar to the way that we would not praise a 21st-century upper-class man for refraining from duelling, but we would praise a 19th-century one for the same thing. For the vice of duelling is no longer rampant like it was, and to say that someone never engages in duels is damning with faint praise. Praise is comparative, and comparisons depend on reference class.

Sometimes that reference class is the person’s past and present. And that provides cases where we would praise someone for not striving to avoid good side-effects. If out of hatred someone previously strove to avoid good effects to a particular other, and then stopped such striving, then praise would be in order.

We thus need to be careful in drawing conclusions from praise and blame practices, because these practices depend on statistical facts. If the above is right, the side-effect asymmetry may simply be due to reference class issues rather than any deeper facts about intentions, side-effects and value.

But I think there is probably a further asymmetry between praise and blame. While, as noted, we do not praise people for doing going things most people in the reference class do, we do in fact blame people for doing bad things that most people in the reference class do. While we do not praise our 21st century contemporaries for refraining from dueling, we would have been right to castigate our 19th century contemporaries for that vice. That “everybody is doing it” often makes praise feel nearly completely inappropriate, but it only somewhat decreases the degree of blame rather than eliminating it.

"Should know"

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “x should know that s”. (There is probably a literature on this, but blogging just wouldn’t be as much fun if one had to look up the literature!) We use this phrase—or its disjunctive variant “x knows or should know that s”—very readily, without its calling for much evidence about x.

• “As an engineer Alice should know that more redundancy was needed in this design.”

• “Bob knows or should know that his behavior is unprofessional for a librarian.”

• “Carl should have known that genocide is wrong.”

Here’s a sense of “x should know that s”: x has some relevant role R and it is normal for those in R to know that s under the relevant circumstances. In that sense, to say that x should know that s we don’t need to know anything specific about x’s history or mental state, other than that x has role R. Rather, we need to know about R: it is normal engineering practice to build in sufficient redundancy; librarians have an unwritten code of professional behavior; human beings normally have a moral law written in their hearts.

This role-based sense of “should know” is enough to justify treating x as a poor exemplar of the role R when x does not in fact know that s. When R is a contingent role, like engineer or librarian, it could be a sufficient for drumming x out of R.

But we sometimes seem use a “should know” claim to underwrite moral blame. And the normative story I just gave about “should know” isn’t strong enough for that. Alice might have had a really poor education as an engineer, and couldn’t have known better. If the education was sufficiently poor, we might kick her out of the profession, but we shouldn’t blame her morally.

Carl, of course, is a case apart. Carl’s ignorance makes him a defective human being, not just a defective engineer or librarian. Still a defective human being is not the same as a morally blameworthy human being. And in Carl’s case we can’t drum him out of the relevant role without being able to levy moral blame on him, as drumming him out of humanity is, presumably, capital punishment. However, we can lock him up for the protection of society.

On the other hand, we could take “x should know that s” as saying something about x’s state, like that it is x’s own fault if x doesn’t know. But in that case, I think people often use the phrase without sufficient justification. Yes, it’s normal to know that genocide is wrong. But we live in a fallen world where people can fall very far short of what is normal through no fault of their own, by virtue of physical and mental disease, the intellectual influence of others, and so on.

I worry that in common use the phrase “x should know that s” has two rationally incompatible features:

• Our evidence only fits with the role-based normative reading.

• The conclusions only fit with the personal fault reading.

Two senses of "decide"

Suppose:

1. Alice sacrifices her life to protect her innocent comrades.

2. Bob decides that if he ever has the opportunity to sacrifice his life to protect his innocent comrades, he’ll do it.

We praise Alice. But as for Bob, while we commend his moral judgment, we think that he is not yet in the crucible of character. Bob’s resolve has not yet been tested. And it’s not just that it hasn’t been tested. Alice’s decision not only reveals but also constitutes her as a courageous individual. Bob’s decision falls short both in the revealing but also in the constituting department (it’s not his fault, of course, that the opportunity hasn’t come up).

Now compare Alice and Bob to Carl:

3. Carl knows that tomorrow he’ll have the opportunity to sacrifice his life to protect his innocent comrades, and he decides he will make the sacrifice.

Carl is more like Bob than like Alice. It’s true that Carl’s decision is unconditional while Bob’s is conditional. But even though Carl’s decision is unconditional, it’s not final. Carl knows (at least on the most obvious way of spelling out the story) that he will have another opportunity to decide come tomorrow, just as Bob will still have to make a final decision once the opportunity comes up.

I am not sure how much Bob and Carl actually count as deciding. They are figuring out what would or will (respectively) be the thing to do. They are making a prediction (hypothetical or future-oriented) about their action. They may even be trying by an act of will to form their character so as to determine that they would or will make the sacrifice. But if they know how human beings function, they know that their attempt is very unlikely to be successful: they would or will still have a real choice to make. And in the end it probably wouldn’t surprise us too much if, put to the test, Bob and Carl failed to make the sacrifice.

Alice did something decisive. Bob and Carl have yet to do so. There is an important sense in which only Alice decided to sacrifice her life.

The above were cases of laudable action. But what about the negative side? We could suppose that David steals from his employer; Erin decides that she will steal if she has the opportunity; and Frank knows he’ll have the opportunity to steal and decides he’ll take it.

I think we’ll blame Erin and Frank much more than we’ll praise Bob and Carl (this is an empirical prediction—feel free to test it). But I think that’s wrong. Erin and Frank haven’t yet gone into the relevant crucible of character, just as Bob and Carl haven’t. Bob and Carl may be praiseworthy for their present state; Erin and Frank may be blameworthy for theirs. But the praise and the blame shouldn’t go quite as far as in the case of Alice and David, respectively. (Of course, any one of the six people might for some other reason, say ignorance, fail to be blameworthy or praiseworthy.)

This is closely to connected to my previous post.

Stupidity, triteness and immorality

I suspect that many philosophers would rather have their work be criticized as being morally perverse than as being stupid or merely tritely repeating unoriginal claims from the literature. At least, I find myself with feelings like that. Does this preference expose a deep vice in me?

I am not sure. It may simply be that I trust other philosophers' judgment as to what is stupid or in the literature more than I trust their moral judgment. At least, if the moral perversity criticism came from one of the philosophers whose moral judgment I really trusted, the judgment would worry me a lot more. But I am not sure it would still worry me as much as a judgment of stupidity or unoriginality from someone of comparable epistemic authority.