I’ll focus on ‘accountability without a universal standpoint’.
My concern lies in the accountability of immoral leaders in war. How much leverage do other countries, judgments, moral or international laws actually have?
Can’t they themselves be morally compromised?
Foot’s WWII experience shows enforcement through defence or attack. War begets war; there is a ‘vicious’ cycle. Moral judgment alone can’t prevent immoralities.
This directly challenges the idea that we act under a universal umbrella of ‘answerability to the judgment of all.’
Kantian duties such as ‘never lie’ presume a shared rationality that breaks down under asymmetrical power — protecting the immoral and endangering the vulnerable.
Real responsibility has to be understood within messy, relational situations — among real actions and people — not in an imagined space where everyone judges from the same standpoint.
Questions remain, especially when power overwhelms judgment, and the levels of responsibility are not aligned.
It seems to me that the issue is intention. Practical reasoning is often seen in hypothetical imperatives — if this is the end, then this is what I must do.
Intention is in the situation not in a prior motive we need to discover. The evaluation is in what a person is trying to do, making a decision —rather than moralising every act or inner state.
Yes, and this is the crazy-making part of Kant, because he agrees with this but won’t allow that anything other than “acting in accordance with a universal maxim” could be a good reason for “trying to do” something. To my mind, this is so obviously untenable that I’m always looking for ways to bring a traditional moral vocabulary back into Kantian thinking, since his insistence on universalization is so right on. He simply had to have taken the virtues and the ordinary moral vocabulary for granted, otherwise the “concept” of the categorical imperative has no “intuitions” to work with.
Kant aside, we certainly include the ordinary sense of “situational intention” in our moral evaluations – along with a number of other factors that he rules out.
I understand what you mean by wanting to bring back the ‘traditional moral vocabulary’, though not sure how traditional it is.
It’s really just the ordinary intuitions we use to make sense of actions — intention, motive, fairness, care, sincerity. These are all familiar words showing what someone is trying to do.
They’re already doing the real work in real situations. This is why I’m keeping the focus there rather than trying to make them fit a Kantian framework.
Consider two amoralists; the first holds that there are moral statements, but all statements about morals are false, and concludes that there is nothing they ought do. The second holds that there are indeed true moral statements, that there are things he ought do, but then doesn’t do those things. For them, one need not do what one ought.
OK. But isn’t there a third as well? The third holds that there are true moral statements, that they express what ought to be done if you care about such things, but that he/she is an exception, since he/she doesn’t care about morality. “Ought” doesn’t apply to me, is their claim; good, bad, who cares.
Which of these three possibilities (if there are three) do you think is “Foot’s amoralist” – the one she’s describing in the target essay?
Yes, just so. With a healthy dash of “sentimental education” in the virtues, perhaps – being shown how to recognize, and empathize with, what morality is meant to address.
That’s fine. My own obsession with rehabilitating Kant doesn’t have to take center stage. But I’ll speak up for universalizability as essential within that “real work.”
…the amoral man, who agrees that some piece of conduct is immoral but takes no notice of that…
She uses it to drive a wedge between what we ought do and what we indeed do.
So my counter, given earlier in this thread, was that the amoral man of the second type is guilty of a form of performative contradiction. Foot’s point is that he might well respond “yes, it is a performative contradiction, I ought not do what I am now doing”, and carry on.
What to make of such a one? Culpable, obviously. But so what? Whence the imperative here?
I think that’s right. The denial of the “ought” can occur at any point, with the same result – a claim of exemption.
Proponents of a categorical imperative have to concede that the most force they can get out of it – and all that Kant was really arguing for, I believe – is that to act against the dictates of the cat imp is to be rationally inconsistent, even self-contradictory, at a deep level, based on a certain (fairly plausible) view of human nature. As I say, that’s the most, putting the most positive construction on what Kant is laying out.
But to be rationally consistent and to avoid self-contradiction doesn’t, to me, have much ethical firepower. At this point we can start speculating about why Kant might have believed that it did – something to do with Enlightenment values, perhaps? – but I don’t know how to generate a recognizable “ought” out of it that doesn’t need the hypothesis of “being self-consistent to one’s rational nature” or something similar.
People often say that there is no ought in the is, but identity definitely involves ought. A massive amount of identities are nearly exclusively operational, or based in action. That one can be a plumber, and not ever work on pipes is a nonsense. An actor that never acts, is a retired or former actor, or unemployed, or some other qualifier that explains it, because, actors ought to act, or they aren’t actors at all. I think there is no coincidence in Buddhists deciding that non-identity and non-action are related. So, when we say someone is something, it carries with it the entailment of particular actions and activities. Dogs bark, cats meow, frogs leap, painters paint. We constantly check behavior, status, morality by attempting to control and check identity itself. It is the primary means of directing action and behavior.
I think that there is no less clarity with morality on the subject. Stories proliferate with little confusion about how the villains and heroes ought behave. There may be some room for disagreement, or ambiguity at the fringes, or on finer details, but this is true of literally every category. I don’t think that morality is special here. It just may be more contentious or significant in many ways to us. Things we all feel the most pressure to enact and disavow in our own lives, unlike plumbing and painting.
We become highly biased because the stakes and implications become so high. They challenge or problematize our identity as a good decent person to ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities and the consequences of that challenge can be extreme. So we struggle to maintain clarity.
Though, still substantially normative, and conventional, with plenty of room for rebellion, and individuality, if you care to risk moving against the grain.
It does have much ethical power if you actually look at the people who did not care whether the moral principle they adopt is self-defeating. If lying is universally okay, such as it’s okay to promise to repay the money you borrow because you’re in dire need at the moment while knowing that you can’t repay it, then soon no one will believe anyone’s promise and what do you think would happen next?
The point is, logical maturity can be willed as a universal maxim.
If you believe something is ‘the right thing to do’ then do you assume there must be an underlying reason for this? If you do what could that look like. If not then what are you actually doing by saying this?
If I may, demanding an “underlying reason” for “it’s the right thing to do” is often confused; the phrase can function as normative bedrock, such that attempts to reduce it to some further fact are vulnerable to open-question style objections. Calling something right can itself be an act of willing/endorsing rather than a report requiring separate backing.
Basically I think that is the point I was trying to make. It is a mistake to assume there is a ‘reason’ in any logical sense of the term. This then leads to what is ‘right’ as foundational in a completely different sense from a logical function.
It’s a lovely angle — the way identities seem to carry their own ‘oughtness’ — how certain roles can lean towards certain actions.
And in places like medical ethics, you really do see prescribed actions: duties of care, confidentiality, informed consent.
But these aren’t in the same simple sense of ‘a doctor ought to doctor’. They’re foundational ethical frameworks built around the role.
Moral ‘oughts’ are different. They’re not just tied to what someone is or the demands of a role — they depend on how moral reasons touch a person’s sensitivities.
That is what Foot is mapping. Not role-based prescription but the lived responses that involve individual power, the way moral reasons actually take hold.
In that sense, she’s less interested in defining the ideal doctor — not what a role demands — but how moral reasons actually settle into someone and their way of responding.
Very good example, and of course it’s the one that Kant himself gives. But wouldn’t the liar reply like this?: “Right, that would be the consequence if everybody did what I’m going to do. But they won’t, and I’m not ‘willing that they do.’ The societal structure of promise-keeping in not in danger. I’m doing what I believe I need to do, in this circumstance.”
So having the (logical) contradiction pointed out ("If everyone did this, then . . . ") doesn’t seem to have a bearing on the actor’s reasons for doing what they do. That’s why I still don’t see any powerful imperative here. I think what this actor is doing is absolutely wrong. But if I’m to convince them of that, going the “cat imp” route won’t help much, IMO. What would help – and this is why I respect and learn from Kant – might be to start with the idea of universalizability as part of ethics. We can perhaps find some agreement there without having to read “part of ethics” as “a categorical imperative.”
As @Banno notes, “it’s the right thing to do” can be baldly normative, or it can refer us back to some different description of the act in question. I think what you’re asking is, are both these usages acceptable?
If that’s right, then I think my answer would be yes, as long as we don’t imagine we’re supplying a substantive, referring-back-type answer when we say only “it’s the right thing to do.” That would be a version of the Euthyphro problem, where piety is defined only as “what the gods love.”
If it does tend that way, then all the more reason for me to downplay it. I don’t mean to suggest that other systems are weak by comparison, though Kant would probably mean that. In fact, I think the opposite: Other approaches, such as Foot’s, supply critical missing pieces and concepts without which Kant is either incoherent or inaccurate.
This is true, but let’s not misread Kant here. He’s saying that ethical force depends on universalizability, not that it will “succeed universally” in the sense you mean.
This is an interesting point. I agree that Foot’s tone is largely diagnostic. But for that very reason, can we say with any assurance what her “cure for defects” would be? I’d like to hear more about this from someone who knows Foot better than I do.
Foot actually argues against appealing to emotion, or sensitivity, or sentimentalism, and in natural goodness she argues directly that moral imperative can be derived from the type of thing something is. What is good for a tree can be derived from the nature of trees. What is good for wolves can be derived from the nature of wolves, and what is good for people, can be derived from the nature of people. What something is, implies what it ought do. What I said isn’t exactly the same as her, and I’m not particularly or strongly familiar with her, but it doesn’t appear that far off from me either. I don’t think.
Let’s say this was true, which I’m not sure it is. How would knowing what is good for people provide an argument for an individual person to pursue that good? Trees and wolves aren’t faced with a decision about whether to be good trees or wolves, but humans are.
That’s the part I want to understand better, from this point of view.