Positive and Negative Moral Incompetence
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Positive and Negative Moral Incompetence Sean Clancy1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction Sometimes agents are vicious because they lack moral attitudes that they ought to possess. For instance: U-Boat: Norman is the commanding officer of a submarine tasked with enforcing a naval blockade. He has torpedoed one of the enemy’s merchant ships, and as it sinks he notices that several survivors are clinging to various bits of floating debris. Norman knows that these survivors might be rescued and could provide the enemy with information about his submarine’s location. He judges that the risk is slight, but he also judges that he has no moral obligations towards the survivors: According to the ideology with which Norman was inculcated as a child and which he sincerely believes, he has moral obligations only towards persons of his own nationality. In fact, Norman has internalized this ideology so completely that he has no concern whatsoever for the lives or well-being of the enemy sailors. So Norman orders his crew to shoot the survivors in the water before his boat submerges. As it turns out, Norman does have moral obligations towards persons of all nationalities, and shooting the survivors is severely morally wrong. I take it that most of us will agree that Norman is severely morally vicious. Significant, for our purposes, is the fact that Norman’s viciousness seems to consist in the absence of moral attitudes that are warranted by the moral facts. Norman does, in fact, have obligations towards persons of other nationalities, and thus either some concern for those persons or some aversion to killing them is warranted; and, it seems, it is because Norman lacks these warranted attitudes that he is vicious. My primary interest in this paper is in another class of agents who may at first seem to be quite different from Norman. Here is one example: Would-Be-Farmer: Electra is attracted to the idea of a career in agriculture. But she also knows that farming, even when conducted carefully, results in * Sean Clancy [email protected] 1
East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Rd., Minhang District, Shanghai 200241, China
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the deaths of many small invertebrates, such as worms and insects. Electra believes that the biological properties which small invertebrates possess—their capacity for reproduction, their ability to move about independently, and so on—imbue their lives with great moral value, and she concludes that she has a strong moral reason not to kill them. In fact, Electra takes her putative moral obligations towards small invertebrates so seriously that she comes to care about their deaths as strongly as she cares about the deaths of other humans. Because of this strong concern, Electra decides not to become a farmer. As it turns out, the properties which small invertebrates possess and which Electra attributes to them do not imbue their lives with any moral value. Electra has no moral reason either to become a farmer or to refrain from becoming a farmer. Whe
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