Virtue, Motive, and Permissibility

2017

A common objection to the view that one’s intentions are non-derivatively relevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions is that it confuses permissibility with other categories of moral evaluation, in particular, with blameworthiness or character assessment. The objection states that a failure to distinguish what one is permitted to do from what kind of a person one is, or from what one can be held blameworthy for, leads one to believe that intentions are relevant to permissibility when in fact they are only relevant to blameworthiness or to character assessment. In this paper, I argue that this objection is mistaken. I defend two claims: first, that a confusion of moral categories is not the source of the view that intentions are relevant to permissibility and, second, that in conjunction with some other premises a confusion does not undermine that view.

2008

Many people believe in the intention principle, according to which an agent’s intention in performing an act can sometimes make an act that would otherwise have been permissible impermissible, other things being equal. Judith Jarvis Thomson, Frances Kamm and Thomas Scanlon have offered cases that seem to show that it can be permissible for an agent to act even when the agent has bad intentions. If valid, these cases would seem to cast doubt on the intention principle. In this paper, I point out that these cases have confounding factors that have received little attention in the literature. I argue that these confounding factors undermine the putative force of these cases against the intention principle. Indeed, when cases without these confounding factors are considered, it becomes clear, so I argue, that intentions can be relevant for the permissibility of an act.

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it.

Critical discussion of Thomson's and Scanlon's arguments against the view that the permissibility of an action may depend on the intention with which it is done. I argue that intentions can determine permissibility, but in a way that is different from the principle of double effect.

Kantian Themes from the Philosophy of Thomas E. Hill, Jr., 2015

Normative ethics asks, what makes right acts right? W.D. Ross attempted to answer this question in The Right and the Good. Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross’s intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, McNaughton states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I’ll show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what makes right acts right. Deontological theories have struggled to say what internal to acts could make them right. From Price to Ross, the striking but uninformative answer has been the nature of the act. In this paper I’ll provide a Rossian theory of the moral natures of acts. It contains a set of self-evident principles of moral stringency and other considerations that can assist agents in deciding what prima facie duty overrides what.

Ethics, 2009

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons, No Reasons, and Reasons of Virtue (in The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness, ed. by Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno, Routledge, July 2014) Situationist critics of virtue ethics argue that, in many morally significant situations, most of us unwittingly act for bad reasons – or for no reason. Situational factors trigger automatic cognitive processes that bypass intentional control. But virtue requires such control. Hence, if these claims are true, most of us lack genuine virtue. Too often, however, these claims are made without good reason, because the experimental evidence supports alternative interpretations that are compatible with the agent being in control and acting for the right reason. To the extent that these claims are justified, neo-Aristotelian ethics can modify its requirements, because it is committed to basing them on human nature. If some of its requirements are beyond our capacities, then those requirements have no place in the theory, except as part of a regulative ideal.

Some philosophers believe that a change in motive alone is sometimes sufficient to bring about a change in the deontic status (rightness or wrongness) of an action. I refer to this position as ‘weak motivism’, and distinguish it from ‘strong’ and ‘partial motivism’. I examine a number of cases where our intuitive judgements appear to support the weak motivist’s thesis, and argue that in each case an alternative explanation can be given for why a change in motive brings about (or, in some cases, appears to bring about) a change in deontic status.

The dissertation is a defense of the view that intentions with which we act are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of our actions. What we intend might indicate what kind of people we are, or whether and why we should be open to praise or blame, but it is never a reason why we are morally permitted or forbidden to act. The Doctrines of Double and Triple Effect and similar moral principles are rejected. The most prominent arguments in favor of the irrelevance of intentions—those pointing to a category mistake, the impossibility of choosing intentions, or to the oddness of considering them in decision making or of intervening in actions of others due to them—are also shown to be flawed. The conclusion reached is that the strongest evidence for the irrelevance of intentions is negative, based on the failure of case-based, principle-driven, and theoretical justifications to the contrary.