Circumstantial Luck: Another Response!

Very few things in life get me more excited than a response to one of my posts (OK, maybe more than a few, but it's still pretty great). This comment was a counterpoint to my July 1st post on the topic of circumstantial luck. I admit this post gets a bit technical, but I promise to try and keep it as layperson-friendly as possible (if you want an even more technical treatment, check out my response to Kyle's post, on that same page). Here we go:

Circumstantial Luck, or CM for all you sweet abbreviators out there, deals with the different ways we treat two people: the person who actually did do something wrong, and the person who would have done the same bad thing, but got lucky and was never put in a circumstance where he had to make that decision (recall my example of Mary, Joe and the Nazis). My argument is that we have to hold Joe, the guy who would have, but didn't do the bad thing, equally culpable as we do Mary, who actually did do the bad thing.

Kyle's response had to do with Joe. Here's what he said:

Even if, say, Joe told us he would act like a Nazi, we simply can't know for certain. There are surely people who think of themselves as unethical in certain ways but, when presented with an actual chance to act, choose rightly. In short, I'm not sure there is any substitute for acting like a Nazi.

That's definitely an interesting point, but I don't think it poses a problem to my example, for two reasons:

1. I think that we can know what people would do in lots of different circumstances. If I gave you a gun and said "shoot your parents," would you do it? I bet (for your mom and dad's sake!) you can truthfully say you wouldn't. The fact is that human behavior is awfully predictable most of the time, and even if there are some cases where we don't really know what we would do, we can still usually predict what our actions will be.

2. Even if it's impossible for us to know what we would do in some particular set of circumstances, that fact doesn't make us any more or less blameworthy. Let's say it really is impossible for me to know if I'd help the Nazis out if I lived in Germany in 1938. That doesn't change the fact that, if I were placed in that situation, I really would make a decision, either to collude or not to collude. Take a different example: I have no idea if I would be a courageous soldier if I enlisted and fought in a war, and I don't think I would know until I actually did it. But that doesn't change the fact that I am a courageous or cowardly person: I still have that attribute (courage or cowardice), and it just won't "show up" until I'm forced to act. In the same way, I still do have either a good or a bad moral character; I just might not know which one I have until I'm in a tough spot and have to make a decision.

And that brings me back to my original point. Assuming Mary did collaborate with the Nazis, and assuming we know that Joe would have collaborated if given the chance, shouldn't we blame them both the same?

A Response!

In what is the first of what will hopefully be many responses on this page, Sadeghi commented on my discussion of (uh oh!) abortion. Since I want to encourage as much dialogue as possible on this site, I'm dedicating today's column to responding to him or her (hopefully, Sadeghi, you won't mind having your comment featured so prominently!).

Here's what Sadeghi had to say about the Violinist Example:

From an evolutionary perspective, you are not in the same position as the woman impregnated by rape. Perhaps the most basic instinct of man is to reproduce replicas of him/herself. Being that this baby carries half of the mother's genes, can we really say that the rape victim and I are in the same position? I have no biological connection to this disgusting violinist hooked up to me, yet I have reason to want to save the baby carrying my DNA.

While I'm not endorsing either side of the debate, I think Sadeghi's got an interesting point: in the case of pregnancy by rape, the woman has a particular, special relationship to the fetus--she's the mother. I'm not sure it's a consideration of evolution, as Sadeghi suggests, but nonetheless it's not hard to see how the parental relationship imparts certain obligations that wouldn't otherwise exist. Since in the example I posed previously you didn't have any special relationship to the talented violinist, there's certainly an important difference.

But it's moral philosophy! We can always amend our example: let's say that the violinist is your child; would you have an obligation then? That, I think, makes Judith Jarvis Thomson's example quite a bit more controversial, but I leave it to you to consider....