Perhaps the root notion of responsibility concerns the sense in which we use the term to indicate mere causal efficacy as when we say things like, "The leaking value is responsible for the water in the basement," or "An infestation of locusts was responsible for poor crop production and starvation in Eastern Africa last year."
In these cases we attribute responsibility, in the sense of causal efficacy, without also imputing agency or intentionality to the cause. The causal sense of responsibility differs from the moral senses of the term in that it carries no implication of praise or blame. Responsibility in this sense has to do with mere happenings rather than with doings. Non-agentive causal factors can be said to be 'responsible' for producing effects in this basic sense of the term.
The locust infestation case represents agent causality. As living beings, locusts are agents, that is, they act autonomously and their actions evince a certain purpose that is, in this case, built into their biological program. Locusts, like other living things, need to take in energy from their environments in order to survive and reproduce. The locusts did not intend to cause human beings to starve; they only intended to feed themselves. While it is possible to impute agency and a kind of intentionality to things like locusts, we do not treat them as moral agents, that is, we do not hold them responsible for their actions in the moral sense of having liability and being subject to moral blame. The question of how far down the tree of life agency and intentionality go is a difficult and complex one. I will discuss it later on in the sections on agency and intrinsic value. But for the time being it suffices to note that non-human agents can be responsible in the causal sense but not also in the moral sense.
When applied to human beings attributions of responsibility can sometimes take this form, that is, agentive causal efficacy, as when we say an infant was responsible for spilling some milk on the rug. The infant did not spill the milk intentionally or deliberately, but the infant is responsible for spilling it nonetheless, but only in the causal sense. This is an example of agent causality but without any imputation of intentionality or purpose.
In law, the insanity defense rests on the possibility of distinguishing among cases in which the agent acted knowingly and intentionally, in which case they are held morally responsible for the consequences of their actions, from cases where the actions were unknowing, unintended, or compelled, even though the defendant may have been causally responsible for some harm.
Even fully competent moral agents may sometimes be causally responsible for producing effects though they did not intend them nor deliberately act to produce them, as when we accidentally knock over the coffee mug. The idea expressed by this sense of responsibility can also be applied in cases in which the subject of responsibility is a person, however, except for cases such as those noted above, when applied to persons there is normally also an attribution of intentionality and moral agency that goes along with the assertion of causal efficacy.
The assumption of intentionality and moral agency is generally held to be necessary to ground ascriptions of moral, as opposed to mere causal responsibility, and is seen as a necessary precondition for the further ascription of "responsibility" in the senses of "accountability", "culpability", or "liability."
However, it is important to note that not all attributions of responsibility in the senses of accountability or liability presuppose causal responsibility. We may, for instance, hold a military officer liable for the actions of a soldier under his command, even though the officer was not the cause of those actions himself. While responsibilities, in the moral sense, are limited by the range of our causal powers, that is, by the range of effects which we have produced or can causally influence, there is no necessary connection between an agent being the cause of some effect X and his being morally responsible for it.
Ascriptions of liability, culpability, and blame require the presumption of moral agency, which in turn requires the presumption of intentionality as well as further conditions such as whether the act was a voluntary one or done under duress, whether the actor did or should have foreseen the consequence, and assumptions about the agent’s moral competence. Moral agency is also a necessary condition of being the bearer of moral duties and obligations. But it is not a necessary condition of being the object of the moral duties and obligations of others. Things which can function as the direct objects of moral duties and obligations I call "moral patients." Moral agents can also be moral patients, but moral patients need not also be moral agents. I will drill down further into the meaning of these terms in other posts.
Showing posts with label moral patients. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moral patients. Show all posts
Moral Patients
We need to understand that while only moral agents, or persons, can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities, it is not the case that only moral agents can function as their objects. As I shall use the term, a moral patient is something that can function as the object of the moral responsibilities of moral agents, that is, something to which moral attitudes such as moral concern, respect, or care can be directed.
Moral patients are things towards which moral agents can have moral responsibilities. On this definition, all moral agents are also moral patients, but moral patients need not be moral agents. Only moral agents can function as the bearers of moral obligations towards others, while moral patients can be the objects of the moral obligations of others, but need not themselves be capable of moral agency.
We generally think of other adult human beings as moral agents, even though some adult human beings lack the effective capacity for moral agency, for instance, persons in comas. To qualify as a moral agent, one must satisfy the criteria generally accepted for mental competence as required for ascriptions of moral responsibility in the sense of liability for moral blame or praise. The actions of moral agents can be evaluated morally as to their blame or praiseworthiness, but not, for instance, the actions of infants and most animals. Nonhuman animals because they lack an effective capacity for moral agency can be readily classified as moral patients.
Thus, a moral patient does not have to be a moral agent or person, but could, for instance, also be nonhuman animals or an entire species, plants, microorganisms, an ecosystem, or even perhaps an inanimate object such as a work of art or a prized possession. The category of moral patients might be quite large and quite differentiated. It will need to be defined further.
Some kinds of moral patients are also agents, just not moral agents. In using the terms 'agent' and 'patient' I do not mean to imply that moral patients lack agency in their own right, or that moral agents cannot also be acted upon by moral patients. A shark, which is a moral patient can kill a man. A human infant, which is another kind of moral patient, can evoke in most human adults a caring impulse. Moral agents act upon moral patients and vice versa. In order to be considered a moral patient, that is, as the object of a moral responsibility, an entity must have some kind and degree of moral status.
As Francis Kamm has noted, there is a broad sense of moral status in which the concept can be defined as "what it is permissible or impermissible to do to some entity. In this sense, rocks may have the moral status of entities to which, just considering them, it is morally permissible to do anything" (F. M. Kamm. Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 227). But we normally use the term in a narrower sense as a contrast between "entities that in some important sense 'count' morally in their own right, and so are said to have moral status, and others that do not count morally in their own right." I will employ the term "moral standing" to denote things which count morally in their own rights either because of their intrinsic properties or relational properties. Having moral standing is a kind of moral status; other things like ordinary rocks do not have moral standing because they have the moral status of things to which we can do anything we please. Some other things which we cannot affect at all by means of human action have a different kind of moral status. The planet Jupiter or the Carina Nebula would fall into this category and would also lack moral standing.
Kamm endorses a suggestion by Christine Korsgaard that entities do not have to be considered to have an intrinsic value in order to have moral status in this sense; they only need to be considered as ends in the sense that some aspect of their good can "provide a reason (even if an overrideable one) for attitudes and actions independent of other considerations" (228). For instance, Kamm says, "A work of art or a tree may count in its own right in the sense that it gives us reason to constrain our behavior toward it (for example, not destroy it) just because that would preserve this entity" (228).
But Kamm further distinguishes doing something to an entity "for its own sake and not just in its own right." For Kamm only entities that have the capacity for sentience or consciousness can qualify as objects for whose sakes we can have moral obligations. I agree that entities which have the psychological capacities necessary for sentience have moral standing and are therefore moral patients. But I disagree with Kamm and also believe that there are organisms which are not sentient towards which we can act morally in their own rights even though they do not have interests in the psychological sense. All of those living things whose well-being can be affected for better or worse by the actions of moral agents can, on this view, be considered to have some kind or degree of moral standing and can therefore function as moral patients within the vulnerability relation.
To clarify the notion of moral status further, Kamm argues that, "there is a difference between one's having a duty to do something and having a duty to a specific entity to do it" (230). When we have a duty to someone, it typically creates a "correlative right or claim had by the entity to which the duty is owed against the person who owes it." We say that we act wrongly when we fail to fulfill a duty or responsibility to do something, but we say that we have wronged someone when we fail to fulfill our duty towards them as a right-holder. The party to whom a moral obligation is owed (its addressee) is not necessarily the party who is benefited or affected by that obligation (its object). This can be made clear by means of an example or two.
Suppose that Sam has mother, Judith, who has had a stroke which left her severely incapacitated and in need of care. But Sam has a job and a young family to care for as well, so he hires Gwen, a professional nurse, who promises Sam to take care of Sam's mother Judith while he is at work. In this example, Sam has a moral responsibility to care for his mother when she is vulnerable and depending upon him for her care, but he can delegate this responsibility to another caregiver who then enters in as a party to this moral relationship.
In this triangular moral relationship Gwen is a duty-bearer; she has a duty to Sam to take care of his mother Judith. Sam is the right-holder and the addressee of Gwen's duty since it is Sam who would be wronged by Gwen if she failed to properly discharge her duties. Judith is an object and beneficiary of Gwen's duty. Judith is in this case is a moral patient who is also a moral agent but who functions as the indirect object of Gwen's moral obligations. Sam functions as the direct object of Gwen's responsibility because she owes her duty to Sam. While Gwen owes her duty to Sam, because of her promise was addressed to him, Judith is the object of Gwen's duty because Gwen now has a responsibility to care for Judith that was delegated to her by Sam. On this account, Sam has a right against Gwen, and Gwen has a duty she owes to Sam, but Gwen also has a moral responsibility towards Judith who is the object and the beneficiary of her care. Judith is the object of Gwen's duties, but Sam is the right-holder who is in a position to demand that Gwen fulfill her responsibilities.
This is an example of how moral patients can function as the objects of a moral agent's obligations although they are not themselves are not right-holders in the relevant sense. Thus, a moral patient can be the object of the moral responsibilities of others without having rights against them.
One can drive this point home more forcefully by substituting something that is not a human being for Judith. Suppose we vary the case and stipulate that Sam asked Gwen to water his plants while he was away on vacation. Sam's plants are not moral agents, nor are they sentient, and are not the kind of things that can have rights. But Gwen still has a duty towards the plants because of the promise she has given to Sam. Sam has rights against Gwen, but Sam's plants don't.
Or consider the case in which Sam asks Gwen to take care of his 1200cc Harley Davidson motorcycle for him, say to change its oil and polish its chrome. In this case we would say that Gwen has a responsibility concerning Sam's Harley, but many people would be disinclined to say that the motorcycle is the object her responsibilities. Sam is still the addressee of Gwen's duties and he would be wronged if she does not do as she has promised. But motorcycles, and most other inanimate, non-living material artifacts, are not normally considered to be things that we can have obligations towards. In such cases, I will say that the object in question has a derived, or observer-relative kind of moral status. Its status is derived from the interests of moral patients who have "goods of their own" or can be regarded as "ends in themselves," but the object of the obligation, its beneficiary, itself cannot.
There can also be cases where a single entity, for example, another person, functions both as the object or beneficiary and the right-older with respect to someone else's duties. When rights ground moral responsibilities, for example, a duty, to refrain from torturing another person by subjecting them to electrical shocks, my duty corresponds to a right on her part not to be tortured. Here the object of my responsibilities and their beneficiary are the same individual. Rights ground moral duties that are in the interest of the right-holders. If I commit torture I both harm the person I torture and I wrong him because I have violated a right which he has against me.
However, when we have moral responsibilities concerning moral patients who are not also moral agents, no such rights are involved. So, for example, I may have a duty not to destroy a tree without good reason because the tree has a moral status, which (other things being equal), gives me reason not to destroy it. But this moral duty does not correlate with right on the part of the tree, and I will not have wronged the tree if I destroy it, although I may still have done something wrong. Trees and other kinds of living things can be moral patients that function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents without their also qualifying as right-holders.
Moral agents can have moral responsibilities that are other-regarding towards (or concerning) both other moral agents and towards various categories of moral patients having intrinsic and derived moral status. Moral agents can also have self-regarding moral responsibilities, that is, persons have can have moral responsibilities to themselves. Moral patients are, in general, things which are valuable and vulnerable to human action in a variety of different ways. Things which cannot be affected for good or for ill by human actions cannot be considered to be moral patients at all. The planet Jupiter, for instance, which is only a great gaseous sphere in space, is something which cannot be a moral patient because we cannot affect it in any way that might be considered as mattering to its "good" or "well-being." The limits of human action also mark the outer limits of possible human responsibilities.
We cannot have moral responsibilities concerning those things whose well-being we cannot affect through our action or inaction. We can't really do anything to Jupiter even though we have now shot satellites into it to try to learn more about it. But this action did not harm Jupiter in any way. Jupiter is, in fact, not even the sort of thing which can be harmed. We can only harm those things which can be thought of as having a well-being or a good of their own. The planet Jupiter has no good of its own, and even if it did, its good could not be affected in any way by human action, which is just another way of saying that things like the planet Jupiter cannot be moral patients.
However, I think that we can have moral responsibilities concerning the Earth, since we can affect the earth for good or ill by our actions. Unlike Jupiter, the Earth has a moral status of its own which derives from its being a living planet – a place in the cosmos where the phenomenon of life has emerged. Perhaps there are other planets in the universe where life has arisen. Personally, I believe that Earth cannot be the only site of life in the cosmos, but at this stage in humanity's scientific understanding of the universe we don't know this. However, we do know that life exists on Earth and that this fact makes Earth rather special. On the bio-centric view of moral value I will develop shortly, life is the basis of intrinsic value.
Moral patients are things towards which moral agents can have moral responsibilities. On this definition, all moral agents are also moral patients, but moral patients need not be moral agents. Only moral agents can function as the bearers of moral obligations towards others, while moral patients can be the objects of the moral obligations of others, but need not themselves be capable of moral agency.
We generally think of other adult human beings as moral agents, even though some adult human beings lack the effective capacity for moral agency, for instance, persons in comas. To qualify as a moral agent, one must satisfy the criteria generally accepted for mental competence as required for ascriptions of moral responsibility in the sense of liability for moral blame or praise. The actions of moral agents can be evaluated morally as to their blame or praiseworthiness, but not, for instance, the actions of infants and most animals. Nonhuman animals because they lack an effective capacity for moral agency can be readily classified as moral patients.
Thus, a moral patient does not have to be a moral agent or person, but could, for instance, also be nonhuman animals or an entire species, plants, microorganisms, an ecosystem, or even perhaps an inanimate object such as a work of art or a prized possession. The category of moral patients might be quite large and quite differentiated. It will need to be defined further.
Some kinds of moral patients are also agents, just not moral agents. In using the terms 'agent' and 'patient' I do not mean to imply that moral patients lack agency in their own right, or that moral agents cannot also be acted upon by moral patients. A shark, which is a moral patient can kill a man. A human infant, which is another kind of moral patient, can evoke in most human adults a caring impulse. Moral agents act upon moral patients and vice versa. In order to be considered a moral patient, that is, as the object of a moral responsibility, an entity must have some kind and degree of moral status.
As Francis Kamm has noted, there is a broad sense of moral status in which the concept can be defined as "what it is permissible or impermissible to do to some entity. In this sense, rocks may have the moral status of entities to which, just considering them, it is morally permissible to do anything" (F. M. Kamm. Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 227). But we normally use the term in a narrower sense as a contrast between "entities that in some important sense 'count' morally in their own right, and so are said to have moral status, and others that do not count morally in their own right." I will employ the term "moral standing" to denote things which count morally in their own rights either because of their intrinsic properties or relational properties. Having moral standing is a kind of moral status; other things like ordinary rocks do not have moral standing because they have the moral status of things to which we can do anything we please. Some other things which we cannot affect at all by means of human action have a different kind of moral status. The planet Jupiter or the Carina Nebula would fall into this category and would also lack moral standing.
Kamm endorses a suggestion by Christine Korsgaard that entities do not have to be considered to have an intrinsic value in order to have moral status in this sense; they only need to be considered as ends in the sense that some aspect of their good can "provide a reason (even if an overrideable one) for attitudes and actions independent of other considerations" (228). For instance, Kamm says, "A work of art or a tree may count in its own right in the sense that it gives us reason to constrain our behavior toward it (for example, not destroy it) just because that would preserve this entity" (228).
But Kamm further distinguishes doing something to an entity "for its own sake and not just in its own right." For Kamm only entities that have the capacity for sentience or consciousness can qualify as objects for whose sakes we can have moral obligations. I agree that entities which have the psychological capacities necessary for sentience have moral standing and are therefore moral patients. But I disagree with Kamm and also believe that there are organisms which are not sentient towards which we can act morally in their own rights even though they do not have interests in the psychological sense. All of those living things whose well-being can be affected for better or worse by the actions of moral agents can, on this view, be considered to have some kind or degree of moral standing and can therefore function as moral patients within the vulnerability relation.
To clarify the notion of moral status further, Kamm argues that, "there is a difference between one's having a duty to do something and having a duty to a specific entity to do it" (230). When we have a duty to someone, it typically creates a "correlative right or claim had by the entity to which the duty is owed against the person who owes it." We say that we act wrongly when we fail to fulfill a duty or responsibility to do something, but we say that we have wronged someone when we fail to fulfill our duty towards them as a right-holder. The party to whom a moral obligation is owed (its addressee) is not necessarily the party who is benefited or affected by that obligation (its object). This can be made clear by means of an example or two.
Suppose that Sam has mother, Judith, who has had a stroke which left her severely incapacitated and in need of care. But Sam has a job and a young family to care for as well, so he hires Gwen, a professional nurse, who promises Sam to take care of Sam's mother Judith while he is at work. In this example, Sam has a moral responsibility to care for his mother when she is vulnerable and depending upon him for her care, but he can delegate this responsibility to another caregiver who then enters in as a party to this moral relationship.
In this triangular moral relationship Gwen is a duty-bearer; she has a duty to Sam to take care of his mother Judith. Sam is the right-holder and the addressee of Gwen's duty since it is Sam who would be wronged by Gwen if she failed to properly discharge her duties. Judith is an object and beneficiary of Gwen's duty. Judith is in this case is a moral patient who is also a moral agent but who functions as the indirect object of Gwen's moral obligations. Sam functions as the direct object of Gwen's responsibility because she owes her duty to Sam. While Gwen owes her duty to Sam, because of her promise was addressed to him, Judith is the object of Gwen's duty because Gwen now has a responsibility to care for Judith that was delegated to her by Sam. On this account, Sam has a right against Gwen, and Gwen has a duty she owes to Sam, but Gwen also has a moral responsibility towards Judith who is the object and the beneficiary of her care. Judith is the object of Gwen's duties, but Sam is the right-holder who is in a position to demand that Gwen fulfill her responsibilities.
This is an example of how moral patients can function as the objects of a moral agent's obligations although they are not themselves are not right-holders in the relevant sense. Thus, a moral patient can be the object of the moral responsibilities of others without having rights against them.
One can drive this point home more forcefully by substituting something that is not a human being for Judith. Suppose we vary the case and stipulate that Sam asked Gwen to water his plants while he was away on vacation. Sam's plants are not moral agents, nor are they sentient, and are not the kind of things that can have rights. But Gwen still has a duty towards the plants because of the promise she has given to Sam. Sam has rights against Gwen, but Sam's plants don't.
Or consider the case in which Sam asks Gwen to take care of his 1200cc Harley Davidson motorcycle for him, say to change its oil and polish its chrome. In this case we would say that Gwen has a responsibility concerning Sam's Harley, but many people would be disinclined to say that the motorcycle is the object her responsibilities. Sam is still the addressee of Gwen's duties and he would be wronged if she does not do as she has promised. But motorcycles, and most other inanimate, non-living material artifacts, are not normally considered to be things that we can have obligations towards. In such cases, I will say that the object in question has a derived, or observer-relative kind of moral status. Its status is derived from the interests of moral patients who have "goods of their own" or can be regarded as "ends in themselves," but the object of the obligation, its beneficiary, itself cannot.
There can also be cases where a single entity, for example, another person, functions both as the object or beneficiary and the right-older with respect to someone else's duties. When rights ground moral responsibilities, for example, a duty, to refrain from torturing another person by subjecting them to electrical shocks, my duty corresponds to a right on her part not to be tortured. Here the object of my responsibilities and their beneficiary are the same individual. Rights ground moral duties that are in the interest of the right-holders. If I commit torture I both harm the person I torture and I wrong him because I have violated a right which he has against me.
However, when we have moral responsibilities concerning moral patients who are not also moral agents, no such rights are involved. So, for example, I may have a duty not to destroy a tree without good reason because the tree has a moral status, which (other things being equal), gives me reason not to destroy it. But this moral duty does not correlate with right on the part of the tree, and I will not have wronged the tree if I destroy it, although I may still have done something wrong. Trees and other kinds of living things can be moral patients that function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents without their also qualifying as right-holders.
Moral agents can have moral responsibilities that are other-regarding towards (or concerning) both other moral agents and towards various categories of moral patients having intrinsic and derived moral status. Moral agents can also have self-regarding moral responsibilities, that is, persons have can have moral responsibilities to themselves. Moral patients are, in general, things which are valuable and vulnerable to human action in a variety of different ways. Things which cannot be affected for good or for ill by human actions cannot be considered to be moral patients at all. The planet Jupiter, for instance, which is only a great gaseous sphere in space, is something which cannot be a moral patient because we cannot affect it in any way that might be considered as mattering to its "good" or "well-being." The limits of human action also mark the outer limits of possible human responsibilities.
We cannot have moral responsibilities concerning those things whose well-being we cannot affect through our action or inaction. We can't really do anything to Jupiter even though we have now shot satellites into it to try to learn more about it. But this action did not harm Jupiter in any way. Jupiter is, in fact, not even the sort of thing which can be harmed. We can only harm those things which can be thought of as having a well-being or a good of their own. The planet Jupiter has no good of its own, and even if it did, its good could not be affected in any way by human action, which is just another way of saying that things like the planet Jupiter cannot be moral patients.
However, I think that we can have moral responsibilities concerning the Earth, since we can affect the earth for good or ill by our actions. Unlike Jupiter, the Earth has a moral status of its own which derives from its being a living planet – a place in the cosmos where the phenomenon of life has emerged. Perhaps there are other planets in the universe where life has arisen. Personally, I believe that Earth cannot be the only site of life in the cosmos, but at this stage in humanity's scientific understanding of the universe we don't know this. However, we do know that life exists on Earth and that this fact makes Earth rather special. On the bio-centric view of moral value I will develop shortly, life is the basis of intrinsic value.
Moral Weight and Prima Facie Duties
Earlier I introduced the concept of moral gravity and illustrated it with some examples of how moral stature interacts with moral gravity to determine the weight of our moral obligations to protect the vulnerable. I want to develop this idea a bit further now into a general schema for thinking about the notion of the weight of different moral obligations in general.
Intuitively we all think that certain moral obligations are more compelling, that is, weightier, than others. This kind of intuition is particularly important when we are called upon to resolve conflicts among our prima facie duties. The notion of a prima facie duty was introduced by W. D. Ross as a way of reinterpreting the notion of categorical imperatives in Kantian ethics. Although Ross gave various interpretations of this notion, it is now generally understood among moral philosophers that one has a prima facie duty to do something just in case an agent has some reason to think that he or she has a moral obligation to act in a certain way, and that reason does not involve an appeal to personal inclination or self-interest or to the total consequences of performing that action. He writes that,
In each case of a proposed prima facie duty moral agents are thought to have a pro tanto reason for acting in the ways that a description of a duty provides just because it is the sort of reason that counts as a moral reason for action. As I will use this expression, one has a pro tanto moral reason to do A, when one is aware of a state of affairs S that provides a moral reason for A-ing, even if there are other states of affairs of which one might become aware that would give one a moral (or other) reason not to A.
Prima facie duties are usually contrasted with “all things considered” moral duties, that is, ones in which all of the morally relevant factors have been taken into consideration in a process of moral deliberation before deciding whether the agent does in fact have an actual or operative duty to do something. As Shelley Kagan explains it: “To say that something is your duty all things considered is to say that you are required to do it given all of the relevant factors that are relevant to the case at hand. In contrast, to say of something that it is a prima facie duty is only to note the presence of one or more of the factors that would generate an all things considered duty—in the absence of conflicting factors.”
Ross himself expressed some dissatisfaction with the term “prima facie duty” and suggested that perhaps “conditional duty” or “claim” might better capture his meaning, but ultimately rejected these alternatives. The term “prima facie” is unfortunate because it suggests that the duty is only apparent, and the phrase “all things considered” is rather cumbersome. In my discussion I will use the term “standing moral responsibility” in place of “prima facie duty”, and the terms “actual” (or sometimes “operative”) moral obligation, for the notion of an all things considered duty.
So then, if moral agents have in general a standing moral responsibility to protect vulnerable moral patients, then it will often be the case that different special responsibilities generated by this general standing moral responsibility will come into conflict with one another. How does one resolve these kinds of conflicts? Ross feel back on moral intuition, but perhaps we can do better than that. The idea that there might be a formula of some kind that we could use to actually calculate the weight of our moral responsibilities has appealed to many philosophers, though none has come up with a satisfactory account. I don't think my account is ultimately satisfactory either: it is presented as a heuristic device to aid the understanding of the set of normative factors that might potentially influence judgments of these kinds.
The basic schema is as follows:
W = A x O x P
where W stands for the weight of a particular prima facie duty or standing moral responsibility, A stands for agent-relative factors, O stands for the kind of obligation involved, that is, the gravity of the interest or value that is being protected by having such an obligation, and P stands for patient-relative moral factors, such as the moral stature of the patients to whom the agent's obligation is directed.
We can illustrate how this schema works using simple thought experiments in which we hold two of the three variables constant and vary the third. For example, if we specify that the A is a competent moral agent with no special relationship to the patient involved, and the P is a normal healthy human child, then we can vary the O factor as follows: Suppose O is the obligation not to murder. This is a weighty moral obligation. It is weightier than the obligation not to injure, which is in turn weightier than the obligation to provide some benefit to a moral patient. So, if killing is given the value 100, and injuring the value 75, and benefiting the value 25, and we set A and P to 1 each, then, the schema predicts that the prima facie responsibility not to kill the child is weightier than the similar obligation not to injure it, which is weightier than the obligation to provide the child with a benefit. This is in turn explained by the fact that the underlying interests involved have greater gravity in relationship to the patient's well-being or good. So, O is going to be an independent variable that will affect our judgment about the weights of various moral obligations we might have. Other things being equal, the more grave the interest involved the weightier the corresponding moral obligation.
But, let's hold the O factor the same and vary the P factor, that is, the moral stature of the patient involved. Suppose that one patient is the normal healthy child as above and another is a sentient non-human animal such as say a rabbit. Let's put the child and the rabbit on the trolley tracks so that the moral agent involved has to make a forced choice between injuring the child and injuring the rabbit. In this case, we would assign the P factor a high value, say 100, and the rabbit a smaller, but not insignificant value, say 50. Since the A and O factors are held constant, the schema predicts that our choice should be to injure the rabbit, since our obligation to refrain from injuring sentient nonhuman animals is less weighty than our corresponding obligations not to injuring human beings, because the former have lower moral stature. And this is what the schema predicts (roughly) that in a forced choice between these two prima facie responsibilities, we should choose to save the child.
But this is still far too simple to account for our moral intuitions. We can see this by introducing quantities of moral patients.
W = A x O x (nP)
where n is a number of patients. Suppose that instead of one rabbit on the tracks we have 50 rabbits and one is still forced to choose between injuring one child and injuring 50 rabbits. If we use the values for moral stature I suggested earlier, the obvious conclusion would be that the obligation not to injure 50 rabbits is 25 times weightier than the obligation not to injure one child. But is it? We can fudge this by assigning an arbitrarily low value to the nonhuman patients involved, say 1 as opposed to 50, but this seems pretty arbitrary and just an ad hoc way of saving the intuition that human interests matter more than nonhuman interests. As I said before, if your view is that human interests, no matter how trivial, will always outweigh animal interests, then my theory is not for you.
But clearly quantities do matter. We can see this using standard cases in which there is a forced choice between steering the trolley so it collides with one innocent helpless person who is tied to the tracks or steering it so it will collide with five innocent helpless persons who are tied to the other track. Most everyone who is asked about such cases comes to the conclusion that it is preferable to injure or kill one person than it is to injure or kill five, other things being equal.
But what if that one person is your own mother? Here is where the notions of derived or observer-relative moral status and moral partiality come into play so as to raise the stakes involved and change the moral calculation. Suppose that on one track lies your own mother, and on the other a complete stranger. The additional moral stature your own mother has in your eyes would give her life greater value than the life of a mere stranger, and so, if forced to choose, most of us would (perhaps reluctantly) steer the trolley into the stranger. Except, of course, if your own mother was an evil-doer who abused you as a child. This kind of consideration lowers your mother's moral stature and makes it more likely that you would choose to sacrifice her for the stranger, who, presumably, is innocent. These kinds of considerations have nothing to do with the intrinsic moral standing of the patient, but rather, are due to the patient's derived moral status. In order to account for these kinds of factors, we shall have to make the proposed schema even more complex:
W = A x O x n(P +/- D)
where D represents the increment or decrement of moral stature in a moral patient due to their relational or derived moral status.
We probably also have to complicate the A factor, which we have taken to represent a normal adult human moral agent. But in addition to their standing moral responsibilities, moral agents can also have various kinds of special responsibilities due to the particular roles they occupy, their own past actions, the promises they have made, and so forth. These additional sorts of agent-relative factors can also affect the weight of an obligation, sometimes in crucial ways. So, for instance, if a physician happens to be on the scene when another person suffers a heart attack along with a non-physician, most people would I think judge that the obligation of the physician to attempt to help this person is weightier than the obligation of the non-medical bystander. It would be even greater is the medical person is a trained EMT who has been in fact summoned to the scene by a 911 call. Such an individual has a strict duty to provide aid to the patient in distress, which ordinary bystanders do not have. So, then, we need to make the schema look something like this:
W = (A +/-R) x O x n(P +/-D)
where R stands for agent-relative factors, such as social roles, that function to increase or decrease the agent's level of responsibility.
Again, this formula is just illustrative. It is far from clear what the relationship is among these different sorts of normative factors. I have represented them in terms of multiplication and addition, but I could have equally well used powers, or logarithms to the variables and the way they interact. In fact, it is not possible to determine the precise formula for thinking about these kinds of issue by doing armchair philosophical thought experiments like the ones I have been offerring. One needs to actually develop a range of cases and present them to subjects and measure their responses, and then find the data points, and then choose which sort of formula (if any) best fits the curve. That is, it might be doable through empirical moral psychological research, but even then, it is not going to be easy.
Yet as moral agents we make these kinds of judgments all the time. Assuming that our moral intuitions are not wholly arbitrary, it must then be the case that our brains are following some kinds of patterns or using some kinds of algorithms to arrive at judgment about the relative weights of our moral duties. But we are obviously a long way from understanding how we make these kinds of complex moral judgments. Which is why moral philosophers such as Ross, and I, fall back on using the intuitions of expert moral judges as the basis for deciding among conflicting moral responsibilities. Moral intuitions may be slippery and uncertain, but they are still better than simplistic formulas as a guide to moral judgment.
However, even simplistic moral formulas have some value in that they can be used to help us disentangle the different sorts of normative factors than can affect our intuitive judgments about the weight of different duties and responsibilities. The schema presented here is offerred only as a first rough approximation, a heuristic, that tells us that there are at least three basic kinds of normative factors that can affect the moral weight of an obligation: those related to the agent, those related to the type of obligation or interest involved, and those related to the patient's moral stature. This already gives us a lot of complexity, but I doubt it is adequate as it stands, since it leaves out what are called contextual factors, for instance, what the knock-on consequences of certain actions for other moral patients, and 'threshold effects', that is, when the harm done by fulfilling a prima facie obligation to say, refrain from restricting the free movement a person, would be so great as to tip the balance in favor of doing so, as for instance, when the person involved is the carrier of a serious infectious disease who might spread it to others. Such thresholds can alter our judgments even when duties derived from basic human rights are involved. So I am not claiming a lot for my schema; only that it is a way of starting to get a handle on these very complex matters.
Intuitively we all think that certain moral obligations are more compelling, that is, weightier, than others. This kind of intuition is particularly important when we are called upon to resolve conflicts among our prima facie duties. The notion of a prima facie duty was introduced by W. D. Ross as a way of reinterpreting the notion of categorical imperatives in Kantian ethics. Although Ross gave various interpretations of this notion, it is now generally understood among moral philosophers that one has a prima facie duty to do something just in case an agent has some reason to think that he or she has a moral obligation to act in a certain way, and that reason does not involve an appeal to personal inclination or self-interest or to the total consequences of performing that action. He writes that,
When a plain main fulfils a promise because he thinks he ought to do so, it seems clear that he does so with no thought of its total consequences, still less with any opinion that these are likely to be the best possible. He thinks in fact much more of the past than of the future. What makes him think it right to act in a certain way is the fact that he has promised to do so – that and, usually, nothing more.Ross provided examples of six prima facie duties: fidelity, gratitude, justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and self-improvement, but suggested that there might be many more. So, for instance, in addition to such standard prima facie duties as “One ought to keep ones promises” or “One ought to refrain from injuring others,” there might be prima facie duties such as, “One ought not to discriminate against persons on account of their race,” or, “One ought not to believe things which are not true,” or “One ought to ensure that those accused of crimes get fair trials.”
In each case of a proposed prima facie duty moral agents are thought to have a pro tanto reason for acting in the ways that a description of a duty provides just because it is the sort of reason that counts as a moral reason for action. As I will use this expression, one has a pro tanto moral reason to do A, when one is aware of a state of affairs S that provides a moral reason for A-ing, even if there are other states of affairs of which one might become aware that would give one a moral (or other) reason not to A.
Prima facie duties are usually contrasted with “all things considered” moral duties, that is, ones in which all of the morally relevant factors have been taken into consideration in a process of moral deliberation before deciding whether the agent does in fact have an actual or operative duty to do something. As Shelley Kagan explains it: “To say that something is your duty all things considered is to say that you are required to do it given all of the relevant factors that are relevant to the case at hand. In contrast, to say of something that it is a prima facie duty is only to note the presence of one or more of the factors that would generate an all things considered duty—in the absence of conflicting factors.”
Ross himself expressed some dissatisfaction with the term “prima facie duty” and suggested that perhaps “conditional duty” or “claim” might better capture his meaning, but ultimately rejected these alternatives. The term “prima facie” is unfortunate because it suggests that the duty is only apparent, and the phrase “all things considered” is rather cumbersome. In my discussion I will use the term “standing moral responsibility” in place of “prima facie duty”, and the terms “actual” (or sometimes “operative”) moral obligation, for the notion of an all things considered duty.
So then, if moral agents have in general a standing moral responsibility to protect vulnerable moral patients, then it will often be the case that different special responsibilities generated by this general standing moral responsibility will come into conflict with one another. How does one resolve these kinds of conflicts? Ross feel back on moral intuition, but perhaps we can do better than that. The idea that there might be a formula of some kind that we could use to actually calculate the weight of our moral responsibilities has appealed to many philosophers, though none has come up with a satisfactory account. I don't think my account is ultimately satisfactory either: it is presented as a heuristic device to aid the understanding of the set of normative factors that might potentially influence judgments of these kinds.
The basic schema is as follows:
W = A x O x P
where W stands for the weight of a particular prima facie duty or standing moral responsibility, A stands for agent-relative factors, O stands for the kind of obligation involved, that is, the gravity of the interest or value that is being protected by having such an obligation, and P stands for patient-relative moral factors, such as the moral stature of the patients to whom the agent's obligation is directed.
We can illustrate how this schema works using simple thought experiments in which we hold two of the three variables constant and vary the third. For example, if we specify that the A is a competent moral agent with no special relationship to the patient involved, and the P is a normal healthy human child, then we can vary the O factor as follows: Suppose O is the obligation not to murder. This is a weighty moral obligation. It is weightier than the obligation not to injure, which is in turn weightier than the obligation to provide some benefit to a moral patient. So, if killing is given the value 100, and injuring the value 75, and benefiting the value 25, and we set A and P to 1 each, then, the schema predicts that the prima facie responsibility not to kill the child is weightier than the similar obligation not to injure it, which is weightier than the obligation to provide the child with a benefit. This is in turn explained by the fact that the underlying interests involved have greater gravity in relationship to the patient's well-being or good. So, O is going to be an independent variable that will affect our judgment about the weights of various moral obligations we might have. Other things being equal, the more grave the interest involved the weightier the corresponding moral obligation.
But, let's hold the O factor the same and vary the P factor, that is, the moral stature of the patient involved. Suppose that one patient is the normal healthy child as above and another is a sentient non-human animal such as say a rabbit. Let's put the child and the rabbit on the trolley tracks so that the moral agent involved has to make a forced choice between injuring the child and injuring the rabbit. In this case, we would assign the P factor a high value, say 100, and the rabbit a smaller, but not insignificant value, say 50. Since the A and O factors are held constant, the schema predicts that our choice should be to injure the rabbit, since our obligation to refrain from injuring sentient nonhuman animals is less weighty than our corresponding obligations not to injuring human beings, because the former have lower moral stature. And this is what the schema predicts (roughly) that in a forced choice between these two prima facie responsibilities, we should choose to save the child.
But this is still far too simple to account for our moral intuitions. We can see this by introducing quantities of moral patients.
W = A x O x (nP)
where n is a number of patients. Suppose that instead of one rabbit on the tracks we have 50 rabbits and one is still forced to choose between injuring one child and injuring 50 rabbits. If we use the values for moral stature I suggested earlier, the obvious conclusion would be that the obligation not to injure 50 rabbits is 25 times weightier than the obligation not to injure one child. But is it? We can fudge this by assigning an arbitrarily low value to the nonhuman patients involved, say 1 as opposed to 50, but this seems pretty arbitrary and just an ad hoc way of saving the intuition that human interests matter more than nonhuman interests. As I said before, if your view is that human interests, no matter how trivial, will always outweigh animal interests, then my theory is not for you.
But clearly quantities do matter. We can see this using standard cases in which there is a forced choice between steering the trolley so it collides with one innocent helpless person who is tied to the tracks or steering it so it will collide with five innocent helpless persons who are tied to the other track. Most everyone who is asked about such cases comes to the conclusion that it is preferable to injure or kill one person than it is to injure or kill five, other things being equal.
But what if that one person is your own mother? Here is where the notions of derived or observer-relative moral status and moral partiality come into play so as to raise the stakes involved and change the moral calculation. Suppose that on one track lies your own mother, and on the other a complete stranger. The additional moral stature your own mother has in your eyes would give her life greater value than the life of a mere stranger, and so, if forced to choose, most of us would (perhaps reluctantly) steer the trolley into the stranger. Except, of course, if your own mother was an evil-doer who abused you as a child. This kind of consideration lowers your mother's moral stature and makes it more likely that you would choose to sacrifice her for the stranger, who, presumably, is innocent. These kinds of considerations have nothing to do with the intrinsic moral standing of the patient, but rather, are due to the patient's derived moral status. In order to account for these kinds of factors, we shall have to make the proposed schema even more complex:
W = A x O x n(P +/- D)
where D represents the increment or decrement of moral stature in a moral patient due to their relational or derived moral status.
We probably also have to complicate the A factor, which we have taken to represent a normal adult human moral agent. But in addition to their standing moral responsibilities, moral agents can also have various kinds of special responsibilities due to the particular roles they occupy, their own past actions, the promises they have made, and so forth. These additional sorts of agent-relative factors can also affect the weight of an obligation, sometimes in crucial ways. So, for instance, if a physician happens to be on the scene when another person suffers a heart attack along with a non-physician, most people would I think judge that the obligation of the physician to attempt to help this person is weightier than the obligation of the non-medical bystander. It would be even greater is the medical person is a trained EMT who has been in fact summoned to the scene by a 911 call. Such an individual has a strict duty to provide aid to the patient in distress, which ordinary bystanders do not have. So, then, we need to make the schema look something like this:
W = (A +/-R) x O x n(P +/-D)
where R stands for agent-relative factors, such as social roles, that function to increase or decrease the agent's level of responsibility.
Again, this formula is just illustrative. It is far from clear what the relationship is among these different sorts of normative factors. I have represented them in terms of multiplication and addition, but I could have equally well used powers, or logarithms to the variables and the way they interact. In fact, it is not possible to determine the precise formula for thinking about these kinds of issue by doing armchair philosophical thought experiments like the ones I have been offerring. One needs to actually develop a range of cases and present them to subjects and measure their responses, and then find the data points, and then choose which sort of formula (if any) best fits the curve. That is, it might be doable through empirical moral psychological research, but even then, it is not going to be easy.
Yet as moral agents we make these kinds of judgments all the time. Assuming that our moral intuitions are not wholly arbitrary, it must then be the case that our brains are following some kinds of patterns or using some kinds of algorithms to arrive at judgment about the relative weights of our moral duties. But we are obviously a long way from understanding how we make these kinds of complex moral judgments. Which is why moral philosophers such as Ross, and I, fall back on using the intuitions of expert moral judges as the basis for deciding among conflicting moral responsibilities. Moral intuitions may be slippery and uncertain, but they are still better than simplistic formulas as a guide to moral judgment.
However, even simplistic moral formulas have some value in that they can be used to help us disentangle the different sorts of normative factors than can affect our intuitive judgments about the weight of different duties and responsibilities. The schema presented here is offerred only as a first rough approximation, a heuristic, that tells us that there are at least three basic kinds of normative factors that can affect the moral weight of an obligation: those related to the agent, those related to the type of obligation or interest involved, and those related to the patient's moral stature. This already gives us a lot of complexity, but I doubt it is adequate as it stands, since it leaves out what are called contextual factors, for instance, what the knock-on consequences of certain actions for other moral patients, and 'threshold effects', that is, when the harm done by fulfilling a prima facie obligation to say, refrain from restricting the free movement a person, would be so great as to tip the balance in favor of doing so, as for instance, when the person involved is the carrier of a serious infectious disease who might spread it to others. Such thresholds can alter our judgments even when duties derived from basic human rights are involved. So I am not claiming a lot for my schema; only that it is a way of starting to get a handle on these very complex matters.
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