In the name of science
Jul. 15th, 2005 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
High hourly temp, here: 33. Dewpoint at that time: 17. High dewpoint: 21.
High hourly temp in TO: 33. Dewpoint at that time: 20. High dewpoint: 22.
I'm actually not sure why I'm recording temperatures. I think the high dewpoint is all that really matters.
Finished reading Berit Brogaard's "Epistemological Contextualism and the Problem of Moral Luck" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84, 2003) today. Brogaard wants to get around the problem of moral luck by having how much you blame someone for an action depend on the context in which you place its potential consequences. So, the victim of a morally unlucky action (Brogaard's example: you failed to get your brakes checked on time, and ran the victim over) heavily blames the morally unlucky person because the context in which the victim places the action heavily emphasizes the sort of consequences that happened to ensue for the victim, whereas the disinterested observer puts the action in a context emphasizing the unlikeliness of those consequences. And this is well and good, according to Brogaard, as long as the victim and the disinterested observer place all other similar actions in the same contexts, whether those similar actions turn out to be unlucky or not, and assign equal blame for all similar actions.
It looks to me like this just misses the point of the problem. The usual drunk driving example makes it clearer: not just the victim but *practically everyone* blames the drunk driver who kills someone *vastly* more heavily than they blame the drunk driver who makes it home all right. If you say--as Domsky does, as well as Brogaard--that people *shouldn't* do that, then you're just begging the question. The *problem* is that while our moral theories, or our abstract moral intuitions, tell us that we shouldn't blame the unlucky driver more, we *actually do* blame the unlucky driver more--it's a fact about our moral reasoning that we blame the unlucky driver more.
It strikes me that the problem arises from a collision between two late-mid-twentieth-century philosophical waves, a Kantian one and a naturalistic one: the Kantian one dictates that morality is a matter of intentions, so how blameworthy or praiseworthy you are has nothing to do with how your intentional actions happen to turn out; the naturalistic one dictates that philosophy must be empirically based, so if it's an empirical fact that people assign more or less blame according to how actions happen to turn out, then your moral philosophy has to account for that and not make it go away.
I *think*, though I'm having trouble articulating the reason why, that the problem already starts to evaporate when you replace the Kantian terms with consequentialist ones, like Brogaard does. On very *simple* consequentialist terms, there wouldn't be a problem because blameworthiness would *just* be a matter of how things happen to turn out, but for Brogaard's consequentialism you're supposed to take into account what the actor knows, or should know, about how things are likely to turn out. Domsky, I think, does something similar (his whole schtick is that we deceive ourselves about how things are likely to turn out) ... but someday I'll come back to Domsky in more detail.
High hourly temp in TO: 33. Dewpoint at that time: 20. High dewpoint: 22.
I'm actually not sure why I'm recording temperatures. I think the high dewpoint is all that really matters.
Finished reading Berit Brogaard's "Epistemological Contextualism and the Problem of Moral Luck" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84, 2003) today. Brogaard wants to get around the problem of moral luck by having how much you blame someone for an action depend on the context in which you place its potential consequences. So, the victim of a morally unlucky action (Brogaard's example: you failed to get your brakes checked on time, and ran the victim over) heavily blames the morally unlucky person because the context in which the victim places the action heavily emphasizes the sort of consequences that happened to ensue for the victim, whereas the disinterested observer puts the action in a context emphasizing the unlikeliness of those consequences. And this is well and good, according to Brogaard, as long as the victim and the disinterested observer place all other similar actions in the same contexts, whether those similar actions turn out to be unlucky or not, and assign equal blame for all similar actions.
It looks to me like this just misses the point of the problem. The usual drunk driving example makes it clearer: not just the victim but *practically everyone* blames the drunk driver who kills someone *vastly* more heavily than they blame the drunk driver who makes it home all right. If you say--as Domsky does, as well as Brogaard--that people *shouldn't* do that, then you're just begging the question. The *problem* is that while our moral theories, or our abstract moral intuitions, tell us that we shouldn't blame the unlucky driver more, we *actually do* blame the unlucky driver more--it's a fact about our moral reasoning that we blame the unlucky driver more.
It strikes me that the problem arises from a collision between two late-mid-twentieth-century philosophical waves, a Kantian one and a naturalistic one: the Kantian one dictates that morality is a matter of intentions, so how blameworthy or praiseworthy you are has nothing to do with how your intentional actions happen to turn out; the naturalistic one dictates that philosophy must be empirically based, so if it's an empirical fact that people assign more or less blame according to how actions happen to turn out, then your moral philosophy has to account for that and not make it go away.
I *think*, though I'm having trouble articulating the reason why, that the problem already starts to evaporate when you replace the Kantian terms with consequentialist ones, like Brogaard does. On very *simple* consequentialist terms, there wouldn't be a problem because blameworthiness would *just* be a matter of how things happen to turn out, but for Brogaard's consequentialism you're supposed to take into account what the actor knows, or should know, about how things are likely to turn out. Domsky, I think, does something similar (his whole schtick is that we deceive ourselves about how things are likely to turn out) ... but someday I'll come back to Domsky in more detail.
