Ethics, Chapter 3: Actors and Actions

Despite the apparent nebulousness of the topic at hand, it is trivially easy to make a clear delineation between conventional notions of morality and the morality of virtue. Conventionally, morality lies in action. It is what you do that is important, morally speaking. It's not hard to confirm this at a basic level; think of the problems I offered in Chapter 2. Why were they hard to resolve morally? Because every possible action leads to a result that is undesirable, or the possible actions themselves were in some way undesirable. Think of any other moral dilemma - why is it hard to resolve? I will wager it is for basically the same reason. Now, I suspect at least some of you will think this is a silly train of thought. After all, the whole point of a dilemma is to offer two actions, neither of which is clearly right. My pointing out that this is the case doesn't establish anything at all, does it? Well, it should, I think. Let me provide something of an abstract Gedankenexperiment.

Let's suppose that we can define "moral" to be whatever it is we choose. In real life we seem to think, for some strange reason, that good is good. We have already seen that this can lead to nasty dilemmas. Now, if we can choose any definition we like, we might as well try for one which eliminates such dilemmas. Then what is right and wrong will be, at the very least, less ambiguous than it is in the real world. Let's try making bad "good". But no, we get the exact same dilemma, except we're trying to be bad and not good. At the end of the day, we're still going to get a subpar situation which just hasn't turned out bad enough. But why bad? Why not something less value-based. Why not base morality on the ability to light fires, or the colour green? It doesn't really matter, at the end of the day. There will always be some situation which cannot be satisfactorily resolved for anyone, let alone everyone (at least from our objective standpoint).

The point is that it's not the content or the make-up of the dilemma that is important, it is that the dilemma exists.This suggests to me that maybe we are interpreting the situation wrongly, or that we're not asking the right questions. As an alternative, I will offer a suggestion of a radically different way of looking at morality that I imagine will take some convincing for you to think that I haven't completely lost the plot. My alternative is that the morality of a person's actions relies not on the morality of the action but on the morality of the person. Does that make any sense at all? If you understand me, then I imagine your first thought (as it would be mine also) would be, "Doesn't that lead to some sort of loop? You're judging a person's moral judgement based on... what? How moral they are? And how exactly do we do that, Mr. Smartypants?"

Clearly the matter is a little more nuanced than that. For the proposition I'm making to make any real sense to you, you really need to drop the outside frame of reference. "Judging" a person by means of virtue ethics is difficult at best. Maybe I should try putting it a different way for you. Ordinarily, if you want to ask the question, "Is this person morally good?" you enquire as to what their actions have been and you infer from the details of those actions an answer. In real life, most people aren't dyed in the wool consequentialists or deontologists but have some sort of mixture, some of which are more consistent than others. It doesn't particularly matter, though. In the one case you look at an action and determine its value by its consequences, and in the other case you look at an action and determine its value by its own nature. This is not just how we analyse other people's actions but also how we look at our own. My suggestion is that we change this question from asking what a person does to why a person does it, not only in terms of motivations but more generally their moral values, their influences, their character.

If my estimation of you is right, I imagine you're reading this with a vague sense of amusement, perhaps mumbling something sarcastic under your breath. Sure, it's a great idea, but it's probably full of holes, you probably imagine. Certainly it's all fine and good to have the right intentions, but doesn't everyone have the best of intentions, at least as far as they are concerned? And yet people still do bad things, act in a way which we would look down upon as immoral. You're not about to tell me that Hitler was fundamentally a good bloke, just misunderstood, are you? Well, I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that no, I'm not about to say any such thing. I will answer your question in full, but first I will introduce you, or those of you not already acquainted, to the doctrine of double effect. The doctrine of double effect was introduced by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, and attempts to provide a rationalisation for acting in situations which would ordinarily be permissible but in this particular case bring about particularly nasty side-effects. I don't intend to go into the DDE in much depth for fear of getting side-tracked, and certainly there is no lack of information out there should you choose to look for it. I bring up the DDE because one of the key criteria is "right intentions", that you mean to do well. This leads to some peculiar cases.

One such case, which was raised by Judith Jarvis Thomson, I will paraphrase here. Suppose that you are a bomber pilot involved in a war which is in every manner fictional. Let us imagine two possible missions you are asked to go on. In the first, you are sent to bomb a munitions factory. You have good reason to think you can destroy the factory, but you will also likely destroy a nearby hospital, simply because your bombs cannot be any more accurate than that. In the second scenario, you are asked to bomb the hospital as part of a terror bombing campaign to cause the enemy to surrender, but will also somewhat serendipitously hit the munitions factory. In both scenarios we have the exact same result but according to the DDE the first mission is morally acceptable and the second is not. Such a situation is, to say the least, highly suspect, and it is same suspicion that I imagine many of you harbour against my newfangled suggestion. Clearly I'm not fazed by the objection, however, otherwise I'd likely not be bringing it up, so let me tell you why it doesn't in fact apply to the ethics of virtue.

It's quite simple, really. Yes, good intentions are a sign of virtue, but they are not sufficient. We have established already, as a matter of fact, that bad things can be done in the name of good intentions. As I have hinted at already, actions are not good or bad, but are made so by the actor. If an action appears to us to be prima facie wrong, then we can infer that, in this case, it is because of some deficiency in the actor (not, mind, from the action itself). Certainly it is good and well to bomb the munitions factory, but if one chooses to do so knowing that such an action will result in the deaths of innocent civilians and, furthermore, the destruction of a hospital, then we might argue that going ahead would not be the action of a virtuous person, though we are not yet able to establish why or why not we might reach this conclusion. The point, however, is that there is much more to virtue and, importantly, to character, than intentions alone.

In our discussion to this point, I have been working on some assumptions that perhaps we should question, and in doing so I think we will be able to establish some other interesting facts (if we can be so bold to call them that) about the nature of our morality. In Chapter 4 I will work on this interesting topic, focussing on the nature of objective morality and its implications for virtue ethics, before returning to an exploration of virtue itself in Chapter 5.