Forgiving the forgiven

Suppose that Alice wronged Bob, repented, and God forgave Alice for it. Bob, however, withholds his forgiveness. First, it is interesting to ask the conceptual question: What is it that Bob withholds? On my account of objective guilt, when Alice wronged Bob, she gained a normative burden of guilt (minimally, she came to owe it to Bob that she think of herself as guilty), and forgiveness is the removal of that normative burden.

Now in forgiveness, God removed Alice’s normative burden not just to himself, but to Bob. For if God did not remove Alice’s normative burden owed to Bob, then it would be in principle possible that Alice is in heaven—having been forgiven by God—and yet still carries the burden of having wronged Bob. But no one in heaven has a burden.

But if Alice’s normative burden owed to Bob has also been removed by God, and forgiveness is the removal of the burden, then what is it that Bob is withholding?

I think the answer is that there are two parts of forgiveness: there is the removal of the burden of objective guilt and the acknowledgment of the removal of that burden. When God has removed the burden of objective guilt from Alice, all that’s left for Bob to do is to acknowledge this removal.

Note, too, that it would be rather bad for Bob to fail to acknowledge the removal of Alice’s burden, because we should acknowledge what is real and good, and this removal is real and good.

One might think this problem is entirely generated by the idea that God can forgive not just sins against God but also sins against other people. Not so. There seems to be a secular variant of this problem, too. For there seems to be a way in which one’s normative burden of objective guilt of wrongs against fellow humans can be removed without God’s involvement: one can repent of the wrong and suffer an adequate punishment. (Of course, any wrong against neighbor is also a sin against God, and this only removes the guilt with respect to neighbor, unless the punishment is adequate to sin against God, too.) In that case, the burden is presumably removed, but the victim should still acknowledge this removal.

This points to a view of forgiveness on which we ought to forgive those whose normative burden has been removed. If we think that God always forgives the repentant, then this implies that we should always forgive the repentant.

This is close to Aquinas’s view (in his Catechetical Instructions) that we are all required to forgive all those who seek our forgiveness, but it is even better (“perfect” is his phrase) if we forgive even those who do not.

Socrates' harm thesis

Socrates famously held that a wrongdoer harms themselves more than they harm their victim.

This is a correct rule of thumb, but I doubt that it is true in general.

First, Socrates was probably thinking of the harm to self resulting from becoming a vicious person. But one can imagine cases where a wrongdoer does not become any more vicious, because they have already maxed out on the vice. I don’t know if such cases are real, though.

But here is a more realistic kind of case. It is said that often abusers were themselves abused. Thus it seems that by abusing another one may cause them to become an abuser. Suppose Alice physically abuses Bob and thereby causes Bob to become an abuser. Then Alice has produced three primary harms:

1. Bob’s physical suffering

2. Bob’s being an abuser, and

3. Alice’s being an abuser.

It seems, then, that Alice has harmed Bob worse than she has harmed herself. For she has harmed herself by turning herself into an abuser. But she has harmed Bob by both turning Bob into an abuser and making him suffer physically.

Objection 1: If Bob becomes an abuser because he was abused, then his responsibility for being an abuser is somewhat mitigated, and hence the moral harm to Bob is less than the moral harm to Alice.

Response: Maybe. But this objection fails if we further suppose that Alice herself was the victim of similar abuse, which mitigated her responsibility to exactly the same degree as Alice’s abuse of Bob mitigates Bob’s responsibility.

Objection 2: One does not cause another to become vicious: one at worst provides an occasion for them to choose to become vicious.

Response: Whether one causes another to become vicious or not is beside the point. One harms the other by putting them in circumstances where they are likely to be vicious. This is why corrupting the youth is so wicked, and why Jesus talks of millstones in connection with those who make others trip up.

From the normative burden of wrongdoing to the existence of God

In recent posts I’ve been exploring the idea that wrongdoing imposes on us a debt of a normative burden.

This yields this argument:

1. Whenever one does wrong, one comes to have a debt of a normative burden to one who has been wronged.

2. A debt can only be owed to a person.

3. One cannot owe a debt to oneself.

4. Therefore, every wrongdoing includes a wrong to a person.

This has some interesting consequences.

First, it is possible to do wrong to future generations, but one cannot owe anything to the nonexistent. So either eternalism is true, and future generations exist simpliciter, or God exists and we owe a normative burden to God when wrong future generations, or both. So we get the disjunction of eternalism and God’s existence.

Second, we simply get the existence of God. For it is wrong to engage in cruelty to animals even if no human is wronged, other than perhaps oneself. But one cannot be in debt to a non-person or to oneself (debts are the sort of thing one can be released from by the one to whom one owes them; this makes no sense if the creditor is oneself, and impossible if the creditor is a non-person). So the only explanation of whom one can owe the normative burden to is that it’s God, who creates and loves the animals.

If one thinks that it is possible to owe a debt to animals, or one is unconvinced that cruelty to animals is wrong, there is yet another argument for the existence of God. Suppose Alice is the only finite conscious thing in the universe. However, Alice comes across misleading evidence that there are many other finite persons, and that there is a button that, when pressed, will result in excruciating pain to these persons. She then maliciously presses the button. Alice has done wrong, but the only finite conscious thing she can be counted as wronging is herself. She doesn’t owe a normative debt to herself. So she must owe it to something other than a finite conscious being. One cannot owe a debt to anything but a conscious being. So there must be an infinite conscious being, i.e., God.

Forgiveness

If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden. I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the relief?

The burden need not consist of anything emotional or dispositional on your side, such as your harboring resentment or being disposed not to interact with me in as amicable a way as before or pursuing my punishment. For, first, if I secretly betrayed you in such a way that you never found out you were wronged, my burden is still there. And, second, if you die without forgiving me, then the burden feels intact—unless perhaps I believe in life after death or divine forgiveness.

The burden need not consist of something emotional or dispositional on my side, either. For if it had to, I could be relieved of it by therapy. But therapy might make it easier to bear the burden, or (if badly done) may make me think the burden is gone, but the burden will still be there.

People often talk about forgiveness as healing a damaged relationship. But that’s not quite right, either. Suppose I have done many grave wrongs to you over the years that have completely ruptured the relationship. You have finally, generously, brought yourself to forgive me some but not all of them. (A perhaps psychologically odd story: you are working backwards through your life, forgiving all who have wronged you, year by year. So far you’ve forgivenes the wrongs in the last three years of your life. But my earlier wrongs remain.) The remaining ones may be sufficient to make our relationship remain completely ruptured.

The burden is fundamentally a normative feature of reality, as is hinted at by the use of “debt” language in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts as we forgive those indebted to us”). By wronging someone, we make a move in normative space: we burden ourself with an objective, and not merely emotional, guilt. In forgiveness, the burden is removed, but the feeling of burden can remain—one can still feel guilty, just as one’s back can continue hurt when a load is removed from one’s back.

Insofar as there is a healing of a relationship, it is primarily a normative healing. There need not be any great psychological change, as can be seen from the case where you have forgiven me some but not all wrongs. Moreover, psychological change can be slow: forgiveness can be fast, but healing the effects of the wrongdoing can take long.

So far we have identified the type of thing that forgiveness is: it is a move in normative space that relieves something that the wrongdoer owes to a victim. But we are still not clear on what it is that the wrongdoer owes to the victim. And I don’t really know the answer here.

One possibility it is that it has something to do with punishment: I owe it to you to be punished. If so, then there are two ways for the burden to be cleared: one is by being punished and the other is by being forgiven. I can think of one objection to the punishment account: even after being adequately punished, you still can choose whether to forgive me. But if punishment clears the burden, what does your forgiveness do? Maybe it is at this point that the psychological components of forgiveness can enter: it’s up to you whether you stop resenting, whether you accept the clearing of the burden? Plus, in practice, it may be that the punishment is not actually sufficient to clear the burden—a lifetime in jail is not enough for some crimes.

Another possibility is that there is something normative and emotional. I owe it to you to feel guilty, and you can clear that debt and make it no longer obligatory for me to feel that way. That, too, doesn’t seem quite right. One problem is circularity: objective guilt consists in me owing you a feeling of guilt, but a feeling of guilt is a feeling that I am objectively guilty. Maybe the owed feeling has some other description? I don’t know!

But whatever the answer is, I am convinced now that the crucial move in forgiveness is normative.

Harm Principle

Consider this Harm Principle:

1. Without a relevant connection to actual, intended or risked harm, there is no wrongdoing.

Now suppose Carl tortures Bob because he has justified practical certainty that this torture will lead Bob to abandon beliefs that Carl takes to be heretical and thereby cause him to avoid the pains of hell. (How could Carl be justified in such practical certainty? Easy: we can imagine a ton of hallucinatons that evidentially support the claim.) Suppose, further, that Bob’s being tortured in fact transforms Bob’s life in ways quite different from those Carl envisioned. Bob’s own wholesome beliefs are deepened. He abandons his meaningless corporate job and becomes an advocate for the vulnerable, leading a deeply meaningful life. Moreover, were all known about Bob’s character at the time of the torture, this transformation would have been predictable with a very high probability.

It seems Bob is not actually harmed: his life becomes better. And Carl does not intend Bob to be actually harmed. Given Carl’s justified practical certainty that the torture will benefit Carl, Carl does not subjectively risk harm. And given that Bob’s transformation was quite predictable given full knowledge of his character, Carl does not objectively risk harm. So, it seems (1) is false.

There is, however, a natural response to (1): Carl does actually and intentionally harm Bob, just not on balance. The torture is a real harm, even if it results in an overall benefit.

This natural response seems right. Thus, in (1) we should not understand harm as on-balance or all-things-considered harm. The problem with this interpretation of (1), is that (1) becomes trivial in light of this plausible observation:

2. Every significant human action has a relevant connection to some actual or risked harm (perhaps a very minor one).

Is wrongdoing an evil?

In my previous post, I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a privation. It may be that what makes a murder be an evil is a privation—say, the privation of justice in the agent—but the murder itself is not a privation.

But I wonder if one could save the privation theory of evil by severely narrowing the scope of what counts as an evil, so that instances of sin, suffering, error, natural disasters, etc. are not actually evils. Instead, the real evils are what I called “evilmakers” in earlier post. Thus, a murder is not an evil, but the privation of justice in the agent is the evil. An erroneous belief is not an evil, but the evil is its erroneousness, which is a privation of truth.

I don’t think I like this. It departs too far from ordinary language to say that murder or torture aren’t evils, but the privations of justice are. Here is one reason not to like it. Some evils cause direct harm to their victim, and torture is a paradigm example. But when we think of the paradigm harms of torture—namely, intense suffering as well as psychological and psychological damage—then these harms are not caused by the privation of justice. They are caused by the electric shocks, etc. So on the view that it is only the privation of justice that is an evil, the stuff that actually causes most of the suffering isn’t an evil. And while sometimes something can cause suffering without being an evil (e.g., when your well-meaning friend’s advice annoys you), torture doesn’t seem to be a case like that. It’s the torture as a whole that seems to be evil, not simply its injustice. Thus, it seems to me to be truer to say that the injustice is an evilmaker (and evilmakers are also evils), and the torture is an evil.

Forgiveness of sins

It is very plausible that God can forgive wrongs we do to him. But a very difficult question which is rarely discussed by philosophers of religion is how God can forgive wrongs done to beings other than God.

This puzle seems to me to be related to the mystery of the line: “Against you [God], you alone, have I sinned” in Psalm 51:4, a line that seems on its face to contradict the obvious fact that the sins in question (David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah) seem to be primarily against human beings. Perhaps also related is Jesus’s puzzling statement: “No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18).

I think the answer to all of these questions may lie in a metaphysics and axiology of participation on which all the value of creatures is value had by participation in God, so that only God is good in the primary sense and only God is sinned against in the primary sense, which in turn gives God the normative power to forgive all wrongs, including wrongs directly against God as such as well as wrongs against God’s goodness as participated in by creatures.

Scepticism about culpability

I rarely take myself to know that someone is culpable for some particular wrongdoing. There are three main groups of exception:

1. my own wrongdoings, so many of which I know by introspection to be culpable

2. cases where others give me insight into their culpability through their testimony, their expressions of repentance, etc.

3. cases where divine revelation affirms or implies culpability (e.g., Adam and David).

In type 2 cases, I am also not all that confident, because unless I know a lot about the person, I will worry that they are being unfair to themselves.

I am amazed that a number of people have great confidence that various infamous malefactors are culpable for their grave injustices. Maybe they are, but it seems easier to believe in culpability in the case of more minor offenses than greater ones. For the greater the offense, the further the departure from rationality, and hence the more reason there is to worry about something like temporary or permanent insanity or just crazy beliefs.

I don’t doubt that most people culpably do many bad things, and even that most people on some occasion culpably do something really bad. But I am sceptical of my ability to know which of the really bad things people do they are culpable for.

The difficulty with all this is how it intersects with the penal system. Is there maybe a shallower kind of culpability that is easier to determine and that is sufficient for punishment? I don’t know.

Avoiding double counting of culpabilities

Here’s an interesting double-counting problem for wrongdoing. Alice stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in Australia. Bob thinks he stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in New Zealand. Both of them know that it’s wrong to kill rich uncles for their inheritance, but each of them nonetheless hires a hitman with the instruction to kill the rich uncle. Both hitmen run off with the money and do nothing. But Bob in fact has no uncles—he was misinformed.

Here are some plausible observations:

1. Alice culpably committed two wrongs: she violated her conscience and she wronged her uncle by hiring a hitman to kill him.

2. Bob culpably committed only one of these wrongs: he violated his conscience.

3. Bob is just as morally culpable as Alice.

Here is one way to reconcile these observations. We should distinguish between something like moral failings of the will, on the one hand, and wrongdoings, on the other. It is the moral failings of the will that result in culpability. This culpability then will qualify one or more wrongdoings. But the amount of culpability is not accounted by looking at the culpable wrongdoings, but at the moral failings of the will. A being that executes unalloyed perfect justice will look only at these failings of the will. Alice and Bob each morally failed in the same way and to the same degree (as far as the stories go), and so they are equally culpable. But, nonetheless, Alice has two culpable wrongdoings—culpable through the same moral failing of the will, which should not be double counted for purposes of just punishment.

Badness and deontological prohibitions

The following form of argument has some initial plausibility:

1. Ordinarily, action type A is no better than action type B.

2. So, if there is no deontological prohibition against A, there is no deontological prohibition against B.

But here’s an interesting fact. One can have pairs of action types A and B such that:

3. under ordinary circumstances, A is worse than B, but

4. there is a deontological prohibition against B but not against A.

For instance, let A be a train engineer’s choosing not to brake a slow moving train ahead of a section of track on which there are ten innocents tied up. Let B be the train engineer’s shooting one innocent dead (knowingly, without divine permission, etc.).

Under ordinary circumstances, A is worse than B. But if Alice reliably informs the train engineer that she will murder fifty people if the engineer brakes, the engineer is permitted (and probably obligated) to refrain from braking. Hence there is no deontological prohibition against A. But if Alice informs the train engineer that she will murder fifty people if the engineer refuses to shoot the innocent, the engineer must still still refuse. There is a deontological prohibition against B.

So, while there is some correlation between ordinary worseness and deontological prohibition, that correlation has exceptions.

Wronger and wronging

Here’s an interesting thing. An act doesn’t necessarily become any more wrong for wronging someone.

Alice and Bob respectively come across a derelict spaceship. Their sensors show that there is intelligent life aboard. Each blasts the respective spaceship as target practice. Bob’s sensors malfunctioned: there was no intelligent life on the ship he blasted. Alice’s sensors were just fine. Alice wronged the people she killed. Bob wronged no one, as there was no one there to be wronged. But what Bob did was no less wrong than what Alice did.

Note 1: Bob’s case differs from standard cases of attempted murder. For in standard cases of attempted murder, the intended victim is wronged.

Note 2: I am not claiming that Bob wrongs no one. Bob wrongs both God and himself. But Alice also wrongs God and herself, just as much as Bob does, and additionally wrongs the people she kills. That additional wronging doesn’t make her act wronger, though.

Note 3: One might argue that Bob and Alice wrong all the people who have the property that they might (epistemically? alethically?) have been on the ship. Sure, but what if there are no such people in Bob's case? Perhaps Bob, unbeknownst to himself, is alone in his universe.

Attempts at wrongdoing

It is a common intuition, especially among Christians, that attempts at immoral actions—say, attempted murder or attempted adultery—are just as bad as the completion of the actions.

But in practice the situation is rather more complicated. Suppose Samantha is about to murder Fred. She is sitting on the rooftop with her rifle, has measured the windspeed, has made the corrections to her sights, is putting Fred in her cross-hairs and is getting ready to squeeze the trigger at an opportune moment. Then suddenly a police officer comes up and grabs Samantha’s rifle before she can do anything.

Samantha has performed actions whose end was Fred’s death. She is an attempted murderer. But I think there is an immoral act that she has been saved from. For imagine three versions of how the story could end:

1. The police officer comes up and grabs her rifle at time t₁ before she squeezes the trigger.

2. At time t₁, Samantha decides not to squeeze the trigger and not commit the murder.

3. At time t₁, Samantha decides to squeeze the trigger.

In all three cases, by the time of t₁, Samantha is already an attempted murderer. But in version 2, Samantha has done at least one less bad thing than in version 3. As of t₁, Samantha still has a decision to make: to go through with the action or not. In case 3, she decides that wrongly. In case 2, she decides that rightly.

In case 1, the police officer prevents her from making that decision. It seems clear that Samantha’s moral state in case 1 is less bad in than in case 3. For in case 3, Samantha makes a morally wrong decision that has no parallel in case 1. So the police officer has not only saved Fred’s life, but he has decreased the number of wrongs done by Samantha.

Of course, timing and details matter here. Suppose that the police officer grabs Samantha’s rifle at a moment when the bullet is already traveling through the barrel, making the shot go wide. Then Samantha is an attempted murderer, but the amount of wickedness on her conscience is the same as in case 3.

So there is a moral distinction to be made between Samantha in cases 1 and 3, but the distinction isn’t the distinction between attempt and success. Rather, the issue is that a typical wrong action involves multiple acts of will, many of which may well come with the possibility of stopping. Each time one does not will to stop, while being capable of willing to stop, one does another wrong. If one is prevented from completion of the act after the last of these acts of will, then one is not better off in terms of one’s moral guilt state. (Though one is better off in terms of how much restitution one owes and similar considerations.) But if one is stopped earlier, then one is better off.

This means that counting counts of sin is tricky. Suppose Fred had decided on committing adultery with Samantha’s sister Patricia. He texted Patricia offering to meet with her in a hotel room. He is already an attempted adulterer. But then he makes a number of decisions each of which could be a stopping point. He decides to get in his car. To drive to the hotel. To enter the room. Etc. At each of these points, Fred could have stopped, I assume. But at each point he chose adultery instead. So by the time he is in the room, he has committed adultery in his will many times.

But when we count wrongs, we don’t count like that. We count the number of murders, the number of adulteries or the number of thefts—not the number of times that one could have stopped along the way. We act as if the person who murdered five is worse than the person who murdered one, even if the person who murdered the one had to drive ten times as far.

Maybe the reason we count as we do is just a pragmatic matter. We don’t know just how many times one’s will is capable of stopping one, and how much a person just acts on auto-pilot, having set a course of action.

Or maybe the responsibility for the choose-not-to-stop decisions is much lower than for the initial decision?

I don’t know.

Dignitary harms and wickedness

Torturing someone is gravely wrong because it causes grave harm to the victim, and the wickedness evinced in the act is typically proportional to the harm (as well as depending on many other factors).

But there are some wrongdoings which are wicked to a degree disproportionate to the harm. In fact, torture can be such a case. Suppose that Alice is caught by an evildoer who in a week will torture Alice by one second for every person who requests this by email. About a hundred thousand people make requests, and Alice gets over a day of torture. Each requester’s harm to Alice is real but may be quite small. But each requester’s deed is very wicked, disproportionately to the harm. The case is similar to a conspiracy where each conspirator contributes only a small amount of torment but collectively the conspirators cause great torture—the law would be just in holding all the conspirators guilty of the whole torture.

Here’s another way to see the disproportion. Suppose that someone is deciding whether to request torture for Alice or to steal $100 from her. Alice might actually self-interestedly prefer an extra second of torture to having $100 stolen. Nonetheless, requesting the torture seems much more wicked than stealing $100 from Alice (unless Alice is destitute).

Similarly, the evildoer could kill Alice with probability 1 − (1/2)ⁿ where n is the number of requesters. Given sad facts about humanity, everyone might know that the probability that Alice will die is going to be nearly certain, and no one requester makes any significant difference to that probability. So the harm to Alice from any one requester is pretty small, but the wickedness of making the request is great.

Another case. It is wicked to fantasize about torturing someone. And to be thought of badly is indeed a kind of harm. But if one can be sure that that the fantasy stays in the mind—think, maybe, of the sad case of a dying woman who spends her last twenty minutes fantasizing about torturing Bob—one might self-interestedly prefer the fantasy to, say, a theft of $100. Hence, the harm is relatively small. Yet the wickedness in fantasizing about torture is great, in disproportion to the harm.

Yet another case. Suppose that with science-fictional technology, someone destroys my heart, while at the same time beaming into my chest a pump of titanium that is in every respect better functioning than my natural heart. I think I have been harmed in one respect: a bodily function, that of pumping blood by my heart, is no longer being fulfilled. But blood is still being pumped, and better. So overall, I may not be harmed. (I may even be benefited.) Yet it seems that to destroy someone’s heart is to do them a grave harm. I am least confident about this case. (I am confident that the deed is wrong, but not of how wrong it is.)

In all these cases, there is a dignitary harm to the victim. And even if it is self-interestedly rational for the victim to prefer this dignitary harm to a modest monetary harm, imposing the dignitary harm is much more wicked. This is puzzling.

Solution 1: Imposing the dignitary harm causes much greater harm to the wrongdoer, and that’s what makes it so much more wicked.

But that seems to get wrong who the victim is.

Solution 2: Alice and Bob are mistaken in preferring not to be robbed of $100. The dignitary harm in fact is much, much worse.

Maybe. But I am not sure. Is it really much, much worse to have ten thousand people request one’s death rather than five thousand? It seems that dignitary harm drops off with the numbers, too, and each individual harmer’s anti-dignitary contribution is small.

Solution 4: Wrongdoings are not a function of harm, but of irrationality (Kant).

I fear, though, that this has the same problem of dislocating the victim from the center of the wrong, just as Solution 1 did.

Solution 3: Dignitary harms to people additionally harm God’s extended well-being, by imposing an indignity on the imago Dei that each human being constitutes. Dignitary harms to people are dignitary harms to God, but they are either much greater when they are done to God (because God’s dignity is so much greater?) or else they are much more unjust when they are done to God (because God deserves our love so much more?).

Like Solution 1, this may seem to get wrong who the victim is. But if we see the imago Dei as something intrinsic to the person (as it will be in the case of a Thomistic theology on which all our positive properties are participations in God) rather than as an external feature, this worry is, I think, alleviated.

I am not extremely happy with Solution 4, either, but it seems like it might be the best on offer.

Actions that are gravely wrong for qualitative reasons

Some types of wrongdoing vary in degree of seriousness from minor to grave. Stealing a dollar from a billionaire is trivially wrong while stealing a thousand dollars from someone poor is gravely wrong. A poke in the back with a finger and breaking someone’s leg with a carefully executed kick can both be instances of battery, but the former is likely to be a minor wrong while the latter is apt to be grave.

On the other hand, there are types of wrongdoing that are always grave. An uninteresting (for my purposes) case is where the gravity is guaranteed because the description of wrongdoing includes a grave-making quantitative feature as in the case of “grand theft” or “grevious bodily harm”. The more interesting case is where for qualitative reasons the wrongdoing is always grave. For instance, murder and rape. There are no trivial murders or minor rapes.

Of course, even if a type of act is always seriously wrong, the degree of culpability might be slight, say due to lack of freedom or invincible ignorance. Think of someone brainwashed into murder, but who still has a slight sense of moral discomfort—although her action is gravely wrong, she may be only slightly culpable. My interest right now, however, is in the degree of wrongness rather than of culpability.

We can now distinguish types of wrongdoing that are always grave for qualitative reasons from those that are always grave merely for quantitative reasons. Here is a fairly precise characterization: if W is a type of wrongdoing that is always grave for qualitative reasons, then there is no sequence of acts, starting with a case of W, and with merely quantitative differences between the acts, such that the sequence ends with an act that isn’t grave. Grand theft and grevious bodily harm are examples of types of wrongdoings that are always grave merely for quantitative reasons.

On the other hand, it is intuitively plausible that murder and rape are not gravely wrong for merely quantitative reasons. If this intuition is correct, then we get some very interesting substantive consequences. In the case of rape, I’ve explored some relevant issues in a past post, so I want to focus on murder here.

The first consequence of taking murder to be always gravely wrong for qualitative reasons is that there is no continuous scale of mental abilities (whether of first or second potentiality) that takes us from people to lower animals. An unjustified killing of a lower animal is only a minor wrong (take this to constrain what “lower” means). If there were a continuous scale of mental abilities from people to lower animals, then murder would be gravely wrong only for quantitative reasons: because the victim’s mental abilities lie on such-and-such a position on the scale. So once we admit that murder is gravely wrong for qualitative reasons, we have to suppose a qualitative gap in the spectrum of mental abilities. This probably requires the rejection of naturalism.

A second consequence is that if killing a consenting adult in normal health is murder—which it is—then euthanasia is gravely wrong. For variation in health and comfort is merely quantitative, and one cannot go from a case of murder to something that isn’t gravely wrong by merely quantitative variation, since murder is always gravely wrong for qualitative reasons.

I suspect there are a number of other very interesting consequences of taking murder to be gravely wrong for qualitative reasons. I think these consequences will motivate some people to give up on the claim that murder is gravely wrong for qualitative reasons. But I think we should hold on to that claim and accept the consequences.

Two ways of acting wrongly through ignorance

Case 1: Petr shoots and kills Anna while hiking, thinking that Anna is a dangerous bear (she was wearing a fur coat).

Case 2: Ivan the NKVD agent shoots and kills Natasha for speaking out against the state, thinking it is right to kill dissidents.

Both Petr and Ivan acted in ignorance. If their ignorance was inculpable, then they might well be inculpable for their respective killings. However, even if neither is culpable, it seems that Ivan is now a murderer while Petr is an accidental killer.

Wherein lies the difference? Both killed someone who shouldn't have been killed. Both did something that would have been a case of culpable murder if they killed while knowing all the relevant facts.

One difference is this. Petr acts under this description: "Killing something that appears to be a dangerous bear" or maybe even: "Killing a dangerous bear." Ivan acts under this description: "Killing someone who spoke out against the state." The description that Petr acts on is a description that it is permissible to act on (regardless of the version we choose). The description that Ivan acts on is a description that it is always impermissible to act on. Both Petr and Ivan have deficient knowledge. But Petr's intention is acceptable while Ivan's is corrupt.

I am somewhat inclined to go even further. Of the two, Petr did nothing morally wrong. Ivan, however, acted wrongly, albeit perhaps inculpably. This works best if we take Petr's intention to be "Kill a dangerous bear." In that case, we can say that Petr's action was a permissible attempt to kill a dangerous bear. But Petr's action was unsuccessful. On the other hand, it seems that Ivan's intention to kill a dissident made his action impermissible but successful.

Maybe. But what if Ivan's intention was this: "Permissibly kill Natasha for being a dissident"? In that case, Ivan failed, too, since his killing wasn't permissible. But now it seems we have a close parallel between Petr and Ivan. Petr failed to fulfill his intention to kill a dangerous bear. Ivan failed to fulfill his intention to permissibly kill Natasha. Can't we, in fact, say that just Petr accidentally killed a human, Ivan accidentally killed someone that it was impermissible to kill? So can we really say that Ivan was a murderer but Petr wasn't?

I don't know. There is, nonetheless, this difference. The intention "Kill a dangerous bear" is one that it is possible to succeed at. The intention "Permissibly kill Natasha for being a dissident" is one that it is not possible to succeed at. (Admittedly, there may be cases where it's permissible to kill a dissident. But even in those cases, it's not permissible to kill the dissident for being a dissident. Rather, the cases of permissibility are ones where there is some reason for the killing over and beyond the dissident's dissidence.) But while this is a significant difference, it doesn't seem to be a morally significant difference. After all, just as "Permissibly kill Natasha for being a dissident" is impossible to succeed at, so too "Find a counterexample to Fermat's Last Theorem" is impossible to succeed at. However, there is nothing morally wrong with someone who tries to find a counterexample to Fermat's Last Theorem in ignorance of the impossibility.

Wrongness due to self-harm

It is tempting to use harm to self as an explanation for the wrongness of various things. Kant infamously did this in trying to explain why it's wrong to be cruel to animals, namely because it dehumanizes us. And two commenters did so when I argued from the wrongness of attempted murder, in a case where the intended victim doesn't exist, to the existence of a necessary being.

Now, I agree with Socrates that every wrong action harms the agent. And I even think that sometimes the harm to self is the primary reason why an action is wrong--for instance, harm to self is the primary reason why it's wrong to use heroin. But in both the attempted murder case and Kant's case, the invocation of self-harm fails. Let's see why.

Normally when I do wrong, two main harms result to me:

1. The action constitutes me as a wrongdoer, makes me be guilty.
2. I develop morally bad habits.

(There are also further harms in many cases: other people's opinion of me is liable to go down, I may become liable to punishment in this life or thereafter, etc.)

Let's now think about the two main harms. To say that an action is wrong because it constitutes me as a wrongdoer, makes me be guilty, at best simply shifts the burden of explanation into the equally difficult question of why this action constitutes me as a wrongdoer (why does kicking a dog make one a wrongdoer while feeding it does not?). But actually it's even worse than that: it simply gets things the wrong way around, since an action constitutes me as a wrongdoer because it is wrong. So (1) won't be the explanation of the wrongness of the action. Though of course it is true that wrong actions constitute me as a wrongdoer, and I guess that multiplies the amount of wrong in any wrong action.

On the other hand, the second harm, that of developing morally bad habits, is a merely contingent matter. It would be wrong to be cruel to an animal or attempt murder even in the last moment of one's existence, when no bad habit were developed. Further, cruelty and attempted murder are wrong even if one's character is already so calloused that the action does not make it any worse. We can even imagine outlandish cases where cruelty and attempted murder end up improving one's character, say because a renowned neurosurgeon credibly promises to eradicate all one's tendencies to cruelty as soon as one kicks her neighbor's cat.

How can I knowingly and freely do wrong?

I accept the following two claims:

1. Every free action is done for a reason.
2. If an action is obligatory, then I have on balance reason to do it.

Consider cases where I know that an action is obligatory, but I don't do it. How could that be? Well, one option is that I don't realize that obligatory actions are ones I have on balance reason to do. Put that case aside: I do know it sometimes when I do wrong. So I know that I have on balance reason to do an action, but I refrain from it. But then how could I have a reason for my refraining? And without a reason, my action wouldn't be free.

It strikes me that this version of the problem of akrasia may not be particularly difficult. There is no deep puzzle about how someone might choose a game of chess over a jog for a reason. A jog is healthier but a game of chess is more intellectually challenging, and one might choose the game of chess because it is more intellectually challenging. In other words, there is a respect in which the game of chess is better than the jog, and when one freely chooses the game of chess, one does so on the basis of some such respect. The jog, of course, also has something going for it: it is healthier, and one can freely choose it because it is better in respect of health.

Now, suppose that the choice is between playing a game of chess and keeping one's promise to visit a sick friend. Suppose the game of chess is more pleasant and intellectually challenging than visiting the sick friend. One can freely choose the game of chess because there are respects in which it is better than visiting the friend. There are, of course, respects in which the game of chess is worse: it is a breaking of a promise and a neglecting of a sick friend. But that there are respects in which visiting the sick friend is better does not make there be no reason to play chess instead, since there are respects in which the chess game is better.

But isn't visiting the sick friend on balance better? Certainly! But being on balance better is just another respect in which visiting the sick friend is better. It is still in some other respects better to play the game of chess. If one freely chooses to play the game of chess, then one chooses to do so on account of those other respects. That one option is on balance better is compatible with the other option being in some respects better. It is no more mysterious how one can act despite the knowledge that another option is on balance better than how one can act despite the knowledge that another option is more pleasant. The difference is that when one chooses against an action that one takes to be on balance better, one may incur a culpability that one does not incur when one chooses against an action that is merely more pleasant, but the incurring of that culpability is just another reason not to do the action.

But isn't it decisive if an action is on balance better? Isn't it irrational to go against such a decisive reading? Well, one can understand a decisive reason in three ways: (a) a reason that in fact decides one; (b) a reason that cannot but decide one; and (c) a reason that rationality requires one to go with. That an action is on balance better need not be what decides you, even if in fact you do the on balance better action. Now, granted, rationality requires one to go with an on balance better action. But that rationality requires something does not imply you will do it.

But if you don't, aren't you irrational, and hence not responsible? Well, if by irrational one means lack of responsiveness to reasons, then that would indeed imply lack of responsibility, but that is not one's state when one chooses to do the wrong thing for a reason. It need not even be true that one is not responsive to what is on balance better. For to be responsive to a reason does not require that one act on that reason. The person who chooses the chess game over the jog is likely quite responsive to reasons of health. If she were not responsive to reasons of health, it might not be a choice but a shoo-in. Likewise, the person who chooses against what is on balance better is responsive to what is on balance better, but goes against it.

Now, of course, the person who knowingly does what she knows she on balance has reason not to do, does not respond to the reason in the way that she should. In that sense, she is irrational. But that sense of irrationality is quite compatible with responsibility.

Is all immoral action a violation of a duty to someone?

Each of the following propositions is controversial:

1. It is possible to act wrongly without wronging any person.
2. It is possible to wrong oneself.
3. There is a necessarily existing person.

I think (2) and (3) are true. I deny (1), because I think that every wrongdoing wrongs oneself and God.

I shall argue that at least one of (1)-(3) is true. I think the disjunction of (1)-(3) is also controversial, so this result has some interest, I suppose.

The argument for the disjunction of (1)-(3) is based on the following premises:

4. If there are no necessarily existing persons, then it is possible that there is only one person in existence and she acts wrongly.
5. It is not possible to wrong a non-existent person.

Given (4) and (5), the argument is easy. For a reductio, assume that none of (1), (2) and (3) are true. Since (3) is false, it follows from (4) that there is a world w at which is there is only one person in existence and she acts wrongly. By (5) she does not wrong anyone except perhaps herself. But by (1) and (2), she wrongs someone other than herself in w.

I think (5) is very plausible, but (4) needs argument. The argument depends on a simple case. If there are no necessarily existing persons, it is possible that there be only one person in existence and that she be imperfect. (One might think that necessarily if there are imperfect persons, there is a perfect person, but that is only plausible if necessarily there is a perfect person.) Suppose Sally is the one person in existence and she knows that torture of the innocent is wrong and justifiably but falsely believes that by pressing a button she would be torturing an innocent other. She presses the button in order to torture that innocent other for fun. In so doing, she acts against her conscious and clearly does wrong.

Suppose one bites the bullet and says that Sally doesn't do anything wrong. Then by the same token, if I shoot at a distant shape falsely believing it to be the present king of France, but in fact it's just a rosebush, I do not wrong. And that's absurd.

Perhaps, though, (5) can be denied, and it can be insisted that a merely possible person is wronged by Sally. But, still, which possible person is wronged in the Sally scenario? The only at all plausible answer I can think of is: every possible person who could possibly satisfy the description under which Sally intends to torture is wronged. But suppose that Sally also justifiably but falsely believes that humans are reptiles, and she intends to torture an innocent human reptile. Then there is no possible person who fits her description. And the idea that one can wrong impossible persons seems really weird. Certainly it seems more problematic than the disjunction of (1)-(3).

Or maybe instead of wronging possible persons, one can wrong fictional persons. But then writers are in grave moral danger! It seems, for instance, much preferable to suppose one can wrong oneself than to suppose that one can wrong a fictional person.

Guilt

One of the interesting questions about Christian moral philosophy is how moral life differs if Christianity is correct from how it would be if atheism is correct. Here is one difference. When I have culpably done wrong, I become guilty of the wrongdoing. The state of guilt is a bad state to be in. (It is good, however, if in addition to being guilty, I feel guilt.) If Christianity is right, then every state of guilt in this life has a potential cure through divine forgiveness. If atheism is right, however, then there will be incurable states of guilt.

There are two plausible ways of guilt being relieved. One of them is making sufficient restitution/satisfaction—as it were entirely undoing the badness of what one had done (I actually don't know if this really removes guilt—I think forgiveness may still be needed—but I don't need this for the argument). The other is accepting or maybe just receiving (it's a really interesting question which) forgiveness. But not just anyone can forgive a wrongdoing—the right person or persons must offer forgiveness. The most obvious thing to say here is that it is only those against whom the wrongdoing was done that can offer forgiveness.

If Christianity is right, every wrongdoing is also a wrongdoing against God. One can then argue that God has the authority to forgive the wrongdoing on behalf of all the aggrieved parties, say because all of the goods of all the aggrieved parties come from God, or because the aggrieved parties' very possibility of being better or worse off is a participation in God, or some such story. If this is true, then every wrongdoing can be forgiven by God, in a way that removes guilt. The defense of an exact account here needs more work, but it is clearly true that if Christianity is right, then forgiveness is possible.

But if atheism is right, then there will be wrongdoings which the wrongdoer cannot make sufficient restitution/satisfaction, whether due to the kind of wrongdoing (e.g., murder or rape), or due to the wrongdoer's lack of power (e.g., stealing money, then gambling it away, and then being unable ever to earn it back). Moreover, some wrongdoings of this sort will be such that it will be impossible to obtain forgiveness for them because the wrongdoings are against non-persons (e.g., wanton environmental damage, torture of non-human animals, etc.) or because for some other reason one or more of the victims are incapable of offering forgiveness (this will be the case if the victim is dead—by the wrongdoer's hand or not—or in a coma or the like). One might think that society as a whole can offer forgiveness on behalf of all victims. But that is implausible. First of all, a society plainly cannot offer forgiveness to someone whose crime was not against a member of that society. If Maxine wipes out an enemy tribe, forgiveness from a member of her own tribe will do nothing to remove her guilt. Likewise, society cannot offer forgiveness for the bulk of the wrong of torturing non-human animals (one might think society can forgive one for the parts of the wrong that consist of brutalizing society, or harming the animal's human friends or owners, but those are not the main wrong). Secondly, while one can argue that all wrongdoings are in a primary sense against God ("Against You, You alone, have I sinned," the Psalm has David praying) who is the first and final cause, and hence God's forgiveness suffices to remove guilt, many wrongdoings are clearly only secondarily wrongdoings against society.

This is not an argument against atheism or for Christianity. It is merely an observation of an important difference between the two. My feeling is that non-religious moral thought, however, mitigates the difference by not taking guilt to be as significant as Christianity takes it. But that mitigation is mistaken.