What is the relevance to praiseworthiness and blameworthiness of what one would have done in other, counterfactual circumstances? I defend a moderate form of actualism: what one would have done is important, but less so than what one actually does.
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See Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 127–33, 260; David Crowe, Oskar Schindler (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), pp. 194–95. I thank Bob Adams for a discussion about Schindler that led me to ask the questions in this paper. For valuable comments, I also thank Shelly Kagan, Allen Wood, Roger Florka, Stewart Goetz, Apryl Martin, the anonymous referees, and various audiences who heard an earlier draft of this paper. Distinguishing between morally trivial and morally non-trivial differences may be difficult in some cases. I will not distinguish the two in any precise way; I trust that our sense of the difference is reliable enough in most cases for the claims I want to make in this paper.
Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone 6:47. (I will cite Kant’s works by volume and page of the German Academy edition, which are indicated in the margins of most current translations.)
Keneally, pp. 173, 370; Crowe, p. 626.
Keneally, pp. 49–55; Crowe, pp. 89–91.
Keneally, p. 48; Crowe, pp. 99–102.
Keneally, pp. 126–33; Crowe, pp. 192–95. Crowe believes Schindler’s moral transformation was somewhat more gradual (Crowe, pp. 128–32, 177, 194–95, 624–25).
See William Hasker, “A Refutation of Middle Knowledge,” Nous 20:4 (December 1986), pp. 545–57. See also Robert M. Adams, “Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), pp. 109–17.
John Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Noûs 32:4 (1998), pp. 504–30; Lack of Character (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999), pp. 315–31; “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000), pp. 223–26. Doris’s position is more subtle and careful than Harman’s; for instance, Doris concedes that there is significant cross-situational consistency among people with respect to “beliefs, goals, values, and attitudes” (Lack of Character, p. 87).
Kelly Sorensen, “The Paradox of Moral Worth,” The Journal of Philosophy 101:9 (September 2004), pp. 465–483; “Effort and Moral Worth,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13:1 (2010), pp. 89–109. See also Robert M. Adams, A Theory of Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
See for instance Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology,” p. 316, and Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” p. 506.
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What is the relevance to praiseworthiness and blameworthiness of what one would have done in other, counterfactual circumstances? I defend a moderate form of actualism: what one would have done is important, but less so than what one actually does.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 377 | 65 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 209 | 6 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 51 | 13 | 0 |