Category: Ethics

On Blaming the Victim

A reader wants my thoughts regarding the following hypothetical scenarios.

I own a modestly nice car, say, a 2014 Honda Accord with some bells and whistles. I treat it fairly well, ensuring that it receives in a timely fashion all of the required maintenance. I get it washed and waxed with pride. The one deficiency I have is that I park my car with some indiscretion. I am not that vigilant with locking my doors. You warn me that this is a mistake. I counter by saying that there are other cars that are more valuable, say BMWs and Audis and that I don't park my car in so-called 'bad areas.' Nonetheless, to my foolish shock and surprise, my car is stolen one day. Could it then be said that I am at least partially responsible for having my car stolen?

Yes, you are partially responsible, and the thief is partially responsible, but his part is larger than yours.  You are the victim of the crime and he is the perpetrator. I blame both of you for the crime, loading the lion's share of the blame upon the perpetrator.  But I blame you too, and in blaming you, I blame the victim.  Clearly, it is right, proper, and  just to blame the victim within limits and subject to qualifications.

This is why the accusation, "You are blaming the victim!" cuts little ice with me.  In some, but not all, situations some judicious blaming of the victim is perfectly appropriate.  People who cannot see this are in many cases  victims of their own political correctness and ought to be blamed for not using their faculties and thus for being victims of their own self-induced political correctness.  This is a sort of meta-level blaming of the victim.

We ought to distinguish the legal, the moral, and the prudential aspects of the situation.  I will set the legal questions aside since in the above scenario the victim hasn't done anything legally wrong.  (In related scenarios, however, the victim would probably be criminally negligent under the law, e.g,  you leave your child in the car, keys in ignition, engine running, while you enter a convenience store for a cup of coffee, and your child is abducted.)

The prudential and moral aspects alone interest me.  But before I explain the difference, let's consider my reader's second scenario.

If we say yes, then I wish to change the elements of our hypothetical scenario in attempts to pump some uncomfortable intuitions. Say instead of owning a modestly nice car, I own a modestly nice female body. I treat it fairly well, making sure I go to the doctor in a timely manner and go to the spa. However, I lack vigilance with myself and drink a lot at frat parties. You warn me that this is not wise. I counter by saying that there are other women more foolish than I and that I don't frequent 'bad places.' Yet, to my foolish shock and surprise, some abuse occurs. Could it be said that I am then at least partially responsible for the abuse? 
 
Yes, of course.
 
Contemporary sentiment is that there is no one to blame for sexual assault except for the perpetrator. And while I agree that the perpetrators are primarily the culpable ones, I also think that there must be some level of personal responsibility that must be practiced. I don't think it terribly offensive for us to encourage women to exercise a healthy level of skepticism of one's fellow human being, yet feminists will cry foul, that we are punishing women for the potential crimes of others when we say it is their responsibility to not party or dress a certain way or hang out with a certain crowd or drink themselves to oblivion, that we should focus our efforts on disciplining the would-be perpetrators with more education.
My reader obviously has his head screwed on Right (which fact is also part of the explanation of why he reads my weblog in the first place).  I agree entirely with what he says.  I would only add to it.
 
What the attractive young woman does when she 'struts her stuff' in dangerous precincts is both imprudent and immoral.  I don't need to explain why it is imprudent.  It is immoral because she is tempting others to commit immoral acts.  Of course, if she ends up being raped, the lion's share of the moral blame lands on the rapist.  But it would be absurd to suggest that she bears no moral responsibility for the rape.  She did something morally wrong: she tempted testosterone-crazed drunken frat boys to have their way with her when she knows what such animals are like.  (They didn't call  the John Belushi flick Animal House for nothing. And look what happened to him: he rode the Speedball Express to Kingdom Come.) The principle here, one probably admitting of exceptions, is something like this: 
 
(P) It is morally wrong to suborn immoral behavior.
 
'Suborn' is most often used in legal contexts, but as the hyperlinked definition shows, it has a broader meaning extendible to the moral sphere.  Surely, it is in general morally wrong to tempt, entice, persuade people to commit immoral acts. 
 
If you reject (P), what would you be maintaining? That it is morally acceptable to suborn immoral behavior?  That is is morally obligatory to suborn such behavior?  That the subornation of immoral behavior is morally neutral?  None of the above, say I.
 
If you have moral sense, you will accept (P).  Unfortunately, moral sense is in short supply in these benighted times.  Can we blame this one on liberals too?
 
My points are made even more forcefully, and more elegantly, in the first two articles below, especially the second.
 
UPDATE:  Seldom Seen Slim writes,
 
Nice post. I was wondering whether you are wanting to talk more about soliciting rather than suborning in Principle P.  http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/criminal-solicitation/
 
BV:  The examples given above are not examples of solicitation as per the definition to which you linked.  The well-endowed but scantily-clad female who advertises her charms in dangerous precincts is not soliciting the crime of rape or any other crime against her person.  The definition also implies that solicitation must be between a person A and some other person B.  But if a person acts in such a way as to tempt another to commit a crime, there needn't be any particular person who is being tempted.
 
Let's consider another example.  I withdraw a large sum of money from an outdoor ATM machine at night in a bad part of town and then walk down the street ostentatiously counting my wad.  I don't see that that foolish behavior would count as solicitation by the above definition.  After all, I don't want to be robbed, and there is no specific person I am persuading to rob me.  But if I offer you $10,000 to kill my wife so that I can collect on a life insurance policy, then that is a clear case of solicitation, as per the definition, whether or not you agree to attempt the dastardly deed and whether or not you succeed.
 
The problem with suborning is that many educated speakers understand it to mean bribing someone  to say something false under oath. Bribing is crucial to suborning. A material element of the criminal charge is your use of corrupt or illegal inducements (e.g., a bribe) to bring about a perjury. If you merely "tempt, entice, [rhetorically] persuade people to commit immoral acts" (your terms), you are not suborning, though you may be soliciting immoral/criminal behavior.
 
BV:  So you are saying that the offer of a bribe is essential to subornation?  If memory serves, however, in the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, one of the charges was subornation of perjury.  Was it alleged that Clinton offered a bribe to the person or persons he attempted to persuade to perjure themselves?  I'm just asking.  And what exactly is a bribe in the eyes of the law?  A monetary inducement only? 
 
In any case, I thought I made it clear that I was not talking above about the law but about morality.  I linked to a dictionary definition of 'suborn' that is broader than a legal definition.  But it may be that 'suborn' is not the best word for what I am trying to convey.
 
As a principle about suborning, I don't think there is anything controversial about (P)–but it has a pretty narrow scope. If you replace (P) with a much broader solicitation principle, to include things like tempting and speaking in favor, it's not clear to me at least that (P) will fly without a lot of qualification.
 
BV:  The sort of counterexample to (P) that occurred to me was what goes on in a 'sting' operation by an undercover law enforcement agent.
 
"Tempting" has always puzzled me. If I put you in a position where it would be easy for you to embezzle a large sum of money, have I tempted you or just shown my faith in your honesty? And if you choose to steal the money, what blame should attach to me because of your (unsuspected) bad character? Am I to be blamed for not acting on the assumption that you will turn into a thief if given the chance? Similarly for the lady who dresses in a sexy outfit and gets attacked. Why are we blaming her because some men have no self-control or decency?
 
BV:  Now that is a good  point.  You leave the bank vault open with me nearby while you go out for lunch.  Are you tempting me to steal or evincing faith in my honesty?  Well, if you don't know me, or don't know me well, then you ought to bear some moral responsibility for my pilfering of the pelf.  But if you knew me very well and knew that I was hitherto always honest, then I think very little or perhaps no blame would attach to you.
 
The case of the sexually attractive and scantily-clad female who advertises her endowments around people she doesn't know is relevantly different.  She knows what men in general are like and knows that her behavior is risky and yet she does it anyway.  I say she bears some of the blame for the abuse she experiences. 
 
Suppose I know that Jack is an alcoholic and I ply him with strong drink at my Thanskgiving feast.  He drives off drunk and slaughters a family of four.  Do I bear some moral responsibility for the slaughter?  Of course I do.  But suppose I don't know Tom, but in good faith I sell him a gun, having no reason to suspect him of criminal intent, but Tom then kills his wife using the gun I sold him.  Am I to any degree morally responsible for the crime?  No, not to any degree.
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The Dirty and the Funny

The muse of philosophy must have visited my otherwise undistinguished classmate Dolores back in the fifth grade.  The topic was dirty jokes and that we should not tell them or listen to them.  "But sister," Dolores piped up, "what if you laugh not because the joke is dirty but because it is funny?"

It was a good distinction then and a good distinction now.

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Kant, Supererogation, and Imperfect Duties

Can Kant's ethical scheme  accommodate the supererogatory?

If obligatory actions are those that one is duty-bound to perform, a supererogatory action is one that is above and beyond the call of duty. Michael A. Monsoor's throwing himself on a live grenade to save his Navy SEAL buddies is a paradigmatic example. But in a wide sense, a supererogatory act is any act, however trifling, that is in excess of what is morally required, any act that is morally good but the nonperformance of which is not morally bad.

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The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of ‘Ought’

This is an old post from the Powerblogs site, written a few years ago.  The points made still seem correct.

…………………

Peter Lupu's version of the logical argument from evil (LAFE) is committed to a principle that I formulate as follows:

P. Necessarily, agent A ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X.

This principle initially appealed to me, but then I came to the conclusion (with the help of the enigmatic Phil Philologos or was it Seldom Seen Slim?) that the biconditional (P) is correct only in the right-to-left direction. That is, I came to the view that there are moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute moral obligations. But so far I have not convinced Peter. So now I will try a new argument, one that explores the connection between the obligatory-supererogatory distinction and the thesis that there are two moral senses of 'ought.' Here is the gist of the argument:

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From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’? Help for Hodges

Our  expat friend, Seoul man, and professor of English, Jeff Hodges, has been puzzling over whether an 'ought' statement can be validly derived from an 'is' statement.  Here is his example, put in my own way:

1. Democratic regimes contribute more to human flourishing than do non-democratic ones.

Therefore

2. If we want to maximize human flourishing, then we ought to support democratic regimes.

(1) purports to state what is the case.  In this sense, it is a factual claim.  On this use of 'factual,' a factual claim need not be true. ('I live in New Mexico' is false but factual as opposed to normative.)  Factual claims on this use of 'factual' are opposed to claims as to what one ought to do or ought not to do, or what ought to be, or ought not to be, or what is better or worse or what is more valuable or less valuable.

It is worth noting that both (1) and (2) are in the indicative mood.  Thus we ought to distinguish (2) from the hypothetical (as opposed to categorical) imperative

2*.  To maximize human flourishing, support democratic regimes!

One difference is that while it makes sense to inquire whether (2) is true or false, it makes no sense to inquire  whether (2*) is either true or false.  It follows that our question is not whether an imperative can be validly inferred from an indicative.

Let us also note that (2) is a conditional.  It is a compound statement  consisting of two simple component  statements,  an antecedent (protasis) and and a consequent (apodosis).  To assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent. It is to assert a connection between the two.  For example, if I assert that if the light is on, then current is flowing through the filament, I do not thereby assert that the light is on, or that current is flowing throught the filament; what I assert is a connection between the two, in this case a causal linkage.

Given this fact about conditionals, I do not consider Jeff's example to show that one can validily derive an 'ought' from an 'is,' a normative statement from a factual statement.  Both (1) and (2) are nonnormative statements.  The first is obviously nonnormative.  But the second is as well despite the fact the 'ought' occurs within it.  For all it asserts — or, to be precise, all a person asserts who assertively utters a token of the sentence in question — is a connection between two propositions, a connection that it nonnormative.

We could of course detach the consequent of (2) thusly:

1. Democratic regimes contribute more to human flourishing than do non-democratic ones.

2a. We want to promote human flourishing

Therefore

2c. We ought to support democratic regimes.

(2c) is unabashedly normative.  But it does not follow from the premises which are both of them nonnormative.

So Jeff has not given a counterexample to what philosophers claim when they claim that an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is.'

But I will irenically add that there is nothing wrong with Jeff's original argument.  It is just that it is not an example of the derivation of a normative statement from a nonnormative one.  It is an example of how a statement containing the word 'ought' can be validily derived from a statement not containing the word 'ought.'  If this is all that Jeff means to show, then he deserves the coveted MavPhil imprimatur and nihil obstat. 

Crucial here is the fact that not every statement containing 'ought' is a normative statement.  Besides (2), there is this example:  'I just replaced the battery, so my car ought to start.'  This is not a statement about  what anyone ought to do, or even about what ought to be; it is a prediction.  One could just as well say, 'I just replaced the battery in my car, so it is highly likely that the car will start.'

And now it occurs to me that 'ought' can be paraphrased away, salva significatione,  even in the case of (2).  Try this:

2p.  If we want to maximize human flourishing, then it is necessary that we support democratic regimes.

Related:  The Ought-to-Be, the Ought-to-Do, and the Aporetics of "Be Ye Perfect"

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Sex, War, and Moral Rigorism: The Aporetics of Moral Evaluation

Fr. Robert Barron here fruitfully compares the Catholic Church's rigoristic teaching on matters sexual, with its prohibitions of masturbation, artificial contraception, and extramarital sex, with the rigorism of the Church's teaching with respect to just war.  An excellent article.

Although Fr. Barron doesn't say it explicitly, he implies that the two topics are on a par.  Given that "the Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives,"  one who accepts just war rigorism ought also to accept sexual rigorism.  Or at least that is what I read him as saying.

I have no in-principle objection to the sexual teaching, but I waffle when it comes to the rigorous demands of just war theory.  I confess to being 'at sea' on this topic.

On the one hand, I am quite sensitive to the moral force of 'The killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances'  which is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine.  Having pored over many a page of Kant, I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature,  wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances.    But what would have been the likely upshot had  the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII?  Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us.  But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens.  The Catholic doctrine implies that if Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age  for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Indeed, if the killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done.  This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."

This extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true.    If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant.  If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.

But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics.  No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true.  For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know it is true?  Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism. (Not every naturalist is an eliminativist loon.) 

If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that one absolutely must resist the evildoer, and absolutely must not turn the other cheek to a Hitler?

An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered.  But a leader of a nation  is in a much different position.  Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me.  Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her rigorism remains tenable.

To sum up these ruminations in a nice, neat antilogism:

1. Some acts, such as the intentional killing of noncombatants, are intrinsically wrong.
2. If an act is intrinsically wrong, then no possible circumstance in which it occurs or consequence of its being performed can substract one iota from its moral wrongness.
3. No act is such that its moral evaluation can be conducted without any consideration of any possible circumstance in which it occurs or possible consequence of its being performed.

The limbs of the antilogism are collectively inconsistent but individually extremely plausible.

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Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy.  And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research.  Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy.  A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader.  It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]."  In the body of the article we read:

This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience. 

For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly – although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which  warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.

Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.

Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.

Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner.  (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it.  The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.

I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point.  Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about.  What is conscience?

Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference.  It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory.  It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds  which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.

The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions.  Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't.  Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should.  If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is.  Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness:  if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.

So  just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience.  Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains.  Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question.  Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong.  That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.

Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole?  If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain.  But this is impossible.  A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state.  But no physical state is object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state. 

So that is one absurdity.  A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain.   Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds.  What is being examined here?  Obviously not some bit of brain matter.  And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.

If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan.  But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate.  No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.

There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk?  Either way, absurdity.  Examining is an intentional state.  So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.

I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense.  And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms.  I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain.  Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure  is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.

Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist:  how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme?  Answers:  It is not possible, and they don't.

Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation?  Maybe not.  Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity.  David Gelernter is good on this. 

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Judgmentalism, Moral Judgment, Moral Relativism, and God

This from a reader:

I still read your blog conscientiously, but sometimes stare at your words in ignorant awe.

I have a question for you this morning which may be of interest. In a recent conversation with someone who described himself as a "gay" Christian (or is it a Christian "gay" ?), I gave reasons for observing that "gay Christian" is an oxymoron. My interlocutor said I must not be judgmental and justified his position by the saying, “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” I made no headway with my argument that a belief in moral relativism is incompatible with a belief in God. If God is the incontestable ground of moral absolutes, it seems to me you can't have one without the other. Am I on the right track ?

Thank you for reading.  Several points in response.

1. Can one be a Christian and a homosexual?  I don't see why not, as long as one does not practice one's homosexuality.  So I don't see that 'gay Christian' is an oxymoron.  (AsI am using 'practice,' a homosexual man who succumbs to temptation and has sexual intercourse with a man on an occasion or two, while believing it to be immoral, is not practicing his homosexuality.  The occasional exercise of a disposition does not constitute a practice.)

2. To be judgmental is to be hypercritical, captious, cavilling, fault-finding, etc.  One ought to avoid being judgmental.  But it is a mistake to confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. I condemn the behavior of Ponzi-schemers like Bernie Madoff.  That is a moral judgment.  (And if you refuse to condemn it, I condemn your refusal to condemn.)   But it would be an egregious misuse of language to say that I am being judgmental in issuing  either condemnation.  

3. If your friend thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong.  If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong. 

4. Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong.  (C) is  a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.

5. He might of course say that 'must not' in 'must not be judgmental' is not to be construed morally, but in some other way.  Press him on how it is to be construed. 

6. Is moral relativism compatible with theism?  No.  If the God of the Christian faith exists, then there are absolute (objective) moral truths.  This is quite clear if you reflect on the nature of the Christian God.  It is not clear, however, that the arrow of entailment runs in the opposite direction.  A Christian could affirm that it does, but he needn't. Either way, moral relativism and theism are logically inconsistent.

7.  A further point.  When your friend 'went relativistic' on you, there was nothing unusual about that.  Alethic and moral relativism in most people are not  thought-through positions, but simply ways  of avoiding further discussion and the hard thinking necessary to get clear on these matters.  It is a form of 'psychic insulation':  "You can't teach me anything, because it's all relative."

8.  A final point.  That there are moral absolutes leaves open what they are.  While moral relativism is easily dismissed, especially if one is a theist, it is considerably less easy to say what the moral absolutes are, even if one is a theist.  So there is no call to be dogmatic.  One can, and I think ought to, combine anti-relativism with fallibilism.

Related: To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism

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Can One Forgive Oneself? An Aporetic Triad

I pointed out earlier that forgiving is triadic: x forgives y for z.  There is the forgiver, the one to whom forgiveness is proffered, and that which is forgiven.   Nominative, dative, accusative.   It is of course correct English to say 'I forgive you,' but this fact about usage cuts no ice since 'I forgive you'  is elliptical for 'I forgive you for what you did or what you failed to do.'  'I forgive you' is not evidence that forgiving is in some cases dyadic any more than 'Tom is married' is evidence that marriage is monadic. Forgiving is then at least triadic: it is a three-place relation.  'X forgives y for z' has three argument-places.  But it doesn't follow that forgiving is in every case a three-term or three-relata relation.    For if one one can forgive oneself, then  x and y are the same person.  Compare identity, which is a two-place, but one-term relation.

Why did I write "at least triadic"?  Because we need to think about such examples as 'I forgive you both for conspiring against me.'   That appears to involve three persons and one action.  I set this issue aside for later discussion.

At the moment, the following aporetic triad is at the cynosure of my interest:

1. There are cases of self-forgiveness and they are instances of genuine forgiveness.

2. If a person forgives himself at time t for doing or failing to do z , then he cannot help but be aware of and admit his own guilt at t for doing or failing to do z.

3. Genuine forgiveness is unconditional: it is consistent with a non-admission of guilt on the part of the one who is forgiven.

Each limb of the triad is plausible.  But the limbs cannot all be true: the conjunction of ( 1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining limb.

To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs. 

(1)-Rejection.  One might maintain that cases of self-forgiveness are not instances of genuine forgiveness.  One might hold that 'forgiveness' in 'self-forgiveness' and 'other-forgiveness'  is being used in different ways, and that the difference between the two phenomena is papered over by the sameness of word.

(2)-Rejection.  I would say that (2) is self-evident and cannot be reasonably rejected.

(3)-Rejection.  One might maintain that genuine forgiveness need not be unconditional, that there are cases when it depends on the satisfaction of the condition that the one forgiven admit his guilt.

I would solve the problem by rejecting both (1) and (3).  As I see it at the moment, genuine forgiveness is an interpersonal transaction: it involves at least two distinct persons.  Self-forgiveness, however, remains intra-personal. What is called self-forgiveness is therefore a distinct, albeit related, phenomenon.  It is not genuine forgiveness the paradigm case of which is one person forgiving another for an action or omission that is in some sense wrong, that injures the first person,  and that the second person admits is wrong.

I also maintain that forgveness cannot be unconditional. For forgiveness to transpire as between A and B, B must accept the forgiveness that A offers.  But B cannot do this unless he admits that he has done something (or left something undone) that is morally or legally or in some other way (e.g., etiquette-wise) censurable.  Thus B must admit  guilt.  That is a condition that must be met if forgiveness is to occur.

One who accepts both (1) and (3) will, via (2), land himself in a contradiction.

Related articles
The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness
An Analysis of the Concept of Forgiveness

An Analysis of the Concept of Forgiveness

In my last post on this topic I advanced a double-barreled thesis to the effect that (i) unconditional forgiveness is in most cases morally objectionable, and (ii) in most cases conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  But now we need to back up and focus on the very concept of forgiveness since deciding whether (i) and (ii) are correct depends on what exactly we take forgiveness to be.  So here is my preliminary stab at an analysis.  After this task is completed, it may be necessary to back up once more and ask how I arrived at my analysis.  Ain't philosophy fun?

1. Forgiveness has a triadic structure: to forgive is for someone to forgive someone for something.  X forgives y for z, where x and y are persons (usually but not necessarily human) and z is typically an action or an action-omission.  We typically forgive deeds and misdeeds, but perhaps states can be forgiven, for example, the state of being insufferably arrogant.  An interesting side-question is whether x and y could be the same person.  Is it possible to forgive oneself for something?  I mention this question only to set it aside.

2. Only those we perceive to be guilty can be forgiven.  Necessarily, if x forgives y for z, then x perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, y to be guilty of doing or having done z, or guilty of failing or having failed to do z.  The necessity of this necessary truth is grounded in the very concept of forgiveness.

3. It follows from (2) that only what one rightly or wrongly takes to be a moral agent can be forgiven or not forgiven.  For anything one takes to be morally guilty one must take to be a moral agent.  I can neither forgive nor not forgive my cat for sampling my lasagne.  Not being a moral agent, my cat cannot incur guilt.

4. It also follows from (2) that what I forgive a person for must be a wrongful act or act-omission.  Tom, unlike my cat, is a moral agent; but it is not possible to forgive Tom for feeding his kids.

5. Forgiving works a salutary change in the forgiver: it alters his mental attitude toward the one forgiven.  True forgiveness is not merely verbal but involves a genuine change of heart/mind (a metanoia if you will) that is good for the forgiver. 

6. Forgiving cannot remove the guilt of the one forgiven if he is indeed guilty.  Suppose you steal my money.  You don't admit guilt or make restitution.  But I forgive you anyway.  Clearly, my forgiving you does not remove your moral guilt.  You remain objectively guilty of theft.  The demands of justice have not been satisfied. 

7. Forgiving cannot retroactively make a person innocent of a crime he has committed.  Suppose again that you steal my money.  You admit guilt and you make restitution.  My forgiving you does not and cannot change the fact that you wrongfully took my money.  Forgiveness does not retroactively confer innocence.  It follows that you remain guilty of having committed the crime even if you do admit guilt and satisfy the objectve demands of justice by making restitution, etc.

Assuming that the above analysis is correct, albeit not complete, does it allow for the possibility of unconditional forgiveness?  It does.  Suppose again that you steal my money, but don't admit guilt let alone make restitution.  If I forgive you nonetheless, then I do so unconditionally, as opposed to on condition that you admit guilt, make restitution, etc.

Note that unconditional forgiveness is not an inter-personal transaction between the forgiver and the person forgiven, but something that transpires intrapsychically in the forgiver.  This is because unconditional forgiveness doesn't require the one forgiven to acknowledge anything or even to be aware that he is the recipient of forgiveness.   One can unconditionally forgive dead persons and persons with whom one has no contact.  Since unconditional forgiveness is merely intra-personal as opposed to inter-personal, one may question whether it is forgiveness in the strict sense at all. Accordingly, one might add to the list of the concept's features:

8.  Necessarily, if x forgives y, then y perceives himself as having done something wrong and admits his wrongdoing to x.

Now I don't think that features 1-7 are controversial, but #8 is.  For it rules out unconditional forgiveness.  The underlying issue is whether forgiveness is an inter-personal transaction or merely an attitude change within the mind/heart of the forgiver.  If forgiveness is inter-personal, the one forgiven must accept forgiveness.  But he can do that only if he acknowledges guilt.

But if unconditional forgiveness is possible, and not ruled out by the very concept of forgiveness, it doesn't follow that it is morally acceptable.  I say it is not.  To forgive unconditionally is to refuse to take a stand against it.  But I will leave the elaboration of this point for later.

The other main question is whether conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  I say it is.

One might think that there is nothing left to forgive after the offender has admitted guilt, made reparations, etc.  But there is something left to forgive, namely, his having committed the offense in the first place.

A second consideration.  If unconditional forgiveness is possible, then what makes forgiveness forgiveness has nothing to do with the the one forgiven:  it does not require his admission of guilt, his doing penance, or even his being guilty.  If I forgive a person, I must take him to be guilty, but he needn't be in fact.  Unconditional forgiveness is merely an alteration of the forgiver's mental state.  Now if forgiveness is what it is whether or not there is any non-relational change in the one forgiven, then it doesn't matter whether or not the conditions are satisfied.  So conditional forgiveness will be just as much forgiveness as unconditional forgiveness is.

So for these two reasons conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.

 

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More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

This just over the transom: 

Finally, a post on forgiveness. 🙂 But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.
 
That is not quite right.

The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally — forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. — seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned — the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc — seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate. 

BV:  That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner.  So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is.  I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.
 
You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!
 
 
BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy.  I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument.  Either Jesus is God or he is not.  If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress.  If he is God, then two problems.  First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition.  (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him.  But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.

At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them.  So this passage is not relevant to our discussion.  Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness.  Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.

Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping.  To drop a name is not to give an argument.  I would have to see their arguments.  Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention?  No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart.  I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!"  Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."

You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.

BV:  This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless.  You may be conflating two separate claims.  I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong.  This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.'  But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed.   I say there is:  the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place.  Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution.  In that case the demands of justice have been met.  But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place.  The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed.  After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent.  He remains guilty as charged.  The fact of his having committed the misdeed  can in no way be altered.  Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.

There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it.  That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime.  Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent — which is absurd.

Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?

BV:  I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert.  It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made.  For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place.  I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid.  Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.

Remember the Derrida quote I cited:

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)

BV:  John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name.  So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection.  The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness.  He seems to be advancing the following sophism.  If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one."  But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.
 
Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.

BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness. 

 

 

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The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

I understand Aurel Kolnai has a paper on this topic.  I haven't read it.  But the paradox has been put to me as follows in conversation.

It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

This is something I need to explore, but off the top of my head I fail to see a problem.  The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc.  But I reject the second limb. I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him.

Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission.  I catch you at it and express my moral objection.  You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it.  I  forgive you.  My forgiving you makes perfect sense even though you have made restitution and have apologized.  For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you go to hell and get out of my life for good.

By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior.  This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.

So I see no paradox.  The first limb is self-evidently true while the second is false.  Only conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. 

It is of course possible that I am not thinking deeply enough!

Death Limits Our Immorality: Death as the Muse of Morality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily that of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One feels this to be especially so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me — but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

The Morality of Suicide

There is a well-informed discussion of the topic at Auster's place.  I have serious reservations about Lawrence Auster's brand of conservatism, reservations I may air later, but for now I want to say that I admire him for his courage in facing serious medical troubles and for soldiering on in the trenches of the blogosphere.  He courageously tackles topics many of us shy away from. I hope he pulls through and carries on.

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