Pressuring people to violate conscience

If you pressure someone to act against their deeply-set moral beliefs, then your pressure is an action which, if successful, results in:

1. the person’s changing their deeply-set moral beliefs, or

2. the person’s acting against their deeply-set moral beliefs.

Our experience of life shows that (2) is rather more likely than (1). People rarely change their deeply-set moral beliefs, but they act against them all too frequently.

But it is wrong to act against one’s moral beliefs. Moreover, acting against one’s moral beliefs is more likely to be culpable than other wrongdoings. For in other wrongdoings, there is always the possibility of being inculpable due to ignorance. But when one acts against one’s moral beliefs, that excuse isn’t available. There is still the possibility that one is insane or that fear of the pressure has taken away one’s free will, but it seems very plausible that most of the time when someone acts against their deeply-set moral beliefs, they are culpable.

Thus, if you pressure someone to act against their deeply-set moral beliefs, there is a very significant chance—bigger than 25%, it is reasonable to estimate—that if you succeed, you will do so by having gotten them to act culpably wrongly. But we should have learned from Socrates that there is nothing worse in life than culpable wrongdoing. Thus the pressure risks a greater than 25% chance of imposing a harm worse than death on the person being pressured.

There are times when it is permissible to impose on someone a 25% risk of death, but that requires very grave reasons indeed, and one should go to great lengths to avoid such an imposition if at all possible. One requires even graver reasons to pressure someone to go against their deeply-set moral beliefs, and one should go to greater lengths to avoid such an imposition.

Remark 1: Here is a kind of a case where it is easier to justify pressure. The harm in violating a mistaken conscience is two-fold: (i) doing wrong, and (ii) culpably so. But now suppose that in fact the person is objectively morally obligated to perform the action they are being pressured to. In fact, let’s suppose the following: the person has a particularly grave objective obligation to ϕ, but they mistakenly believe they have a mild or moderate obligation not to ϕ. Then we may imagine that if they ϕ, they culpably violate a moderate moral obligation, but if they refuse to ϕ, they inculpably violate a grave moral obligation. Which is better? Is it more destructive of one’s moral character to inculpably violate a grave obligation or to culpably violate a moderate one? This is not clear. So in a case like that, pressure is a lot easier to justify.

Conversely, where pressure is hardest to justify is where there is no objective moral duty for the person to perform the action they are being pressured to.

Remark 2: Does it make any difference whether the deeply-set moral beliefs are religious in nature or not? My initial thought is that it does not. In both cases, we have the grave harm of being pressured to wrongdoing, and likely culpable wrongdoing. But on reflection, there can be a difference. Our lives as persons revolve around significant interpersonal relationships. Damaging the deepest relationships between persons requires extremely strong justification. That is why, for instance, we do not (with some exceptions) require spouses to testify against each other in court. But in the fact the deepest relationship in a person’s life is their relationship with God. And to go not only against morality but against what one takes to be the will of God imposes particularly nasty damage on that relationship. Thus when the person cognizes the action they are being pressured to take as not only wrong but contrary to the will of God, the harm that befalls them in doing the action is especially grave. Note that for this harm, it is not necessary that the action be contrary to the will of God—it is enough that the agent believes that it is.

I mean the argument in the previous paragraph to depend on the fact that the person really is in a relationship with God, and in particular that God really exists. I am not talking of the merely subjective harm of thinking that an imaginary relationship is harmed. The extent to which that argument can be extended to people whose religion is non-theistic takes thought. One might hope that these people are still having a relationship with God in and through their religion, and then a version of the point may well apply.

Socrates and thinking for yourself

There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves. I was just re-reading the Euthyphro, and realizing that the popular picture is severely incomplete.

Recall the setting. Euthyphro is prosecuting a murder case against his father. The case is fraught with complexity and which a typical Greek would think should not be brought for multiple reasons, the main one being that the accused is the prosecutor’s father and we have very strong duties towards parents, and a secondary one being that the killing was unintentional and by neglect. Socrates then says:

most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom. (4b)

We learn in the rest of the dialogue that Euthyphro is pompous, full of himself, needs simple distinctions to be explained, and, to understate the point, is far from “advanced in wisdom”. And he thinks for himself, doing that which the ordinary Greek thinks to be a quite bad idea.

The message we get seems to be that you should abide by cultural norms, unless you are “far advanced in wisdom”. And when we add the critiques of cultural elites and ordinary competent craftsmen from the Apology, we see that almost no one is “advanced in wisdom”. The consequence is that we should not depart significantly from cultural norms.

This reading fits well with the general message we get about the poets: they don’t know how to live well, but they have some kind of a connection with the gods, so presumably we should live by their message. Perhaps there is an exception for those sufficiently wise to figure things out for themselves, but those are extremely rare, while those who think themselves wise are extremely common. There is a great risk in significantly departing from the cultural norms enshrined in the poets—for one is much more likely to be one of those who think themselves wise than one of those who are genuinely wise.

I am not endorsing this kind of complacency. For one, those of us who are religious have two rich sets of cultural norms to draw on, a secular set and a religious one, and in our present Western setting the two tend to have sufficient disagreement that complacency is not possible—one must make a choice in many cases. And then there is grace.

Respecting conscience

One of the central insights of Western philosophy, beginning with Socrates, has been that few if any things are as bad for an individual as culpably doing wrong. It is better, we are told through much of the Western philosophical tradition, that it is better to suffer than do injustice.

Now, acting against one’s conscience is always wrong, and is almost always culpably wrong. For the most common case when doing something wrong isn’t culpable is that one is ignorant of the wrongness, but when one acts against one’s conscience one surely isn’t ignorant that one is acting against conscience, and that we ought follow our conscience is obvious.

That said, I think a qualification is plausible. Some wrongdoings are minor, and in those cases the harm to the wrongdoer may be minor as well. But in any case, to get someone to act against their conscience in a matter that according to their conscience is major is to do them grave harm, a harm not that different from death.

Now, the state, just like individuals, should ceteris paribus avoid causing grave harm. Hence, the state should generally avoid getting people to do things that violate their conscience in major matters.

The difficult case, however, is when people’s consciences are mistaken to such a degree that conscience requires them to do something that unjustly harms others. (A less problematic mistake is when conscience is mistaken to such a degree that conscience requires them to do something that’s permissible, but not wrong. In those cases, tolerance is clearly called for. We shouldn’t pressure vegetarians to eat animals even if their conscientious objection to eating animals happens to be mistaken.)

One might think that what I said earlier implies that in this difficult case the state should always allow people to follow their conscience, because after all it is worse to do wrong—and violating conscience is wrong—than to have wrong done to one. But that would be absurd and horrible—think of a racist murderer whose faulty conscience requires them to kill.

A number of considerations, however, keep one from reaching this absurd conclusion.

1. The harm of violating one’s conscience only happens to one if one willingly violates one’s conscience. If law enforcement physically prevents me from doing something that conscience requires from me, then I haven’t suffered the harm. Thus, interestingly, the consideration I sketched against violating one’s conscience does not apply when one is literally forced (fear of punishment, unless it is severe enough to suspend one’s freedom of will, does not actually force, but only incentives).

2. In cases where doing wrong and suffering wrong are of roughly the same order of magnitude, it is very intuitive that we should prevent the suffering of wrong rather than the doing of wrong. Imagine that Alice is drowning while at the same time Bob is getting ready to assassinate a politician, but we know for sure that Bob’s bullets have all been replaced with blanks. If our choice is whether to try to dissuade Bob from attempting murder or keep Alice from drowning, we should keep Alice from drowning, evne if on the Socratic view the harm to Bob from attempting murder will be greater than that to Alice from drowning. (I am assuming that in this case the two harms are nonetheless of something like the same order of magnitude.)

3. A reasonable optimism says that in most cases most people’s consciences are correct. Thus typically we would expect that most violators of a legitimate law will not be acting out of conscience—for a necessarily condition for the legitimacy of a law is that it does not conflict with a correct conscience. Thus, even if there is the rare murderer acting from mistaken conscience, most murderers act against conscience, and by incentivizing abstention from murder, in most cases the law helps people follow their conscience, and the small number of other cases can be tolerated as a side effect. Thus the considerations of conscience favor intolerant laws in such cases. Nonetheless, there are cases where most violators of a law would likely be acting from conscience. Thus, if we had a law requiring eating meat, we would expect that most of the violators would be conscientious. Similarly, a law against something—say, the wearing of certain clothes or symbols—that is rarely done except as a religious practice would likely be a law most violators of which would be conscientious.

4. When someone’s conscience mistakenly requires something that violates an objective moral rule, there is a two-fold benefit to that person from a law incentivizing following the moral rule. The law is a teacher, and the state’s disapproval may change one’s mind about the matter. And even if it a harm to one to violate conscience, it is also a harm to one to do something wrong even inculpably. Thus, the harm of violating conscience is somewhat offset by the benefit from not doing something else that is wrong.

5. In some cases the person of mistaken conscience will still do the wrong deed despite the law’s contrary incentive. In such a case, both the perpetrator and the victim may be slightly better off for the law. The victim has a dignitary benefit from the very fact that the state says that the harm was unlawful. That dignitary benefit may be a cold comfort if the victim suffered a grave harm, but it is still a benefit. And the perpetrator is slightly better off, because following one’s conscience against external pressure has an element of admirability even when the conscience is mistaken.

Nonetheless, there will be cases where these considerations do not suffice, and the law should be tolerant of mistaken conscience.

In a just defensive war, to refuse to fight to defend one’s fellow citizens without special reason (perhaps priests and doctors should not kill) is wrong. But a grave harm is done to a conscientious objector who is gotten to fight by legal incentives. Let’s think through the five considerations above. The first mainly applies to laws prohibiting a behavior rather than ones requiring a behavior. Short of brainwashing, it is impossible to make someone fight. (We could superglue their hands to a gun, and then administer electric shocks causing their fingers to spasm and fire a bullet, but that wouldn’t count as fighting.) The second applies somewhat: we do need to weigh the harms to innocent citizens from enemy invaders, harms that might be prevented if our conscientious objector fought. But note that there is something rather speculative about these harms. Someone who fights contrary to conscience is unlikely to be a very effective fighter, and it is far from clear that their military activity would actually prevent any actual harm to innocents. Now, regarding the third consideration, one can design a conscription law with an exemption that few who aren’t conscientious objectors would take advantage of. One way to do this is to require evidence of one’s conscience’s objection to fighting (e.g., prior membership in a pacifist organization). Another way is to impose non-combat duties on conscientious objectors that are as onerous and maybe as dangerous as combat would be. Regarding the fourth consideration, it seems unlikely that a typical conscientious objector’s objections to war would be changed by legal penalties. And the fifth seems a weak consideration in general. Putting all these together, we do not outweigh the prima facie considerations against pressuring conscientious objectors to act against their (mistaken) conscience from the harms in going against conscience.

Divine hiddenness and divine command ethics

Once upon a time, there was an isolated village in the mountains. It had a large electronic billboard. Every so often, unsigned demands appeared on the billboard. Most of these demands seemed reasonable, and the villagers find themselves with an ingrained feeling that they should do what the billboard says, and typically they do so, often deferring to the billboard even when the reasonableness of its demands is less clear. There were two main theories about the billboard. Some villagers said that thousands of miles away there was an authoritative and benevolent monarch who had cameras and microphones hidden around the village, and who issued commands via the billboard. Others said that there was no monarch, but centuries ago, as a science fair project, a clever teenager wrote a machine learning program that offered good advice for the village—a program that wasn’t sophisticated enough to count as really intelligent, but nonetheless its deliverances were quite helpful—and hooked it up to the billboard, and eventually the origins of the system were largely forgotten. The evidence is such that neither group of villagers is irrational in holding to their theory.

Suppose that the monarch theory was in fact the correct one.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the software theory?

Response: No. Anonymous demands are not valid commands even when they are issued by a genuine authority. A valid command needs to make it evident whom it comes from. When the authority chooses not to make a subordinate be aware of the demand as an authoritative command, the demand is not an authoritative command.

Objection: Given the widely ingrained feeling that the billboard should be obeyed, even the villagers who accepted the software theory had a duty to obey the billboard. That was just part of the governing structure of the village: to obey the billboard.

Response: Perhaps. But even so, the duty to obey the billboard (at least over the villagers who accept the software theory) wasn’t grounded in the monarch’s authority, but in either the authority of the individual’s conscience or the law-giving force of village custom.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the monarch theory?

Response: I am not sure. I think a case can be made in either direction.

A multiple faculty solution to the problem of conscience

I used to be quite averse to multiplying types of normativity until I realized that in an Aristotelian framework it makes perfect sense to multiply them by their subject. Thus, I should think that 1 = 1, I should look both ways before crossing the street, and I should have a heart-rate of no more than 100. But the norms underlying these claims have different subjects: my intellect, my will and my circulatory system (or perhaps better: I as thinking, I as willing and I as circulating).

In this post I want to offer two solutions to the problem of mistaken conscience that proceed by multiplying norms. The problem of mistaken conscience is two-fold as there are two kinds of mistakes of conscience. A strong mistake is when I judge something is required when it is forbidden. A weak mistake is when I judge something is permissible when it is forbidden.

Given that I should follow my conscience, a strong mistake of conscience seems to lead to two conflicting obligations: I should ϕ, because my conscience says so, and I should refrain from ϕing, because ϕing is forbidden. Call the claim that strong mistakes of conscience lead to conflicting obligations the Dilemma Thesis. The Dilemma Thesis is perhaps somewhat implausible on its face, but can be swallowed (as Mark Murphy does). However, more seriously, the Dilemma Thesis has the unfortunate result that strong mistakes of conscience are not, as such, mistakes. For the mistake was supposed to be that I judge ϕing as required when it is forbidden. But that is only a mistake when ϕing is not required. But according to the Conflict Thesis, it is required. So there is no mistake. (There may be a mistake about why it is required, and perhaps one can use that to defuse the problem, but I want to try something else in this post.) Moreover, a view that embraces the Dilemma Thesis needs to explain the blame asymmetry between the obligation to ϕ and the obligation not to ϕ: I am to blame if I go against conscience, but not if I follow conscience.

Weak mistakes are less of a problem, but they still raise the puzzle of why I am not blameworthy if I do what is forbidden when conscience says it’s permissible.

Moving towards a solution, or actually a pair of solution, start with this thought. When I follow a mistaken conscience, my will does nothing wrong but the practical intellect has made a mistake. In other words, we have two sets of norms: norms of practical intellect and norms of will. In these cases I judged badly but willed well. And it is clear why I am not blameworthy: for I become blameworthy by virtue of a fault of the will, not a fault of the intellect.

But there is still a problem analogous to the problem with the Dilemma Thesis. For it seems that:

1. In a mistake of conscience, my judgment was bad because it made a false claim as to what I should will.

In the case of a strong mistake, say, I judged that I should will my ϕing whereas is in fact I should have nilled my ϕing. But I can’t say that and say that the will did what it should in ϕing.

This means that if we are to say that the will did nothing wrong and the problem was with the intellect, we need to reject (1). There are two ways of doing this, leading to different solutions to the problem of conscience.

Claim (1) is based on two claims about practical judgment:

2. The practical intellect’s judgments are truth claims.

3. These truth claims are claims about what I should will.

We can get out of (1) by denying (2) (with (3) then becoming moot) or by holding on to (2) but rejecting (3).

Anscombe denies (2), for reasons having nothing to do with mistakes of conscience. There is good precedent for denying (2), then.

I find the solution that denies (2) a bit murky, but I can kind of see how one would go about it. Oversimplifying, the intellect presents actions to the will on balance positively or negatively. This presentation does not make a truth claim. The polarity of the presentation by the intellect to the will should not be seen as a judgment that an action has a certain character, but simply as a certain way of presenting the judgment—with propathy or antipathy, one might say. Nonetheless there are norms of presentation built into the nature of the practical intellect. These norms are not truth norms, like the norms of the theoretical intellect, but are more like the norms of the functioning of the body’s thermal regulation system, which should warm up the body in some circumstances and cool it down in others, but does not make truth claims. There are actions that should be positively presented and actions that should be negatively presented. We can say that the actions that should be positively presented are right, but the practical intellect’s positive presentation of an action is not a presentation that the action is right, for that would be an odd circularity: to present ϕing positively would be to present ϕing as something that should be presented positively.

(In reality, the “on balance” positive and negative presentations typically have a thick richness to them, a richness corresponding “in flavor” to words like “courageous”, “pleasant”, etc. However, we need to be careful on this view not to think of the presentation corresponding “in flavor” to these words as constituting a truth claim that a certain concept applies. I am somewhat dubious whether this can all be worked out satisfactorily, and so I worry that the no-truth-claim picture of the practical intellect falls afoul of the thickness of the practical intellect’s deliverances.)

There is a second solution which, pace Anscombe, holds on to the idea that the practical intellect’s judgments are truth claims, but denies that they are claims about what I should will. Here is one way to develop this solution. There are times when an animal’s subsystem is functioning properly but it would be better if it did something else. For instance, when we are sick, our thermal regulation system raises our temperature in order to kill invading bacteria or viruses. But sometimes the best medical judgment will be that we will on the whole be better off not raising the temperature given a particular kind of invader, in which case we take fever-reducing medication. We have two norms here: a local norm of the thermal regulation system and a holistic norm of the organism.

Similarly, there are local norms of the will—to will what the intellect presents to it overall in a positive light, say. And there are local norms of the intellect—to present the truth or maybe that which the evidence points to as true. But there are holistic norms of the acting person (to borrow Wojtyla’s useful phrase), such as not to kill innocents. The practical intellect discerns these holistic norms, and presents them to the will. The intellect can err in its discernment. The will can fail to follow the intellect’s discernment.

The second solution is rather profligate with norms, having three different kinds of norms: norms of the will, norms of the intellect, and norms of the acting person, who comprises at least the will, the intellect and the body.

In a strong mistake of conscience, where we judge that we should ϕ but ϕing is forbidden, and we follow conscience and ϕ, here is what happens. The will rightly follows the intellect’s presentation by willing to ϕ. The acting person, however, goes wrong by ϕing. We genuinely have a mistake of the intellect: the intellect misrepresented what the acting person should do. The acting person went wrong, and did so simpliciter. However, the will did right, and so one is not to blame. We can say that in this case, the ϕing was wrong, but the willing to ϕ was right. And we can say how the pro-ϕing norm takes priority: the norm to will one’s ϕing is a norm of the will, so naturally it is what governs the will.

In a weak mistake of conscience, where we judge that it is permissible to ϕ but it’s not, again the solution is that under the circumstances it was permissible to will to ϕ, but not permissible to ϕ.

There is, however, a puzzle in connecting this story with failed actions. Consider either kind of mistake of conscience, and suppose I will to ϕ but I fail to ϕ due to some non-moral systemic failure. Maybe I will to press a forbidden button, but it turns out I am paralyzed. In that case, it seems that the only thing I did was willing to ϕ, and so we cannot say that I did anything wrong. I think there are two ways out of this. The first is to bite the bullet and say that this is just a case where I got lucky and did nothing wrong. The second is to say that my willing to ϕ can be seen as a trying to ϕ, and it is bad as an action of the acting person but not bad as an action of the will.

Real dilemmas, alas

I’ve been trying to avoid holding there are real moral dilemmas—ones where one is genuinely morally required to do something and to abstain from it. But here is a problem:

1. One is obligated to do what one believes to be obligatory.

2. Some people believe that ϕing is obligatory and that refraining from ϕing is obligatory.

3. So, some people are obligated to ϕ and not to ϕ.

Perhaps the most obvious case of (2) is killing in war. It seems to be not an uncommon view that (a) all killing is wrong, but (b) you should kill to defend the innocent in a just war.

Mistaken conscience and failure

Alice is a sniper tasked with stopping Bob the terrorist who is about to set up a bomb that will kill many. Let’s take it for granted that shooting Bob would have been permissible and even praiseworthy. Now, Alice takes all reasonable precautions but she misidentifies Carl the innocent as the terrorist and shoots Carl.

Among the infinitely many ways that we can describe Alice’s action, two are of particular moral relevance:

1. Trying to shoot Bob the terrorist.

2. Shooting an innocent person.

Alice is morally responsible for, and even praiseworthy, for performing (1). She is not responsible for (2), since she did (2) unintentionally and in non-culpable ignorance (remember that she took all reasonable precautions).

Did Alice do a morally impermissible action? It sounds like (2) is impermissible, and Alice indisputably did it. But perhaps this is too quick. For it is not clear to me that Alice’s shooting an innocent person is an action. Suppose that while Alice was sleeping, an evil tinkerer set up a pressure-sensitive switch connected to a gun pointed at David the innocent, and Alice rolled over onto it. Then Alice shot David, but we cannot say that she did anything: shooting David wasn’t an action, but a mere event. And if she didn’t do anything, she didn’t do anything impermissible.

Now, Alice’s trying to shoot Bob the terrorist identical with her shooting an innocent person. And since Alice’s trying to shoot Bob is an action, it follows that her shooting the innocent person is also an action. So it seems that Alice did do something impermissible.

But even this may not be quite right. For it may be that it is not quite right to say that (2) is impermissible. Rather, what are impermissible are actions that are non-accidental cases of shooting an innocent. And both the shooting of Carl and of David are accidental cases (and that of David isn’t even an action).

If this is right, then we can say that Alice did nothing wrong in either the case of Carl or of David.

Now, let’s switch to a harder case. Alice has a reasonable but false belief that she is pursuing a just war, but she is not. She shoots Ella the enemy combatant. Did Alice do anything morally wrong? It seems that she did: she shot Ella. But perhaps we can say something very similar to what we said above. There are two ways to describe Alice’s action;

3. Trying to shoot enemy combatant Ella in pursuit of a just war

4. Shooting enemy combatant Ella not in pursuit of a just war.

Action (1) is permissible, but unbeknownst to Alice was doomed to failure as the war was not just. Now, what is impermissible is non-accidentally shooting enemy combatants not in pursuit of a just war. But Alice did this accidentally: she reasonably thought it was a just war. So perhaps Alice is entirely off the hook for doing something morally wrong. Instead, she accidentally did something that it would be have been wrong to do non-accidentally.

Let’s switch to an even harder case. Alice has a reasonable (given her flawed upbringing and culture) but false belief that in order to save lives in the pursuit of a just war it is permissible to shoot innocent non-combatants, and she shoots Fred the innocent non-combatant. Can we say that Alice didn’t do anything wrong, but merely accidentally did something that it would have been wrong to do non-accidentally? Perhaps. Perhaps we can describe Alice’s action in two ways:

5. Trying to permissibly shoot the innocent non-combatant Fred to save lives

6. Shooting the innocent non-combatant Fred to save lives.

Action (5) is permissible, but doomed to failure. And it is impermissible to non-accidentally do (6). But now it seems that we cannot make the move of saying that Alice only accidentally did (6). For she was trying to do (6), though she was trying to do more than just what is included in (6): she was trying to do (6) permissibly.

But perhaps there is a similar move possible to the one we made before. Perhaps what is impermissible is to do (6) as such, where the “as such” includes both non-accidentality and the assumption that no further relevant factors are involved. And Alice wasn’t trying to do (6) as such: she was trying to do (6) permissibly.

If so, this would give us a nice account of what happens in cases of honestly mistaken conscience. We are intending to do something permissibly, and we fail at this. Instead we accidentally end up performing only a part of our intention. That part would be something that it would be impermissible to attempt as such, but we didn’t attempt it as such, but we intended it only qua permissible.

For this account to work, it has to be the case that if we are to act well, we should positively include permissibility among our intentions. Virtue may help here.

Conscience and the deontic logic of attempts

When people talk of the value of obedience to conscience, it often makes it sound like there is some sort of a relationship to a mysterious faculty with a mysterious authority.

And that may all be true. But there is also a rather simple and deflationary but still, I think, useful way to think of obedience to conscience.

When I obey my conscience I am just trying to do what I ought thing. There is nothing particularly mysterious about what is right about that. If I ought to do A, I ought to try to do A. I ought to honor my parents. So, I also ought to try to honor them. Similarly, I ought to do what I ought, so I ought to try to do what I ought.

And with respect to the duty to try to do what I ought, it doesn’t matter that due to a mistake on my part I will be unable to do what I ought. That I have wrongly written down my mother’s phone number does not excuse me from trying to call her on her birthday. I ought to dial that number, because not dialing that number would be constitute a failure to try to call her, given my belief that it’s her number. Similarly, even if I am mistaken in thinking that I ought to do B, I still ought to do B, because a failure to do B would be constitutive of a failure to try to do what I ought, given my belief that B is what I ought to do.

(This is all a little less trivial when we realize that the duty to do one’s duty is actually a bit controversial. One might think that one only has first order duties, and lacks the second order duty to see to it that one fulfills the first order duties. But that would, I think, be mistaken. If I know that partaking of alcohol would cause me to neglect my first order duties, I thereby have a second order duty to avoid such partaking.)

Fulfilling requests

One of the most moving stories in Rosenbaum’s deeply moving Holocaust and the Halakhah tells of how one can be a great moral hero even when acting out of mistaken conscience. A man in a concentration camp comes to his rabbi with a problem. His son has been scheduled to be executed. But it is possible to bribe the kapo to get him off the death list. However, the kapo have a quota to fill, and if they let off his son, they will kill another child. Is it permissible to bribe the kapo knowing that this will result in the death of another child? The rabbi answers that, of course, it is permissible. The man goes away, but he is not convinced. He does not bribe the kapo. Instead, he concludes that God has called him to the great sacrifice of not shifting his son’s death onto another. The father finds a joy in the sacrifice amidst his mourning.

The rabbi was certainly right. The father’s conscience presumably was mistaken (unless God specifically spoke to him and required the sacrifice). Yet the father is a moral hero in acting from this mistaken conscience. (Here are two relevant features of this case. First, while he was mistaken, he was not mistaken in a way that shows moral callousness—on the contrary, he is obviously a man of moral sensitivity. Second, while he was mistaken in thinking the sacrifice was morally required, nonetheless the sacrifice was—I think—at least permissible.)

The analytic philosopher will see this as a variant of a trolley case (with some complications, such as that the deaths were mediated by the free agency of the kapo). It is permissible to redirect the trolley away from one’s child and towards a stranger’s child. This is another way in which the proportionality condition in the Principle of Double Effect is not a utilitarian calculation: the agent has a proportional reason to save their own child even when it is foreseen (but not intended) to cost another’s their life.

But at the same time it would not be permissible to redirect the trolley away from one stranger’s child towards another stranger’s child. Such redirection would be a grotesque toying with lives. It would be a needless and callous making of oneself into a cause of another’s death, even if unintentionally.

Here, however, is a case that puzzles me. Suppose Alice’s child is on the track the trolley is speeding towards, and a stranger’s child is on another track. Alice is physically incapable of redirecting the trolley but Bob is capable of it. Alice and both children are strangers to Bob. Would it be permissible for Alice to ask Bob to redirect the trolley?

Here is an argument to the contrary. It is impermissible for Bob to redirect the trolley from one stranger to another: that is just playing with lives. But it is impermissible to request someone to perform an impermissible action. Hence, it is impermissible to ask Bob to redirect the trolley.

That seems mistaken. The case of asking Bob to redirect the trolley need not be that different from begging the kapo to take one’s child off the death list, depending on the details of the latter story. So what is going on?

I think there are at least two ways to justify Bob’s acquiescence to the request and hence Alice’s making of the request:

1. Once Alice asks Bob to redirect the trolley, Alice is no longer a stranger to Bob. There is a way in which Bob in receiving her request can become an agent of Alice’s, and hence those that Alice cares for become ones that he has a special reason to care for.

2. On receipt of the request, Bob has two options coming with distinctive incommensurable reasons. The first is not to redirected, with the reason being promote equality, in this case equality between children who don’t have a parent in place to speak up for them and ones who do. The second is to fulfill the request of an anguished parent to save their child. Both reasons are grave, and it is permissible for him (other things being equal) to act on either reason. Requests really do add weight to reasons.

There is another complicating factor. I do have the intuition that if Bob is an employee in charge of the trolley, he should do nothing. The reason is this. Insofar as he is in charge of the trolley, Bob has a role duty of mitigating damage done by the trolley. It is generally good policy that such a role come along with a significant independence from outside influences, such as bribes or even requests. So, in that case, Bob should act as if he did not receive the request. But if he did not receive any request, he shouldn’t do anything, for it is better not to become the cause of the child’s death—as one would if one redirected.

Here is a variant case. There are three tracks. The trolley is on track A with five people. The other two tracks, B and C, have one person each, and Alice is asking Bob not to redirect to track B, as her child is there. Bob has to redirect to either track B or C, but everything other than Alice’s request is equal between these tracks. Here it seems to me that Bob should flip a coin (if there is time; if not, just act as randomly as he can) if he is an employee. And if he is not an employee, then he has a choice to accede to Alice’s request or flip a coin.

More on moral risk

You are the captain of a small damaged spaceship two light years from Earth, with a crew of ten. Your hyperdrive is failing. You can activate it right now, in a last burst of energy, and then get home. If you delay activating the hyperdrive, it will become irreparable, and you will have to travel to earth at sublight speed, which will take 10 years, causing severe disruption to the personal lives of the crew.

The problem is this. When such a failing hyperdrive is activated, everything within a million kilometers of the spaceship’s position will be briefly bathed in lethal radiation, though the spaceship itself will be protected and the radiation will quickly dissipate. Your scanners, fortunately, show no planets or spaceships within a million kilometers, but they do show one large asteroid. You know there are two asteroids that pass through that area of space: one of them is inhabited, with a population of 10 million, while the other is barren. You turn your telescope to the asteroid. It looks like the uninhabited asteroid.

So, you come to believe there is no life within a million kilometers. Moreover, you believe that as the captain of the ship who has a resposibility to get the crew home in a reasonable amount of time, unless of course this causes undue harm. Thus, you believe:

1. You are obligated to activate the hyperdrive.

You reflect, however, on the fact that ship’s captains have made mistakes in asteroid identification before. You pull up the training database, and find that at this distance, captains with your level of training make the relevant mistake only once in a million times. So you still believe that this is the lifeless asteroid. but now you get worried. You imagine a million starship captains making the same kind of decision as you. As a result, 10 million crew members get home on time to their friends and families, but in one case, 10 million people are wiped out in an asteroid. You conclude, reasonably, that this is an unacceptable level of risk. One in a million isn’t good enough. So, you conclude:

2. You are obligated not to activate the hyperdrive.

This reflection on the possibility of perceptual error does not remove your belief in (1), indeed your knowledge of (1). After all, a one in a million chance of error is less than the chance of error in many cases of ordinary everyday perceptual knowledge—and, indeed, asteroid identification just is a case of everyday perceptual knowledge for a captain like yourself.

Maybe this is just a case of your knowing you are in a real moral dilemma: you have two conflicting duties, one to activate the hyperdrive and the other not to. But this fails to account for the asymmetry in the case, namely that caution should prevail, and there has to be an important sense of “right” in which the right decision is not to activate the hyperdrive.

I don’t know what to say about cases like this. Here is my best start. First, make a distinction between subjective and objective obligations. This disambiguates (1) and (2) as:

3. You are objectively obligated to activate the hyperdrive.

4. You are subjectively obligated not to activate the hyperdrive.

Second, deny the plausible bridge principle:

4. If you believe you are objectively obligated to ϕ, then you are subjectively obligated to ϕ.

You need to deny (4), since you believe (3), and if (4) were true, then it would follow you are subjectively obligated to activate the hyperdrive, and we would once again have lost sight of the asymmetric “right” on which the right thing is not to activate.

This works as far as it goes, though we need some sort of a replacement for (4), some other principle bridging from the objective to the subjective. What that principle is is not clear to me. A first try is some sort of an analogue to expected utility calculations, where instead of utilities we have the moral weights of non-violated duties. But I doubt that these weights can be handled numerically.

And I still don’t know how to handle is the problem of ignorance of the bridge principles between the objective and the subjective.

It seems there is some complex function from one’s total mental state to one’s full-stop subjective obligation. This complex function is one which is not known to us at present. (Which is a bit weird, in that it is the function that governs subjective obligation.)

A way out of this mess would be to have some sort of infallibilism about subjective obligation. Perhaps there is some specially epistemically illuminated state that we are in when we are subjectively obligated, a state that is a deliverance of a conscience that is at least infallible with respect to subjective obligation. I see difficulties for this approach, but maybe there is some hope, too.

Objection: Because of pragmatic encroachment, the standards for knowledge go up heavily when ten million lives are at stake, and you don’t know that the asteroid is uninhabited when lives depend on this. Thus, you don’t know (1), whereas you do know (2), which restores the crucial action-guiding asymmetry.

Response: I don’t buy pragmatic encroachment. I think the only rational process by which you lose knowledge is getting counterevidence; the stakes going up does not make for counterevidence.

But this is a big discussion in epistemology. I think I can avoid it by supposing (as I expect is true) that you are no more than 99.9999% sure of the risk principles underlying the cautionary judgment in (2). Moreover, the stakes go up for that judgment just as much as they do for (1). Hence, I can suppose that you know neither (1) nor (2), but are merely very confident, and rationally so, of both. This restores the symmetry between (1) and (2).

Medical conscience exemptions

After listening to a talk by Christopher Kaczor, and the ensuing discussion, I want to offer a defense of a moderate position on the state not compelling healthcare professionals to violate their conscience, even when their conscience is unreasonably mistaken. I think a stronger position than the moderate position may be true, but I won’t be defending that.

This is the central insight:

1. It is a significant harm to an individual to violate their conscience, even when the conscience is irrationally mistaken.

One reason that (1) is true is the Socratic insight is that it is much better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, together with the Conscience Principle that to act against conscience is always wrong.

My argument will need something a bit more precise than (1). For convenience, I will stipulate that I use “grave” for normative considerations, goods, bads and harms whose importance is at least of the order of magnitude of the value of a human life. The coincidence that “grave” not only means very serious but also place of burial in English—even though the etymologies are quite different—should remind us of this. When you read the following, whenever you read “grave” and cognates, don’t just read “serious”, but also imagine a grave.

Then what I need is this:

2. It is a grave harm to a conscientious individual to gravely violate their conscience, even when that conscience is unreasonably mistaken.

(I suspect this is true even if one drops the “conscientious” and “gravely”, but I am only defending a moderate position.) The reasons for (2) are moral and psychological. The moral reasons are based on the aforementioned Socratic insight about the importance of avoiding wrongdoing. But there are also psychological reasons. A conscientious person identifies with their conscience in such a way that gravely violating this conscience is shattering to the individual’s identity. It is a kind of death. It is no coincidence that the Catholic tradition talks of some sins as “mortal”.

Next, here is another reasonable principle:

3. Normally, the state should not require a healthcare professional to provide care when the care is likely to come at a grave cost to the professional.

For instance, the state should not require a healthcare professional to donate her own kidney to save a patient. For a less extreme case that I will consider some variations of, neither should the state require a professional who has a severe bee allergy to pass through a cloud of bees to help a patient when allergy reaction drugs are unavailable and when other professionals lacking such an allergy are available.

In order for (3) to be useful in pracice, we need some way of getting rid of the “Normally” in it.

Notice that (3) is true even when the grave cost to the professional results from the professional’s irrationality. For instance, normally a healthcare professional who has a grave phobia of bees should not be required to pass through the cloud of bees, even if it is known that the professional would not be seriously physically harmed. In other words, that the cost results from irrationality does count as an abnormality in (3).

Under what abnormal conditions, then, may the state require the professional to offer care that comes at grave cost to the professional? This is clearly a necessary condition:

4. The need is grave.

But even if the need is grave, if someone else can offer the care for whom offering the care does not come at a grave cost, they should offer it instead. If the way to save a patient’s life is for one doctor to pass through a cloud of bees, and there is a doctor available who is not allergic to bee stings, then a doctor who is allergic should not be made to do it. Thus, we have this condition:

5. There is no way of meeting the need without someone being required to take on a likely grave cost.

We can combine these two conditions into a neater condition (which may also be a bit weaker than the conjunction of (4) and (5)):

6. If the care is not provided by this professional, a grave harm will likely result to someone.

This suggests some principle like this:

7. Unless failure of this professional to provide this instance of care will likely result in a grave harm, the state should not require a healthcare professional to provide care when the care is likely to come at a grave cost to the professional.

Now we go back to (2), the claim about the grave cost of violating conscience. Let us charitably assume that most medical professionals are conscientious, so that any given medical professional is likely to be conscientious. Then we get something like this:

8. Unless failure of this professional to provide this instance of care will likely result in a grave harm, the state should not require a healthcare professional to provide care that gravely violates their conscience, even when that conscience is unreasonably mistaken.

But this cannot be the whole story. For there are also conditions that render one incapable of doing central parts of one’s job. For instance, someone with a grave phobia of fires should not be allowed to be a fire fighter. And while a fire fighter with that grave phobia should not be made to fight a fire when someone else is available, if they had the phobia at the time of hiring, they should not have been hired in the first place. And if they hid this phobia at the time of hiring, they should be fired.

We have, however, a well-developed societal model for dealing with such conditions: the reasonable accommodations model of disability legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is reasonable to require an office building to put in a ramp for an employee in a wheelchair who is unable to walk; it would be unreasonable for a bank to have to hire a guard specially to watch a kleptomaniac teller. What is and is not a reasonable accommodation depends on the centrality of an aspect of a job, the costs to the employer, and so on.

So my moderate proposal says that we handle the worry that a particular conscientious objection renders a professional incapable of doing their job by analogy to the reasonable and unreasonable accommodations model, and qualify (8) by allowing in hiring or licensure the requirement that the accommodations for a conscientious restriction on practice would have be reasonable in ways analogous to reasonable disability accommodations. A healthcare professional who has only one hand could, I assume, be reasonably accommodated in a number of specialities, but likely not as a surgeon.

The disability case also should push us towards a less judgmental attitude towards a healthcare professional whose conscientious objections are unreasonably mistaken. That an employee became a paraplegic from unreasonable daredevil recreational activity does not render the employee uneligible for otherwise reasonable accommodations.

What about the worry about the rare cases where a healthcare professional has morally repugnant conscientious views that would require discriminatory care, such as refusing to care for patients of a particular race? Could one argue that if patients of that race are rare in a given area, then allowing a restriction of practice on the basis of race could be a reasonable accommodation? We might imagine an employee who has panic attacks triggered by a particular rare configuration of a client’s personal appearance, and that does seem like a case for reasonable accommodations, after all.

Here I think there is a different thing to be said. We want our healthcare professionals to have certain relevant moral virtues to a reasonable degree. Moral virtues go beyond obedience to conscience. Someone with a mistaken conscience may not be to blame, for the wrongs they do, but they may nonetheless lack certain virtues. The case of the conscientious racist is one of those. So it is not so much because the conscientious racist would refuse to care for patients of a particular race that they should not be a healthcare professional but it is because they fail to have the right kind of respect for the dignity of all human beings.

One may think that this consideration makes the account not very useful. After all, a pro-life individual is apt to be accused of not caring enough for women. Here I just think we need to be honest and reasonably charitable. Caring about the embryo and fetus has human dignity does not render it less likely that one cares about women. Compare this case: A vegan physician believes that all higher animal life is sacred, and hence refuses to prescribe medication whose production essentially involves serious suffering of higher animals. Even if such a physician’s actions might cause harm to patients who need such (hypothetical?) medication, the belief that all higher animal life is sacred is not evidence that the physician does not care about such patients–indeed, it seems to render it more likely that the physician thinks the patients’ lives to be sacred as well, and hence to be cared for. There may be specialties where accommodation is unreasonable, but the mere fact of the belief is not evidence of lack of relevant virtues.

Virtue and mistaken conscience

Being fully virtuous is compatible with doing some things that are wrong. A juror, call her Alice, while acting in the best conscience, send an innocent person to prison, say because enough witnesses for the prosecution are particularly effective liars. It can even be the case that sending the innocent person to prison is done out of virtue and further contributes to virtue.

But now suppose Bob is a juror brainwashed through no fault of his own into thinking that members of some ethnic group should be found guilty whether or not they really are guilty, and that Bob voted to convict. He may well be acting in good conscience. But Bob is a vicious person, even if, I shall suppose, not culpably so. (If this case is possible, that creates trouble for claim (4) here.) Moreover, even though the only way for him to avoid incurring guilt is to unjustly vote to convict (for then he is inculpable, but if he voted to acquit, he would have been culpable for violating conscience), by voting to convict she contributes to her vice.

It is natural to distinguish the cases of Alice and Bob by noting that Alice's wrongful action comes from ignorance of non-moral matters while Bob's comes from ignorance of moral matters.

But that's not quite the right distinction. For instance, the question whether the accused person was in fact innocent may itself hinge on some moral question. Imagine that a perfectly truthful witness testified that either vegetarianism is not morally required or the accused was holding a knife, and this witness refused to say which disjunct is true. If Alice mistakenly (let's suppose) thinks that vegetarian is morally required, she could thereby come to an error about whether the accused committed the crime, on the basis of a mistake about a moral question.

Furthermore, there is a third case. Consider Carla, a good doctor who needs to make a decision whether to perform some procedure. The moral issues are quite unclear, and Carla cannot figure them out on her own. But Carla has good reason to trust her hospital's ethics committee. She acts in accordance with the committee's recommendation, even though in this case the committee is mistaken. Carla acts wrongly. Moreover, her wrong action comes from a mistake about moral matters, indeed a mistake about the specific moral matter at hand. But Carla's action need not (though this may depend on details of the case) be incompatible with full virtue--morality can be complex, and even a fully virtuous person may be unable to figure out all the intricacies of cooperation in evil or triple effect, say. Given enough complexity in the case, Carla may be sufficiently isolated from the wrongmaking features of her action that she does not become morally worse by acting wrongly.

So if we want to draw the distinction between a type of ignorance of what is to be done that detracts from virtue and a kind that does not, that distinction is not to be drawn by distinguishing between ignorance about moral matters and ignorance about non-moral matters, even if to get out of the vegetarianism case we refine this to be a distinction between ignorance about the morality of the matter at hand and other kinds of ignorance.

So how do we draw the distinction? I don't know.

Culpably mistaken conscience

It is plausible that we have duties of conscience arising from inculpable mistakes about what we should do. I shall assume this and argue that culpable mistakes also yield duties of conscience.

Here are two cases.

1. Fred hires a neurologist to brainwash him into a state which will make him think the next day that it is his duty to embezzle money from his employer. The neurologist succeeds. The next day Fred conscientiously believes he has a duty to embezzle money from his employer. But he refrains from doing so out of fear of being caught.
2. Sally hires a neurologist to brainwash her into which will make him think the next day that it is her duty to embezzle money from her employer. The neurologist fails. But that night, completely coincidentally, a rogue neurologist breaks into her home and while she's sleeping successfully brainwashes her into that very state the first neurologist failed to brainwash her into. The next day Sally conscientiously believes she has a duty to embezzle money from her employer. But she refrains from doing so out of fear of being caught. There are no further relevant differences between Sally's case and Fred's.

Fred is responsible for his conscience being mistaken. Sally is not responsible for that. Granted, Sally is culpable for trying to make her conscience be mistaken, but she is no more responsible for the mistaken conscience than the attempted murderer is responsible when her intended victim is coincidentally killed by someone else.

If inculpably mistaken conscience gives rise to duties, Sally has a duty of conscience to embezzle, and she fails in her duty. She thus acted immorally on both days: on the first day she acted immorally by asking to be brainwashed and on the second day she acted immorally by refusing to obey her conscience.

Thus:

3. If culpably mistaken conscience does not give rise to duties, then Fred has not violated a duty of conscience by refraining from embezzling, while Sally has.

If culpably mistaken conscience does not give rise to duties, then Sally is in a morally worse state than Fred, being guilty of two things while Fred is only guilty of one.

But on the other hand, Fred and Sally have made all the same relevant decisions in the same subjective states. The only possibly relevant difference is entirely outside of them--namely, whether the neurologist that they actually hired is in fact the neurologist who brainwashed them. But the whole point of the idea of duties of conscience is to honor the subjective component in duty, and so if Fred and Sally's relevant decisions are all relevantly alike, Fred and Sally will also be alike in whether they've violated a duty of conscience. Hence:

4. If Sally has violated a duty of conscience by refraining from embezzling, so has Fred.

It logically follows from (3) and (4) that:

5. Culpably mistaken conscience gives rise to duties.

Of course all of this argument was predicated on the assumption that inculpably mistaken conscience gives rise to duties, and perhaps a reader may want to now revisit that assumption. But I think the assumption is true, leaving us with the conclusion that mistaken conscience gives rise to duties whether or not the mistake is culpable.

Now let's turn the case about. Suppose that both Fred and Sally follow their respective mistaken consciences and therefore embezzle. What should we say? Should we say that they did nothing wrong? It seems we shouldn't say that they did nothing wrong, for if they did nothing wrong then their consciences weren't mistaken, which they were. So let's accept (though I have a long-shot idea that I've talked about elsewhere that might get out of this) that they both did wrong. Thus, as in Mark Murphy's account of conscience, they were in the unhappy position that whatever they did would be wrong: by embezzling they defraud their employer and by not embezzling they violate their conscience.

But what about their culpability? Since Sally's case is one of inculpable ignorance, we have to say that Sally is not culpable for the embezzlement. Let's further suppose Sally and Fred's reasons for having themselves brainwashed were to get themselves to embezzle. Thus Sally is guilty of entering on a course of action intended to lead to embezzlement--basically, attempted embezzlement. But she's not guilty of embezzlement. What about Fred? He is certainly responsible for the embezzlement: it was intentionally caused by his immoral action of hiring the neurologist. But I am inclined to think that this is an effect-responsibility ("liability" is a good word) rather than action-culpability. Fred is responsible for the embezzlement in the way that one is responsible for the intended effects of one's culpable actions, in this case the action of hiring a brainwasher, but he isn't culpable for it in the central sense of culpability. (Compare: Suppose that instead of hiring a neurologist to brainwash himself, he hired the second brainwasher in Sally's case. Then Fred wouldn't be action-culpable for Sally's embezzlement, since one is only action-culpable for what one does, but only responsible for her embezzlement as an intended effect of his action.) Sally lacks that responsibility for the effect--the embezzlement--because her plan to get herself to embezzle the money failed as the embezzlement was caused by the rogue neurologist.

In terms of moral culpability for their actions, in the modified case where they conscientiously embezzle, Fred and Sally are, I think, exactly on par. Each is morally culpable precisely for hiring the neurologist, and that's all. That may seem like it gets them off the hook too easily, but it does not: they did something very bad in hiring the brainwasher. So, if I'm right, they are on par if they both conscientiously embezzle and they are on par if they both violate their consciences by refusing to embezzle.

Two ways to be mistaken about what to do?

Joe is baking cupcakes for Sally. He has an inculpable false belief that cyanide is a tasty nutritional supplement and so adds it to the cupcakes to improve the taste, indeed killing Sally. Sally was innocent.

Fred is baking cupcakes for Samantha. He has an inculpable false belief--perhaps acquired through brainwashing--that it is right to kill any people one likes for fun and so adds cyanide to the cupcakes to kill Samantha for fun, and indeed he kills her. Samantha was innocent.

Neither Joe nor Fred are culpable (though in practice it would take a lot of convincing to make us agree that their beliefs were inculpable). But I feel that there is a difference in the two cases. I am inclined to say that Fred acted wrongly, though not culpably, while I am less inclined to say the same thing about Joe. What's the relevant difference?

Well, one difference is that Joe acts because of an inculpably false empirical belief while Fred acts because of an inculpably false normative belief. But that difference doesn't seem the relevant one to me. We could imagine cases where being wrong about normative matters (say, about whether a particular person one is punishing has acted wrongly) leads to an error more like Joe's than Fred's.

So what's the difference? Well one difference that does seem relevant to me is this. Both Joe and Fred are killing innocent people. But Joe doesn't act under the description killing an innocent person while Fred does. Thus Fred acts under a description that entails the wrongness of the action (assuming that it's necessarily always wrong to kill an innocent) while Joe does not. I think this is getting close, but doesn't quite get at the difference. Suppose Joe does something that he knows to be is a killing if and only if some complex mathematical statement p is true, and Joe is inculpably sure that the statement is false, though it's actually necessarily true. It may well be that Joe is acting under the description killing an innocent person if and only if p and an action's falling under this description does entail the wrongness of the action.

Maybe the right tool for distinguishing the two cases is intention? Joe doesn't intentionally kill. Fred does. That's certainly a very relevant difference. But we can imagine a case like Joe's where there is intentional killing. Suppose James is a law enforcement officer with the inculpable false belief that Suzy is trying to kill innocent people. (Perhaps he's wondered on a movie set where Suzy is playing a mass shooter with great plausibility and superb special effects.) Then James intentionally kills Suzy, but his error seems much more like Joe's than like Fred's. Maybe we can, however, say that James is not intentionally killing an innocent, while Fred is. But that could be a misunderstanding of Fred's intentions as far as my description goes. The story can be elaborated so Fred is no more intending to kill an innocent than if I shake hands with you I am intending to shake hands with someone wearing a green shirt (assuming you're obviously wearing a green shirt). Your wearing a green shirt just doesn't enter into my intentions, and we can suppose that Fred gets no special pleasure out of the innocence of the person he kills, so that innocence doesn't enter into his intentions.

Nonetheless, perhaps we can say this: It is always wrong to intend to kill someone. It is not always wrong to intend to kill an aggressor. But when a person virtuously intends to kill an aggressor, maybe she doesn't automatically intend to kill this person. Rather, she intends to kill this aggressor. This person's being an aggressor suffuses her intentions. Thus James who kills Suzy the apparent aggressor doesn't have the intention to kill Suzy or to kill a person. He has the intention to kill Suzy the aggressor, an intention that he fails to fulfill. If that's right, then we can say that both Joe and James act under a morally upright intention: to flavor cupcakes an to kill an aggressor, respectively.

I am worried about this solution, though. It may require more to be packed into morally upright intentions than is psychologically realistic. After all, it's not right to kill an aggressor as such. It's only right to kill an aggressor who threatens significant harm and cannot be stopped in non-lethal ways and there are surely lots of other conditions (e.g., Aquinas thinks that only officers of the state have the right to intentionally kill--we can defend ourselves in unintentionally lethal ways, he allows, however). Should we pack all of all these conditions into James' intention? Maybe James can summarize mentally. He intends to rightly kill this aggressor. And rightly killing this aggressor is an intention that has the property that necessarily an action that fulfills it is right. However, the very same thing could be said about Fred's case. Given Fred's belief that it's right to kill for fun, Fred could be intending to rightly kill Samantha.

I wish I had a satisfactory resolution. Maybe we don't need the upright intention to entail rightness. Maybe all James needs is the intention to kill an aggressor, even though not all cases of killing an aggressor are right?

I really don't know. As I think about cases like this, I wonder how sharp the distinction between Joe and James, on the one hand, and Fred, on the other, really is. Maybe all we have is a vague distinction that Joe and James' errors do not constitute them as morally corrupt, while Fred's error does constitute him as morally corrupt (even if he is not culpable for this moral corruption). But that distinction doesn't cut quite the line we want. Take my mathematical case and change p into a moral proposition. Suppose Joe has the inculpable false belief that theft is right and intends that Sally die if and only if theft is wrong. Then Joe's root error does constitute him as morally corrupt, but he's still not like Fred. Nonetheless, even though the distinction between beliefs that make one morally corrupt and those that don't may not cut the exact line we want, maybe that's the only non-gerrymandered line to be cut here? I really want to say that Joe and James both did something that we wish they hadn't done, while Fred did something wrong, even though all three were non-culpable. But I don't know if I can support this distinction.

Real dilemmas and conscience

Some people—notably, St. Thomas—think that you can have real dilemmas, ones where you are obligated to do each of two incompatible actions, but only when you've done something wrong. For instance, one might make incompatible promises to two different people, and then have a real dilemma, but of course it's wrong to make such incompatible promises.

But given the binding force of conscience, this is not a stable position to hold. For consider a situation S where one would be in a real dilemma, say the situation where one made incompatible promises to two different people. But now imagine a situation S^* which is epistemically like S and where the same actions are open to one, but where one did nothing wrong to get into S^*. Maybe one has a justified false belief that one has made incompatible promises to two different people (say, a bad friend convinces you that you made such promises but forgot about them). Then while one does not have duties of promise to do the two incompatible actions, one does have duties of conscience to do them.

A complete denial of real dilemmas is a more stable position, as is the position that where there is a real dilemma, something has gone wrong morally or epistemically (but not necessarily through one's having done anything wrong, morally or epistemically).

Laws violating religious freedom and conscience

This post is an oblique response to one of the lines of thought in a petition against Notre Dame University's lawsuit against the HHS contraception mandate.

If your religion or conscience (and on my view of conscience, the former is a special case of the latter if you sincerely accept the religious teachings) forbids you to obey a law, then the law violates your religious freedom or your freedom of conscience. (There is also a further question whether this violation is justified, and I won't address that question.) But the converse is not true. A law can violate your religious freedom, and maybe your freedom of conscience (that's a harder question), even if obedience is not forbidden by your religion or your conscience.

This is easiest shown by example. A paradigm example of a law violating religious freedom is a law prohibiting Christians from meeting to worship on Sunday under pain of death. But obedience to such a law need not go against the requirements of Christianity. Christianity does not require public Sunday worship when such worship seriously endangers innocent life, including one's own. Thus, there is no duty to get to Sunday worship if there is a hurricane, and to get to church one would have to leave the hurricane shelter one is in. Thus, a law that prohibited Christians from Sunday worship on pain of death would violate religious freedom without Christianity holding it to be wrong to obey the law. In case it's not clear that this law violates religious freedom, one can run this a fortiori argument. A law forbidding Sunday worship with a five dollar fine as a penalty would be wrong to obey according to Christianity, unless one is quite poor, and hence violates religious freedom. But if forbidding Sunday worship under pain of a five dollar fine violates religious freedom, a fortiori so does forbidding Sunday worship under pain of death.

For another example, consider a law explicitly prohibiting Jews from meeting to pray together on the Sabbath. It is my understanding that while rabbinical Judaism encourages meeting to pray together on the Sabbath, it does not require this (if I am wrong, just make it a hypothetical example). Thus, this would be a law that it is not wrong to obey, but it surely violates religious freedom.

In fact, one might even have a law that violates freedom of religion without requiring or forbidding the practitioners to do anything. For instance, consider a law requiring doctors who are not themselves Jehovah's Witnesses to forcibly administer blood transfusions to Jehovah's Witnesses when this is medically indicated, even when the Witness does not consent. Such a law violates the patient's freedom of religion, even though the patient is not being required or forbidden to do anything by the law. (The law may also violate the doctor's freedom of conscience.)

It is harder to see whether a law obedience to which does not violate conscience can violate freedom of conscience. There is a prima facie case for a negative answer: How can freedom of conscience be violated by something that doesn't require one to go against conscience?

But I think a case can be made that it is possible to violate freedom of conscience without requiring something contrary to conscience. The cases parallel the above two.

The case of Christian Sunday worship was one where something is required unless there are serious reasons to the contrary. Now, typical vegetarians do not think it is always wrong to eat meat. They would not, for instance, think that an Inuit child whose parents only make meat available to her in winter is morally required to refuse to eat it and thus starve to death. But now imagine a law put in place by the pork lobby that requires everyone to eat six ounces of pork daily, under penalty of death. If it is permissible to eat meat to preserve one's life, it would be permissible for the vegetarian to eat the pork. But surely there is something very much like violation of the vegetarian's freedom of conscience here.

The common thread between the Sunday worship and vegetarian cases is that these are situations where there is a strong duty to go against what the law says, but it is the law's penalty that provides a defeater for the law.

To parallel the case of rabbinical Jewish attitudes to Sabbath worship, consider a Kantian. Now, Kantians believe that there is an imperfect duty to help others, i.e., a duty where it is not specified to what degree and in what way one should help others. Imagine, then, a law that prohibited one from helping others except between 4:30 pm and 5:00 pm on Tuesdays. Such a law might not be such that Kantianism forbids one to obey it. But it is a law that surely in some important sense violates the Kantian's freedom of conscience, by forbidding that which her conscience very strongly encourages her to do, namely help people at other times, even if it does not specifically require it.

Conscience, authority and moral intuition

A former student of mine wrote to me with a query on about how institutional Church authority could co-exist with the authority of individual conscience. She argued that ultimately my conscience will decide whether the authority is to be trusted, and quoted Anscombe as saying that one cannot help but be one's own pilot.

This made me think a bit more about conscience and authority. I had recently been reading about the Charles Bonnet and Musical Ear syndromes. In these, visual or hearing loss, respectively, apparently causes the brain to confabulate visual or auditory data, respectively, to fill in the sensorily deprived blanks. In Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the sufferers see things like colored patterns, faces, cartoons, etc. In Musical Ear Syndrome, they are apt to hear music. The significant thing about both syndromes is that the sufferers are quite sane and fully realize that the incorrect sensory data they are receiving is mere hallucination (that the hallucinations are limited to a single faculty must help there). They may, however, be distressed due to worries that they are insane, particularly if they are misdiagnosed by a psychiatrist, as in a case I recall hearing of.

A reasonable sufferer from one of these two syndromes will accept the testimony of reliable others that what she visually or auditorily perceives isn't there. In so doing, she is genuinely being her own pilot. Indeed, if she were to uncritically accept the visual or auditory data, she wouldn't be being her own responsible pilot: she would be replacing considered judgment with the flow of experience. Likewise, my colorblind son defers to the color judgments of others; an object may look light green to him, but when others testify that it is light pink, he accepts their judgment, and in so doing exercises his epistemic autonomy.

I think something similar can and does happen in moral matters. We have moral intuitions. These moral intuitions can be more or less reliable. But of course raw moral intuitions do not have a final say. Even apart from authority, moral intuitions need to be harmonized. And it may turn out that the best moral theory fitting the bulk of one's moral intuitions can go against some of one's moral intuitions, and then a judgment must be made.

Moreover, there is nothing contrary to being one's own pilot in making a reasonable judgment that a family of one's moral intuitions, or even all of one's moral intuitions, are less reliable than the testimony of an individual or institution one has reason to trust. That is just much an exercise of one's epistemic autonomy as it would be to accept the moral intuitions over that testimony.

I think that sometimes we confuse conscience with moral intuitions. The deliverance of conscience is an all-things-considered judgment of what is morally to be done. It may take moral intuitions into account, but it may also take other relevant data into account as well. The deliverance of moral intuition is not, as such, the deliverance of conscience, though of course in the absence of evidence against the moral intuition, conscience is apt to reasonably accept the content of the moral intuition as true.

It is quite possible for one to reasonably come to the conclusion that one's moral intuitions are less reliable than the teaching of an authority. In such a case, when there is a conflict between one's moral intuition and a teaching of the authority, one's considered moral judgment will at least typically go with the teaching. (I say "at least typically" to leave open the possibility that, say, a particularly strong moral intuition might be judged more likely to be accurate than a teaching that the authority gives quite low weight to.) In so doing, one may very well be a responsible pilot of one's self, if the reasons for accepting the authority as reliable were very good ones.

And one is not going against conscience then. On the contrary, in such a case, it would go against conscience to follow the moral intuitions, because one's considered judgment is that the authority is more reliable than the intuitions.

Our moral intuitions while being a genuine source of moral knowledge are often distorted by the desire to find excuses for our own faults or, more excusably, those of friends. Moral intuitions should not be glorified with the name "conscience". Like a Charles Bonnet Syndrome patient, one can be reasonable in judging that one ought to submit to the judgment of another, and then the other's judgment is the deliverance of one's conscience.

At the same time, I should note that normally our moral intuitions will play a significant role in figuring out that a putative authority should be listened to. When the putative authority's teachings harmonize particularly with those moral intuitions that we take to be more reliable, that will count in favor of the claim to authority, and when they disagree, that will count against the claim to authority. Here I think there is a useful rule of thumb: moral intuitions that something is permissible are less to be trusted than moral intuitions that something is impermissible. An action is impermissible provided there is a conclusive moral reason not to do it. An action is permissible provided that there is no conclusive moral reason not to do it. Generally, perceptions of absence are less to be trusted than perceptions of presence. Moreover, the space of reasons is large, and to judge that none of the infinitely many considerations in that space gives conclusive reason not to do A is fraught witih difficulty. (Of course, judgments about permissibility are very often right, but perhaps only because of the base rate: most actions people perform are right.)

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.

Duties of conscience

Suppose that one affirms:

1. One ought always to do what conscience requires.
2. Conscience is fallible.

Then, I think, one ought also affirm:

3. It is possible for one to be obliged to do A and to be obliged to do B, where doing both A and B is logically impossible.
4. It is possible for one to be obliged to do something logically impossible.

The argument is plausibilistic. A conscience that can err is not going to be infallible about detecting logical incompatibilities and impossibilities. As a result, it should be possible for it to erroneously recommend something impossible, or to recommend two incompossible actions.

We can even give examples. Suppose I have a justified belief that I promised to draw a triangle, and another justified belief that I promised never to draw a figure whose angles add up to 180 degrees. A fallible conscience need not detect the incompatibility between the content of these two promises. And if it does not, then conscience will require me to do both things, even though it is impossible. Similarly, if I do not know that it is impossible to construct a 20 degree angle with straightedge and compass, and I have promised to construct a 20 degree angle with straightedge and compass, then conscience will require me to construct a 20 degree angle with straightedge and compass. But it is logically impossible (assuming that part of the concept of "construct" here is an assumption of the axioms of Euclidean geometry) to construct a 20 degree angle with straightedge and compass.[note 1]

Some may take this to be a strong argument against the conjunction of (1) and (2). Others may take this to be just an interesting consequence of it. I don't myself know what to do with this.

Thick ends

In an earlier post, I offered the hypothesis that an action's end already includes the means under some description, perhaps specific or perhaps general. If this hypothesis is right, then we get an interesting simplification of moral evaluation. Traditionally, deontologists have had to evaluate both the end and its means. But if the means are built into the end, then one of the steps in moral evaluation is removed.

How might one do this? Well, one might say that regardless of what E is, the end "E by any means" is the wrong end to pursue. Why? Because the specified means include morally illegitimate means. If this is right, then a virtuous person only wills ends like "E by any legitimate means" or "E by means of morally licit training" or "E by means of pressing the seventh button on the left when this is permissible".

This has some interesting consequences. Suppose that x is a virtuous agent who erroneously believes that a particular means m to E is morally licit. Then, x being virtuous wills "E by the licit means m" or something like that, and hence when x executes m to gain E, she fails to achieve her end, since her end is not just E but "E by the licit means m". Hence, we can say something about what goes wrong when someone in good conscience does wrong, or at least does wrong in this way: she fails to achieve what she was trying to achieve.

In such cases, we get a different way of answering a puzzle that Cardinal Ratzinger raises: Why not count as fortunate people who in good conscience act wrongly? Aren't they lucky that their conscience leads them astray, since as a result they are non-culpable in their wrongdoing? (Ratzinger's solution was that errors of conscience are preceded by earlier sins that led to the errors.) The solution is that, at least in cases of inappropriate means, the virtuous person who in erring conscience does wrong is one who fails to achieve her ends, though she may erroneously think she succeeds. But a failure to achieve one's ends is surely an unfortunate thing, and hence we cannot count this person entirely lucky. True, it is better to fail innocently than to clearheadedly do wrong and be culpable, but it is clearly better yet to do clearheadedly succeed at doing right.

If one can extend the theory to include the circumstances in the ends, we achieve a further theoretical simplification.

Of course, as in all simplifications, one runs the risk of losing some important distinctions when one does these things.