Moral Debt
Im interested in some thoughts concerning how moral/immoral actions balance out.
When we judge a person as moral or immoral, it seems to me that we are measuring his moral actions against his immoral ones. We consider the act, its consequences, collateral benefit or damage and how it all fits morally speaking. An ethical cost/benefit analysis if you will.
If a person commits theft but regrets in it for some reason and spends the rest of their life giving most of what they have to charity (not necessarily a formal one, could just be to people he meets who are in need or whatever) then he has worked off some kind of moral debt. We might even say the person has paid their moral debt and has a surplus, moral credit, if they ended up with a huge imbalance of moral acts over immoral ones. (For example, stole a pack of gum but saved millions of lives and donated billions of dollars to charity)
If we can measure the moral balance in this way, I dont see any reason why even heinous acts of immorality couldnt be balanced out in the same way as my stick of gum example above. This is where Id like to be challenged, as Im not very comfortable with that conclusion.
The most obvious objection to that line of reasoning is principal based, that breaking the rules is breaking the rules and no action can justifiably balance another. Thats a more fundamental issue, I dont really buy into principle based ethics. For every principal, its trivially easy to show an instance where adhering to that principal is the act of a moral monster. For example, its wrong to lie. Well, what if the lie saves a billion people? The person who refuses to lie in that instance, is a moral monster. The only way to get around that contradiction is to make yet another appeal to principal, or commit semantic fallacy where the acts are considered separately (the lie was still wrong, the saving was right).
Id most like to discuss the first bit, but I recognise that it relies on a non-principal based approach to ethics. Perhaps someone would be sporting enough to consider this thread in the context of a non-principal based approach, even if they do not normally do so.
Anyway, what Im not interested in discussing is the objectivity/subjectivity of morality. This discussion doesnt require it and if you think it does then Im sorry to say Im not talking to you. (By which I mean, ignore this thread as its not addressed to you.)
So, can we pay off moral debt? Are we moral simply by having our moral acts (and all the good they do) outweigh the immoral acts (and all the bad they do)?
(Also, I realise good acts can have bad results and vice versa, I think we can cross that bridge when we come to it, which we very well may not have to)
When we judge a person as moral or immoral, it seems to me that we are measuring his moral actions against his immoral ones. We consider the act, its consequences, collateral benefit or damage and how it all fits morally speaking. An ethical cost/benefit analysis if you will.
If a person commits theft but regrets in it for some reason and spends the rest of their life giving most of what they have to charity (not necessarily a formal one, could just be to people he meets who are in need or whatever) then he has worked off some kind of moral debt. We might even say the person has paid their moral debt and has a surplus, moral credit, if they ended up with a huge imbalance of moral acts over immoral ones. (For example, stole a pack of gum but saved millions of lives and donated billions of dollars to charity)
If we can measure the moral balance in this way, I dont see any reason why even heinous acts of immorality couldnt be balanced out in the same way as my stick of gum example above. This is where Id like to be challenged, as Im not very comfortable with that conclusion.
The most obvious objection to that line of reasoning is principal based, that breaking the rules is breaking the rules and no action can justifiably balance another. Thats a more fundamental issue, I dont really buy into principle based ethics. For every principal, its trivially easy to show an instance where adhering to that principal is the act of a moral monster. For example, its wrong to lie. Well, what if the lie saves a billion people? The person who refuses to lie in that instance, is a moral monster. The only way to get around that contradiction is to make yet another appeal to principal, or commit semantic fallacy where the acts are considered separately (the lie was still wrong, the saving was right).
Id most like to discuss the first bit, but I recognise that it relies on a non-principal based approach to ethics. Perhaps someone would be sporting enough to consider this thread in the context of a non-principal based approach, even if they do not normally do so.
Anyway, what Im not interested in discussing is the objectivity/subjectivity of morality. This discussion doesnt require it and if you think it does then Im sorry to say Im not talking to you. (By which I mean, ignore this thread as its not addressed to you.)
So, can we pay off moral debt? Are we moral simply by having our moral acts (and all the good they do) outweigh the immoral acts (and all the bad they do)?
(Also, I realise good acts can have bad results and vice versa, I think we can cross that bridge when we come to it, which we very well may not have to)
Comments (77)
Mike Tyson was convicted of rape. A horrible crime. I believe he can be reformed and redeemed. I don’t know enough about his life to say whether or not he has been, though.
This seemed kind of funny to me because it implies that if someone were to spend a year doing charity or building houses for the homeless or something they'd now be entitled to go punch a few pregnant women because, hey, they got all these moral credits and why let them go to waste?
Lol, ya I know. Sounds silly when you put it that way. However, I wouldnt say that those actions you used balance out.
Now, it doesnt really matter where you think those balances are so much as whether you think that a balance (and surplus of either morality or immorality) is possible. We can make it easier to consider in the interests of exploring the idea. So, what about a person who spends all day, every day working at saving lives...lets say the save 100,000,000 lives a year. Once a year, he takes a day off and stalks the streets, chooses a dude at random and kicks him square in the nuts. Back to work the next day. Does he earn anything for saving so many people? What kinda asshole goes “fuck those 100,000,000 people and their friends and family's grieving, I aint letting nobody kick me in the balls!”? Lol
Also, if you object to the surplus of good, why not the surplus of bad in a redemption story? Why does it work one way and not the other?
Now if the person saved the planet from extinction, but she was also a serial killer? Tricky.
I think one has to make a concerted effort to reform oneself. I don’t think you just earn points and demerits like spending on a debit card that gets regular deposits. That seems just wrong.
Basically, imagine if you were a god of infinite mercy and forgiveness. You would still of course care that people do good things and not bad, but your focus would be on reforming people to best ensure that they do better in the future, not on passing pointless judgement on their past misdeeds. That is the kind of moral standard that humans should aspire to too. Forgive everyone on principle and just try to influence how they will behave in the future. Nobody has legitimate moral debts or credits, just evidence of past behavior that warrants rehabilitive action to change their future behavior.
Why can't the guy who saved 100 million lives just go out one day and kill someone? He's still far in the net positives for moral credits.
So you think intention is definitive of how the balance is struck? Does it really matter why the person saves 100 million lives? Wouldn't you be glad he did it? (Provided the 100 million lives were the moral surplus of course).
Sure, I get it, an enlightened, non-judging consideration. Im explicitly asking in the context of judging however, so that doesnt answer the OP.
Yes, i agree an accidental act isnt really a moral one (unless someone was so careless it was immoral I suppose), but what if the person saved the lives to get girls? Its still saving 100 million people.
Exactly. Thats essentially what Im asking. Why couldnt he? It follows the same rationale. If the ball kicking was ok, why not the murder?
But would his saving of lives be considered in the balance of morality?
Ok, lets hear the argument.
None of what I said was intended to follow mathematical rules. The terms were meant in a broad sense, to illustrate my points.
Well, I don’t conflate the law and morality, I think of the two as distinct from each other, so youre really asking a different question from my point of view.
Some laws coincide with morality. Murder is one.
I think I disagree with that, but you had mentioned that you would argue that the heat of passion would make it somewhat forgivable if traded for 100 million lives? Id like to hear your argument.
Ok, gotchya :up:
There is bad, but there is also good who produces the event of hell - the judge.
I think if you're a utilitarian this kind of judgment makes sense. Personally, I'm not a utilitarian so I wouldn't judge how morally good a person is by their balance of good consequences versus bad consequences. The first reason I'd use for this is that I feel like as people we just know that there are things we should never, ever do - for instance, crimes against children. I don't care if you're a doctor who has saved hundreds of lives; that doesn't allow you to go abuse children. That's just how I think about morality - it's first and foremost "don't do this" and then we can go on to other topics.
Keep in mind someone could also do a moral action but it has a bad consequence. How do you judge that? For instance, lets say you rescue a man but he turns out to later kill some people. Would that count against you or in your favor in your moral credits vs debts? There's always that question of how far we extend those consequences. Maybe that man who you saved has a son who is the next Hitler.
That may not have been your intention, but that is what it amounts to. Even if you say that this moral arithmetic is loose, it still has the approximate structure of an arithmetic. And my question still stands: why? You admit that this model has unpalatable consequences, such as paying forward for bad deeds*, as @BitconnectCarlos pointed out - that certainly doesn't seem right. So what's the attraction of the model? Does mathematical neatness overcome moral reservations?
* Actually, "paying forward" is a known psychological phenomenon: we tend to give ourselves more license after we do good deeds, especially those that are costly and demanding. But while this may be an unconscious tendency, when we become conscious of it, we usually recognize its moral faultiness.
Thats what I would consider a principal based ethic (“dont do this”), which I addressed in the OP.
Ok, so unintentional consequences...where do we put them on ethical scales here? Thats a good question.
I think intention is a determinate factor in judging right and wrong, in the sense that a certain threshold of due diligence is being met. As long as the person has met that threshold (aren't being totally thoughtless or grossly ignorant of the consequences of their actions) then we dont need to put those unintended consequences on our ethical scale.
I dont know what to tell you. I disagree that any structures I used meets the minimum necessary requirements to be considered a mathematical model and therefore subject to any other mathematical parameters. Even you used the word “approximate”, which is hardly sufficient for you to then smuggle in the other mathematical parameters such as a scalar metric.
We can pay off moral debt and i do believe wrong doing can be quantified monetarily. However I believe forgiveness even drastic forgiveness is entirely necessary for a functional society. Most organizations are unqualified to quantify wrong doing in monetary terms, but that is not to say it is completely impossible. I feel that to say wrong doing is unquantifiable either makes wrong doing trivial or it makes money completely trivial.
...you realise my use of the word “debt” is metaphorical, right?
Correct. Did i miss something? I'll reread what you wrote. I skimmed it the first time.
yeah i should have read the whole thing. Yeah you are completely right with this post. Sorry.
No problem. :)
Anyway, my objection is not that your proposal has the structure of a metric - after all, any theory has a structure of one sort or another, and there is nothing inherently wrong with a metric structure. My objection, or rather my query is very simple: Why this theory? It has some intuitive appeal, but it also has objectionable implications. Is there something about this theory that makes the price worth paying? I suspect that you may be led by implicit assumptions (namely, that there must be something like a metric of moral worth) or seduced by the elegance and simplicity of this theory. I may be wrong, but so far you have shed little light on your motivations.
You said:
“DingoJones This assumes a scalar metric of moral action that accumulates and follows the usual arithmetic rules. Why assume that?“
I didnt make that assumption. You are reframing what Im saying as a “scalar metric of moral action that accumulates and follows the usual arithmetic rules.” and then asking me why I went with a “scalar metric of moral action that accumulates and follows the normal arithmetic rules”. I didnt, you just said I did.
The reason why this is a sticking point for me is because your reframing explicitly imposes a set of rules (“arithmetic rules”) on the expression of my views, but thats just your reframing of it. I didnt assume that framing, you did.
If thats your only query, then I feel like its been answered now. Not much more for me to add so your welcome to the last word.
Ah, ok. In what way did I make a category error? Which categories?
Either one grows as a moral being, meaning at one point one will reflect and be confronted with their past actions and thoughts, and may come to regret some of them. Thereby one is doing their own penance through regret.
Or one stagnates as a moral being, meaning one does not reflect upon their actions. One would not grow wise or learn the nature of love.
Either way one does penance.
Im not treating them like they are the same thing, Im referencing one to gain information about the other. You dont think a persons past actions should be considered in moral judgements? Hitler is helping at a soup kitchen, you just have to conclude he’s a good person even if you know his history?
Ok, I think I understand you now.
If the only connection between two acts is that they are committed by the same person, it makes no sense to talk about debt and cancellation of debt.
If you do something bad against someone and then something good towards the same person, he may feel that you have made up for your bad behavior. Or if the good act was directed at his child or another relation, that may amount to the same thing.
Or you may assume that the bad deed was directed at God, then any good deed would also concern God. That, however, would be a theological question.
There is no logical reason why a bad act would increase the demand for a good act. You should do good regardless and even if you have already done good, that is no reason to stop.
There may however be emotional reasons, a personal way of doing repentance and no one has the right to argue against that. Sure, if the good deed makes you feel better, do it. After all, you should do it anyway.
But to talk about debt and pay back, both creditor and debtor need to be identical, i.e. if A harms B, A must later benefit B (and not C or D)
Quoting DingoJones
Quoting DingoJones
In my impression, the principle of karma in Buddhism works pretty much like you describe. It is considered to be some kind of accounting system across lives.
You suffer in this life for immoralities committed previously in this life, or in a previous life. If you commit new immoralities, you will suffer later in this life, or in a later life. Conversely, you will experience happiness later in this life, or in a later life, for your good deeds.
I am not sure that it necessarily balances out.
Your bad deeds get gradually written off as you suffer for them, but I am not sure that you can merely perform good deeds to reduce your future suffering. Perhaps, you can only write off your bad karma by suffering alone. A Buddhist monk could better clarify the details of how karma works.
Other religions simplify the same idea to merely carrying over good and bad deeds to the rest of your life, and the outstanding balance to the next life, with no reference to previous lives.
B would be the “we” I mentioned in my OP. This is about humans judging humans.
We have to be dealing with the same consciousness to decide if the compensation is appropriate since there is no objective way to measure it. Say someone takes a human life, what would be an appropriate pay-back to mankind? What good deed could in any real since make up for this bad deed?
The law stipulates a certain punishment for murder, but that’s entirely arbitrary (punishment differs between various times and places). You may have an individual feeling about approximately what punishment would be right for a crime, but that can’t be reached by means of logic. What should be the punishment for murder? Capital punishment, life in prison, twenty years in prison, a million dollars? You may have a feeling about it, but it’s just a feeling. There’s no direct correspondence between killing and deprivation of liberty. Likewise, it would be impossible to decide on the correct compensation for murder.
On the other hand, the individual who is hurt by a crime could at some point declare that he is satisfied with the compensation. What could be the compensation for a punch on the jaw? A thousand dollars? A handshake? Since it is subjective, only the person involved can decide.
Objective/subjective is irrelevant. However you think of morality or the basis of morality doesnt matter, im asking about what those judgements would be.
You are still responding as though “B” is a person, but Ive already told you what “B” is. The specific judgements for what good compensates for what bad is getting ahead of the question. Does the principal of paying off moral debt this way make sense to start with? If we then determine that its sound in principal then we can talk about what kind of trade-offs make the most sense. (And subjective/objective basis of morality still doesnt matter).
I don't believe in moral debt, per se. But I think as an analogy or metaphor it kinda works.
People here are suggesting that doing right all your life doesn't entitle you to suddenly murder anyone. True.
However, let's say you have a close loved one who's always had your back and they suddenly wrong you somehow, you're much more likely to refer to their previous goodness as a reason to forgive them (depending on the severity of the wrong, I suppose) than you would some stranger or not close acquaintance.
But as @Pfhorrest suggests, this is probably more due to our relative certainty that the loved one will not continue bad acts and the lesser known person might.
I think doing good things to "make up" for a bad deed aren't thus so much a way to eradicate "debt" as much as a way to prove regret, remorse, and reformation.
What if you steal a pack of gum, but spend the rest of your life doing nothing but right to make up for it? Do we forgive the stolen pack of gum?
Quoting Artemis
Sure, there would be instances where thats the case but Im asking about those circumstances where thats not the case, where its a member of society judged by the rest of society.
Quoting Artemis
Ok, so a few questions here. Is that in all cases, that you can never “make up” for a bad deed? (You steal a pack of gum, then replace the pack of gum plus work the store for free for a few weeks).
Does “making up” actually prove regret or remorse (morally speaking)? It seems like you could have other motivations, selfish or immoral ones.
There is an interesting application of this idea with regards to punishment. We could consider punishment for past actions, like a jail sentence, a way of repaying a moral debt. You have incurred a debt by taking away someone's rights in some way, and now you pay for that by giving up some of your rights. Thus, the balance is re-established, albeit with everyone worse off.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That reminds me of another issue that gets debated concerning punishment: is it actually moral to change who someone is for the benefit of others? Not to encourage them to change, but to threaten them with (harsher) punishment if they don't?
If you could magically change Hitler into a good person, would you be destroying the previous Hitler, and would that be right?
Sure, thats why they say former prisoners have payed their debt to society. I had in mind a moral sense of it though, but yes in principal its the same idea.
Yes. :rofl:
Is that a Hitler specific thing? What if me zap guys like Trump, Duterte or Orban with the nicening ray?
No, the principle of paying off moral debt doesn’t make sense even to start with, and the reason is what I have been trying to convey: There is no correspondence between the original transgression and the presumed reimbursement.
Whatever is paid back, most be paid back in kind, or else it just isn’t real. If you steal a hundred dollars, you can pay back a hundred dollars and at least there is some logical correspondence between crime and compensation. But when paying back in an unconvertible currency so to speak, there’s no way to reach satisfaction.
Let’s say you slap someone on the cheek and then pay a million dollars in compensation. The insult seems small and the compensation enormous, but since there is no correspondence between the two you have in no way erased the original insult. (The offended party may happily accept the compensation, but you’re right that that’s not the point). The insult stays and will stay there forever whatever you do.
You seem to imply in your argumentation that you can morally commit any immoral act as long as you pay back somehow, and that it is as if the bad thing you did never happened. No, what was bad remains bad. If you kill someone’s child and later save the world, that child will still be gone.
Hitler was bad, however Ghengis Khan did alot of good. Many of the nations he conquered were known for raping women, murdering people and oppressing the poor. That is a very overly simplistic analysis of Ghengis Khan. The people Temujin conquered were terrible and attrocius people. Perhaps it was evil conquering evil. The poor weren't any worse off under Ghengis Khan. Look up the history of religions originating out of Saudi Arabia and their relationship to rape.
Yes there is, it corresponds to whatever satisfies as reimbursement. This would be true even if I was talking about the individual, which Im not.
Quoting Congau
Thats just not true, people reach satisfaction over moral transgressions all the time. They do so regardless of this strict mathematical calculation you claim must be present. The currency may seem unconvertible to you but people get by just fine without it.
Quoting Congau
Its not that it never happened, or that reality (the child being gone) would change somehow, its about the moral measure of that person. The bad actions are still bad and the good actions still good as you say, but Im not asking whether the bad actions are considered good somehow based on good action. im asking about the balance, about how the good and bad measure against each other.
We dont judge someones moral worth on whether they’ve did 1 good thing or 1 bad thing, we take account of both and weigh them against one another. I dont think thats controversial.
How can you know what satisfies if you are not talking about an individual? Compensations that are actually unconvertible seem to work because the individual is content. The damage can’t be undone, but a million dollars sort of makes him happy, so he accepts. Another person would demand more a third person less.
What would satisfy the abstract mankind?
Quoting DingoJones
Yes, people reach agreements, individuals, that is.
Quoting DingoJones
If you are only talking about how we morally judge people, it’s a rather trivial point. Sure, I could say, this guy has done a lot of bad things but also a lot of good, so he’s moral worth is about medium.
But you are clearly talking about something more than that when you use a concept of moral debt. Who’s to say that a person should have a medium moral worth or the worth of an average human being? If you are above that level, it’s great, below is bad and balancing is just ok?
Why? Let’s say all actions, good or bad, were assigned a moral value unknown to us, but maybe existing in the mind of God or the universe. Then we could assume that each of us had a real moral value, a number that we wouldn’t know but was still existing. If good acts had a positive value and bad acts negative, why would it necessarily be ok to have the value zero? Maybe objective morality would demand a positive value for an acceptably moral person. (Btw, total inactivity would produce a zero.)
It would function the same way anything else is decided/judged by a collective. With morality the varied judgements within the group may differ on various points, but there will be collective agreement on certain clear acts of morality/immorality. That is why Ive used easily contrasted acts, such as mass murder and working at a soup kitchen once or twice. It should be easy to see the imbalance there. Do you think that the balance is unclear in that example?
Before you mention individual dissent again, remember im talking about a collective, society in general. The small portion of whacky dissenters do not represent the larger body of moral judgement.
Quoting Congau
Groups of people (individuals) reach agreements too. They even do that if not every individual within the group agrees to it or about it.
Quoting Congau
Yes, exactly. Its much more difficult to determine all the different, exact points on the moral spectrum as you are pointing out, but for the purposes of the OP we do not need to. We just need to operate from the premiss that there IS a spectrum. Again, this is why I used such easily contrasted examples, to show that there is a spectrum. Thats all my question requires.
Your original question was: “Can we pay off moral debt?” and I realize that the question is one of principle and not concerned with the exact measurement of each act of charity or transgression. The problem is not about subjective/objective, but that a debt to an unspecified collective doesn’t make sense. How could there be a debt to mankind? The idea of repayment necessitates some unity of feeling on the part of the creditor. Someone feels a loss and a repayment somehow relieves the pain. That unity of feeling obviously doesn’t exist in mankind.
If we still judge the moral value of a person according to how we think his good and bad deeds add up, that doesn’t include any notion of debt since we only assess the achievements and shortcoming of the moral agent. If a student gets some excellent grades and some lousy ones, we call him a medium level student, but there is no preconceived assumption that overall grades are always ok if they balance in the middle. Grades should be as good as possible and so should a person’s moral standing. There’s nothing inherently ok about being average. It’s just that we don’t find it fair to judge a person too hard if he’s no worse than most people.
Well now you’ve gone the complete opposite of the individual, all of mankind.
Two things. Its not an unspecified collective. It can be a specific one. A city, a town, a community within a city or town and whatever standards that group agrees on...and also its not about paying off the debt or accruing it to a specific person, Thats a separate judgement I would say. Its about the moral debt to the community. Stealing from that community and balancing it out with service to that community.
Quoting Congau
Is there something inherently not ok about being average? (Just curious)
Anyway,
We judge the student on the balance of his good and bad grades. That may come out medium, low or still excellent. Thats exactly what Im suggesting about taking someones moral measure.
So its not about aiming for average, but surpassing a minimum standard to qualify as a good person. This standard can actually be very high or very low, whatever the group or community has accepted/adopted.
Quoting DingoJones
No. No level is inherently ok or not ok. From a universal/moral perspective there is no such thing. People decide what they find acceptable for whatever reason. They make laws about what is acceptable behavior, but that’s only aimed at what would make the community work. Excellence would be too high a standard because it would make most people criminals and too much lenience would make society fall apart. Whatever the community decides, it is not to be confused with actual ethics (although by chance it may coincide with your ethical standards).
Ya, I wasnt intending to operate from a universal standard for ethics. Ive meant it to be about any given societies standard. All thats required is a standard by which people are morally judged, or their moral measure taken.
So to your point about it not being about ethics anymore but law/politics. I think we both recognise that distinction, however Im not referencing laws here. Im still referencing the ethics of the group/community, whatever they may be. Law is about whats best for society, and morality is about whats best according to a moral standard.
I agree that you could have unjust laws and imperfect ethics in a group, but thats not what Im asking about. Im asking about how the balance of moral/immoral works, regardless of what the individual standards that are in place may be. Its about how people are judged morally according to any given moral standard, not whether or not the standard is just or not. Thats a separate topic.
I understand its not always clear where the overlap between law and ethics is, so examples Ive used might have been confusing, for that I apologise.
So people are judged morally in any given society by adding and subtracting good and bad actions according to the standards of their society. So what?
Regardless of what those standards are, whether they are very strict or very lenient from our perspective, one would assume that the average member would have an average score, that is a balance between good and bad. It is pretty much a tautology: The standard of any society is determined by how the members generally behave, and how the members generally behave will be identical to the standard. Those who subscribe to the standard, the members in general and the average member, will naturally accept those who are like themselves, those who hit the balance. (They will condemn those below and praise those above.)
This is how we assess everyone in our society concerning everything, not only concerning moral issues (although we tend to confuse them). Someone who dresses in average clothes will get an average acceptance by average members. It’s just how it works, but is it how it ought to work? Should the average expectation be of any real concern to you at all? If you are not an average representative of your society, you will disagree with its verdict, so why bother?
So now we’re clear about how I framed this in the OP? This was all about clarifying on what basis I made my questions about moral debt.
Now that you’ve agreed there is moral measuring going on, Im interested in your thoughts about how they balance out so id refer you the OP.
Quoting Congau
This is a tangent, and I fail to see the relevance. We may have gone into the weeds a bit, we’ve spent a lot of time sorting out the context of my question and not the question.
So people may tend to think that way and I conceded that I may instinctively do so myself. (“He has done some bad things and some good things, so I guess overall he’s an ok guy.”) but that doesn’t mean there’s any deeper truth to it. There is no logical reason why good and bad acts may cancel each other out. But you were not looking for a logical reason, were you, so why expect anything from the conclusion about the “heinous act”?
The reason you are not comfortable with the conclusion is that the original premise was only true in a very inaccurate sense. The premise says: this is how we generally and unreflectingly judge a person’s moral standing. The conclusion: therefore, we must also do it like that in this extreme case. The conclusion doesn’t seem true, so there must be something wrong with the premise.
This is exactly how we detect that our general assumptions are logical fallacies: It seems right from the start because we haven’t considered all implications.
But you didn’t exactly say that the premise was true, did you? You only said that this is what people (including yourself) generally do when considering someone’s approximate moral merits. It’s like explaining why you want something for dinner- it’s generally right but can’t be put through a logical test.
Well I disagree with pretty much all of that. I think its precisely logical, and do not think its correct to call it inaccurate. I think you can take moral measure on more than an instinctive level. I think you are mistaking discomfort for illogical.
Ok, so if a guy steals 20$, then feels bad so builds a few houses for homeless people, cures cancer and creates peace in the middle east to make up for it, you would say its illogical to A) forgive him and/or B) consider him a good person? And you think there is something inaccurate about saying his good deeds outweighs his bad deeds?
So, we are back where we started then. It’s not just that people tend to feel that way, and it’s not about how people in a given collective would give weight to different kinds of action.
Your claim is that this way of thinking has an absolute truth value (which makes it an ethical theory). Very good. Let’s test that.
Whatever is ethically good or bad is either an action or a person. We here assume we know what a good/bad action is and also the degree of good/bad action. This is about testing the ethical value of a person.
I would say that a good person is one who is inclined to do good actions. He has a mental disposition that makes him do what is good when it’s time to act. This is what is called virtue. A person possesses a degree of virtue now at this moment - he is now a good or bad person.
People can change. He may have been a terrible person in his youth, a murderer even, but now he has grown virtuous and that depends on the mental disposition and habits that he has now acquired. It doesn’t depend on what he has actually done, he may not have had the chance, or the change may have come over him relatively recently, but if something came up now, he would do the right thing.
So, how can we tell that he is now a good person? We can’t. We don’t know what is going on inside him. We can only judge from what we see from outside. We acknowledge his good acts, subtract his bad ones and guess his inner state based on that, but we may be wrong. An extremely good deed, curing cancer or creating peace in the middle east, doesn’t make him a good person unless he did it for the right reason, that is a desire to do good. (Maybe he did it to make money)
No im not claiming absolute truth. Its relative to whatever standard of the society/group.
Quoting Congau
So your objection is essentially that morality isnt about taking moral measure of the past but only as the persons Moral disposition is currently? Is that right?
Quoting Congau
How do you separate the act from the intention? If a guy saves babies and cures cancer so he can pick up chicks easier, the act is clearly morally good and the intention not so much, but since the act is an act of good Im not sure it makes sense to say the actor is bad (or not good).
.
I don’t quite believe you think it’s that relative. If a society/group considers that donating a chewing gum makes up for murder, they would be plain wrong, wouldn’t they?
Quoting DingoJones
If by morality you mean moral character, that’s right. And I think that’s what you are trying to measure with your scheme. Isn’t it? The issue is the moral worth of the person and I don’t know what that would mean other than character.
Quoting DingoJones
Right. The action is still good, and the actor is neither good nor bad based on this action.
Of course it’s difficult or impossible for us, the observers, to know his intention. That’s why we make shortcut judgments based on his actions, and that’s why your scheme might seem to work on the surface. We can’t look inside a person’s head, so we assess him based on the circumstantial evidence we have.
That would be the way we actually judge character, but it’s highly inaccurate and often unjust. We look at the drunkard who neglects wife and kids for his booze, which of course is bad, but we don’t know what brought him there, what tragedies he may be fighting against. Therefore, we shouldn’t judge anyone, if we can refrain from it, and a system like yours is an invitation to superficial judgment.
Different discussion. Im not asking about your own “objective” morality and how the societies morality is measured against it, im just referencing the societies standards. (Specifically so we dont have to dick around with an entirely different discussion about whats right and wrong). Im asking about how the measurement is done, not what its being measured against.
Quoting Congau
No, by morality I mean morality. Not a scheme, a simple moral question about how we settle on moral questions. Not moral worth, moral balance. This is entirely a straw-man...straw-men. I chose the framing for a reason, if you think im not using the best words for my meaning you’ll have to show me why first.
Quoting Congau
None of that answers the question.
Hello DingoJones,
I'll start with breaking down what you want into claims, to simplify it for myself. Below that I propose my idea of a solution, before continuing by elaboration upon it.
Claim 1: We judge people as Moral/immoral. Claim 2: We do this by measuring their immoral acts up against their moral. Claim 3: We use an ethical cost/benefit analysis, where we consider the act, its consequences, collateral benefit or damage and how it all fits morally speaking.
Hypothetical example of how this should/could work. "Commits theft (Moral debt), spends life giving to charity and people they meet. (Pays debt) At one point achieves Moral Surplus, goes from Moral Debt to Moral Credit."
Claim 4: Refusing to lie to save billions of people makes you a moral monster.
Conclusion: Given the above claims, further elaborated upon by the hypothetical example, any act should be repayable. I'm not very comfortable with that conclusion.
- Do not use a principle based approach and do not refer to Objectivity of morality or subjectivity of morality. -
How I view this.
You say you are not very comfortable with the fact that your conclusion shows that any act is repayable, and you wish to disprove the conclusion to resolve the feeling. I propose a different solution, namely to fill in the gaps by adding claims, so that your conclusion is more fleshed out. The reason for this is that your conclusion makes sense given the premises, so it makes sense to look at it as it is. Another solution to resolve the issue would of course be to change the premises, but that is not a solution in the context of you having written this OP.
Here are some claims that might fill some gaps. There are still things missing though, and I haven't continued that far as I want to know if this fulfills your criteria.
Claim 5:
Every community is collectively responsible for the immoral acts of every member.
Claim 6:
It is a collective immoral act not to stop immoral acts.
Claim 7:
A community, that collectively has moral debt, becomes morally bankrupt.
With these claims in mind, let's look at the conclusion again.
Any act is repayable, yes, but not unconditionally. If an individual racks up debt, and is not stopped, the community might turn bankrupt. A morally bankrupt community loses it ability to discern whether individuals have moral debt, to measure moral against immoral acts, and also to analyze their moral economy.
I'll stop there, and ask what you think about this line of thinking?
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
I think the claims 1-3 are a fair assessment of what Ive offered in the OP.
Claim 4 was actually an example for some of the claims 1-3 and shouldn't be taken as a claim unto itself. Im not sure it adds anything claims 1-3 do not cover.
Im not sure what context claims 5-7 are for. What are the gaps you mention? If I understand those then perhaps claims 5-7 will make more sense to me.
Also, I take it you disagree with one or more of my premisses?
Hi again DingoJones,
You are welcome. Then let us ignore claim 4 as a claim.
And to answer that first, for the sake of the argument, I was not trying to disagree with your premises or your conclusion. But for your interest I added that below my answers to your questions; see The disagree option
I see that using the word claims might seem like I disagree, or want to add additional premises. That was not my intention. My intention was to try to answer questions that I found reasonable to ask given your premises. Here is the reasoning behind the "claims/answers" I made. Hope that clears it up for you.
First, I assume claim 1-3 are true. "We can judge Moral/immoral, by balancing moral against immoral, and furthermore are able to do an ethical cost/benefit analysis of every situation."
The gaps I mentioned are the parameters you haven't specified. So I started by looking at one of these. The parameter differentiation of, how many does it take to pass moral judgment? You mentioned we specifically, and not I, meaning it could be between 1 and everyone, and I chose to interpret the we as a community.
Did you have another specification in mind? If so, which?
Another parameter, a follow-up to the first, is how skewed the ability to make accurate cost/benefit analyses are between the individual and the community.
I chose to make the community collectively responsible, meaning that if an individual does a "10" immoral act, it affects the total score of the community by -10.
Which is answer/claim 5:
"Every community is collectively responsible for the immoral acts of every member."
The next answer/claim, claim 6, is an answer to the following parameters: Is the ability to make an analysis absolute? You haven't mentioned any limitations to your claim 1-3, so I assumed yes. We can make judgment of each and every action, and our cost/benefit analysis are always accurate.
Which opens up the following parameter: If we, the community, know the consequence of every action and its moral cost, are we in not acting upon this knowledge ourselves committing immoral acts? To which I arbitrarily chose the answer yes.
Which is where claim/answer 6 comes in:
"It is a collective immoral act not to stop immoral acts."
My answer/claim 7 is a response to this situation: If the community, being fully aware of the consequences of moral/immoral actions and with more power than the individual as well, is unable to have a moral surplus, are they immoral or morally incompetent? I'm not assuming the community is perfect, but if they know the consequences of every situation, and they end up immoral aka morally bankrupt, shouldn't that have much bigger implications than the half blind individual not seeing the full extent of his/her immorality?
And to that I answered:
A community, that collectively has moral debt, becomes morally bankrupt.
And when a community becomes morally bankrupt, I just assumed it lost every power and privilege it had with regard to claim 1 through 3. The reason for this being the simple idea that with great power comes great responsibility. So, if you can do claim 1-3, but you fail, the consequences should be big as well. In this case, I chose that they turn morally blind. I stopped there, as I wanted to hear your thoughts.
The disagree option:
If you want to argue that your premises are fundamental or indispensable in some way, I would love to see that. But you haven't argued much for your claims, and there are numerous ways the claims conflict as well. Since your claims and their connection is not well-proven in my opinion, and therefore the conclusion is not solid. I said you could just change the premises. If you find the premises compelling, then for someone to disprove it, shouldn't it first be proven?
One thing I would like proof of, is why Claim 1, 2 and 3 are connected? I would also like proof of the individual claims, and proof of them being better than the alternatives - or at least why you chose these over other options.
Here is one example of different options to your initial claims:
Another option to claim 1, is that we judge people just because we want to. Moreover, we can also judge people without adhering to claim 2. We can also judge people as immoral/moral without using an ethical cost/benefit analyses.
If we add in the parameters, there are a lot of questions too, even without undoing your premises. In each of the questions, I make a choice regarding a parameter. What is your choice of parameters, and why. What is your proof, or ideas, around why this is the right choice?
What if claim 1-3 is true, but we forget the score after a month?
What if claim 1-3 is true, but only groups of 10 can make accurate judgments?
What if claim 1-3 is true, but we can only judge actions that happened in the past week?
What if claim 1-3 is true, but different groups use a different basis for their ethical analysis?
What if claim 1-3 is true, but we choose to pass the debt on?
Kindly but in debate-mode,
Caerulea-Lawrence