Moral Worth

Accounts of moral worth—the property that makes an agent praiseworthy for acting rightly—typically proceed by conditional analysis: given some standard of rightness, what further condition distinguishes praiseworthy from non-praiseworthy right action? This paper argues that such accounts face an underidentification problem: without invariance constraints on the bracketed predicate “rightness,” the explanatory target is not well-defined, and downstream claims about moral worth are not stably evaluable for correctness. I develop an alternative account on which moralworth attributions function as compressed signals tracking (...) counterfactual policy reliability under coordination constraints. The framework recovers the phenomena that motivate moral-worth talk while avoiding the underidentification problem. I show that the two approaches generate divergent predictions about praise judgments, and I argue that the constraint-sensitive account better explains cases—including those traditionally favorable to the duty-based view. (shrink)

An act that accords with duty has moral worth if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the same as what would have motivated a perfectly virtuous agent to perform it. On one of the two leading accounts of moral worth, an act that accords with duty has moral worth if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the fact that it’s obligatory. On the other, an act that accords with duty has moral worth (...) if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the fact that it has that feature of obligatory acts that makes them obligatory. I argue that both views are incorrect, providing counterexamples to each. I then argue that, on the correct account, an act can have moral worth only if its agent is motivated out of a fundamental concern for the things that ultimately matter. (shrink)

Some say that concern for morality de dicto grants right actions moral worth. That is, they say that if you do the right thing because of your concern to do the right thing, your action has moral worth (and you are worthy of esteem for that action). Some say that concern for morality de re grants moral worth - that is, they say that if you do the right action for the reasons that make it right (for example, because it (...) protects wellbeing and respects autonomy) then your action has moral worth. Increasingly, some argue, and many seem to think, that both concern for morality de dicto and concern for morality de re grant right actions moral worth In this paper, I will argue that the last position is false. If de dicto concern grants moral worth, de re concern does not, and vice versa. The question turns out to be surprisingly tied to the question of whether moral ignorance excuses from blame. (shrink)

A central project in epistemology is to spell out the conditions under which a belief is epistemically justified. By contrast, ethicists have not given much attention to the conditions under which an action is morally justified. This state of affairs is surprising, given the way we use the term “justified” in everyday discourse. This paper argues that the concept of moral justification has an important role to play in ethics—a role that closely parallels the role epistemic justification plays in epistemology. (...) After articulating this role, I take some first steps towards providing a unified theory of moral and epistemic justification. Along the way, I highlight the theoretical payoff of adding moral justification to our conceptual toolkit. (shrink)

Traditionally, it has been thought that, assuming other conditions are satisfied, your action must be morally worthy or good if you are acting solely from good motives. There is a lively dispute as to which motives are good, but whichever motives are good, acting solely from good motives is not always good and can even be bad on the whole. We may act rightly from a good motive while being indifferent to what matters most. Indifference, I argue, can make our (...) actions less than ideally good and at times even bad. Traditional theories, however, cannot accommodate cases of indifference by assuming absent and ineffective motives can never make a difference to an action’s moral value. Absent as well as ineffective motives can make an action less good and at times even bad. To accommodate this, we need to adopt a proportionality principle in assessing an action. An action is made good to a degree in proportion to the goodness of its effective motives. But an action is also made bad to a degree in proportion to the disproportion it exhibits through its whole set of relevant motives including not only effective motives but also absent as well as ineffective ones. (shrink)

Some right acts have what philosophers call moral worth. A right act has moral worth if and only if its agent deserves credit for having acted rightly in this instance. And I argue that an agent deserves credit for having acted rightly if and only if her act issues from an appropriate set of concerns, where the appropriateness of these concerns is a function what her ultimate moral concerns should be. Two important upshots of the resulting account of moral worth (...) are that (1) an act can have moral worth even if it doesn’t manifest a concern for doing what’s right and that (2) an act can lack moral worth even if it is performed for the right reasons. (shrink)

I argue that agents can be praiseworthy for doing the right thing despite being unaware of their doing that thing (and not only that it is right). Differently put--contrary to a widespread assumption to the contrary-- I propose that negligence has a positive counterpart, which I dub “posigence”. To motivate this proposal, I introduce cases in which an agent has sufficient reason to act in a way that promotes her own well-being but sets back (or at least, fails to promote) (...) the interests of another, but inadvertently omits to do so, manifesting therein good quality of will. (shrink)

A popular view on moral worth, Anti-Fetishism, states that an action motivated by concern for moral rightness represented as such is not praiseworthy. This can be seen if we appreciate that whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good moral theorist, as good people can misrepresent moral rightness and not be motivated by their mistaken grasp of it. But then what does an action need to be motivated by in order to be praiseworthy? (...) I argue that Anti-Fetishism's key insights give us reasons to reject the positive answers provided to this question by Anti-Fetishists themselves. The source of the Anti-Fetishist insight is much broader than originally thought: whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good theorist in general, as good people can misrepresent many kinds of facts. This makes the question of praiseworthy motivation difficult, and also reveals that certain types of morally relevant descriptive ignorance do not excuse wrongdoing. I suggest a solution: an action is praiseworthy if motivated by a set of representations whose intuitive moral import is unaffected by our potential theoretical mistakes: phenomenal representations of others' lives. (shrink)

According to commonly endorsed “enkratic principles”, one is practically irrational if one judges that one ought to φ without intending to φ, or judges that one has a normative reason to φ without being motivated to φ. Such principles are often considered both a priori or conceptually true and revelatory of the nature of reason-implying judgments, including moral judgments. This paper, however, argues that: (1) There is intuitive ground for expanding these familiar enkratic principles to a principle we call EnkrasiaPlus. (...) (2) EnkrasiaPlus is particularly plausible on the assumption that reason judgments have a motivational function. (3) However, it is a priori possible that actual reason judgments instead have a political function. (4) If they do, EnkrasiaPlus, including its more familiar components, loses its plausibility. (5) Practical rationality is thus at least partly a posteriori. (6) This has important implications for philosophical debates about moral motivation and moral worth. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about responding to reasons maintains that responding to normative reasons and responding to motivating reasons are fundamentally different conditions neither of which can be analyzed in terms of the other. This paper argues against disjunctivism and defends the factoring account of responding to normative reasons according to which the fact that an agent responds to a normative reason is grounded upon the facts that (i) there is a true consideration that provides that normative reason, (ii) she possesses that consideration (...) as a normative reason, and (iii) she is rationally motivated by that consideration (as a motivating reason) to do what it supports. As I argue, recent arguments against the factoring account rest on impoverished conceptions of what it is to possess a normative reason. Accordingly, by defending the factoring account the paper helps deepen our understanding of the notion of possessing normative reasons. (shrink)

The value of human life has a central importance in bioethics and in the Thomistic natural law tradition, but its meaning is often ambiguous. It can refer to the value of human _life itself_, the value of a person’s _life_, or the value of _the person_ whose life it is. These are different kinds of value, but they are often overlooked or conflated in the literature. This article aims to clarify and develop natural law ethics by analyzing two goods associated (...) with the value of life: well-being and dignity. It critiques the mainstream welfarist axiology that makes well-being the sole fundamental good, and it proposes an alternative axiology consisting of two intrinsic goods: well-being and dignity. It argues that this dual value theory is a better account of the value of life, the value of persons, the moral equality of human beings, and the metaphysics of goodness. (shrink)

Tutti concordano che la conformità di un’azione ai dettami della morale non è sufficiente per conferirle valore morale. Tale valore dipende dalle motivazioni con cui l’agente la compie. L’azione giusta deve essere compiuta per le ragioni giuste. Ma quali ragioni sono quelle giuste? Kant ha una visione notoriamente restrittiva in merito: solo le azioni compiute esclusivamente per senso del dovere hanno valore morale. Diversi kantiani hanno optato per requisiti motivazionali a prima vista più indulgenti. Qui sostengo, tuttavia, che c’è un (...) problema comune a tutte queste concezioni: siccome è difficile soddisfare i loro requisiti e sapere quando sono soddisfatti, è difficile per l’agente sapere se le sue azioni hanno valore morale e se egli è quindi degno di lode. Questo problema costituisce una forma soggettiva di alienazione che si esprime in quella che chiamo “la sindrome dell’impostore morale”. Uso questo spunto per supportare una concezione alternativa del valore morale, meno esposta a questo problema. (shrink)

People often act from both motives that are good and motives that are not. How should we assess the moral worth or value of these actions from mixed motives? Having neglected these actions, the recent literature leaves us with no obvious answer. In this paper, I develop an answer. A mixed action, I argue, can be morally worthy even if it is done neither purely from good motives nor partly from good motives that suffice in some relevant sense to prompt (...) it. Whether the action is morally worthy, and if so, to what degree it is, I argue, should be settled by weighing the total goodness of its motives against the total badness of its motives. And two properties of each motive, its intentional object and its motivational strength, together determine the degree of goodness or badness that it contributes to the action’s net worth. (shrink)

This chapter examines Ross’s account of moral virtue as one of his four intrinsic goods and argues that in key respects it’s superior to the better-known accounts of Aristotle and Kant. Among the topics covered are: (1) Ross’s treatment of virtue as a secondary or derivative good, one that consists in fitting attitudes to other, independently given values or duties—this in contrast with many virtue-ethical views; (2) his sharp separation between the right and the morally good, so a wrong act (...) can be virtuous and good; (3) his recognizing both de dicto and de re forms of virtue; (4) his making the primary locus of moral value occurrent attitudes rather than, as in Aristotle, dispositions; (5) his (unpersuasive) arguments that virtue is the greatest intrinsic good and the motive of duty the best motive; and (6) his interesting accounts of the moral worth of actions done from multiple motives or not done from a good motive that should be present and effective but isn’t. (shrink)

According to a prominent family of theories of blameworthiness, quality of will theories, a person is blameworthy for an action if and only if, and to the degree that, her will manifested in that action is bad. A puzzle for such theories is that (the degree of) blameworthiness appears to be affected by several factors beyond how bad the manifested will is. Among such factors are certain types of incompetence of the agent, the outcome of the action, the developmental history (...) of the agent (e.g., an unfortunate upbringing), and the time between action and blame. I defend a novel account of the nature of blame by appeal to its unique capacity to explain away these puzzling intuitions in a unified way. I argue that the account, in addition to being independently plausible, allows us to view those intuitions as products of a systematic yet understandable confusion between the issue of blameworthiness and some other separate issue. (shrink)

Contemporary literature criticises a necessary link between empathy and actions that demonstrate genuine moral worth. If there is such a necessary link, many argue, it must come in the developmental stages of our moral capacities, rather than being found in the mental states that make up our motivating reasons. This paper goes against that trend, arguing that critics have not considered how wide-ranging the mental states are that make up a person’s reasons. In particular, it argues that empathy can play (...) a role in moral motivation when it is to some extent unconscious or it occurs far prior to the moral action itself. (shrink)

Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to show that two theses that are widely adopted among Kantian ethicists are irreconcilable. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly sketch the contours of my own positive view of Kantian ethics, concentrating on the issues relevant to the two theses to be discussed: I argue that agents can perform actions from but not in conformity with duty, and I argue that agents intentionally can perform actions they take to (...) be contrary to duty. In the second, I focus on Barbara Herman’s non-accidental rightness condition from “On the Value of Acting from Duty.” In the third, I focus on Christine Korsgaard’s guise of the objectively good from “Formula of Humanity.” In the fourth, I explain why the positions developed by Herman and Korsgaard are irreconcilable and I make a suggestion about how to move forward. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that the reasons-responsiveness theory of rationality fails to explain the intuitive irrationality of practical akrasia. First, I argue that the best explanation for the distinction between acting in accordance with a normative reason and responding to that reason involves appealing to one’s competence or knowledge about how to respond to that reason. Second, one might possess practical competence to respond to her decisive practical reasons to act, without having the parallel theoretical competence (...) to believe rationally, through deliberation, that she has decisive reasons to perform that action. Third, if possessing a normative reason is a matter of having the ability to respond to that reason, and responding to a reason is grounded in facts about one’s competence about how to respond to that reason, then the mismatch between one’s practical and theoretical competences may give rise to a normative mismatch between one’s possessed reasons for action and one’s possessed reasons for one's normative beliefs. There would be possible situations in which one possesses decisive reasons to perform an action ⱷ but lacks sufficient reasons to believe that she has decisive reasons to ⱷ. In those situations, the reasons-responsiveness theory requires one to act against her normative judgment about what she ought to do. I conclude by considering whether it could be rationally permissible to act against one’s own normative judgment about what one ought to do if one’s reasons for action diverge from one’s reasons for a certain judgment about what one ought to do. (shrink)

A popular view is that you deserve credit for a successful performance only if you were aware in some way of what you were doing. It has been argued that some such cognitive condition on creditworthy performance must be true because it is the only way to ensure that one’s success is not an accident. In this paper, I argue against cognitive conditions on creditworthy performance: cognitive conditions are false because there are agents who deserve credit for their successful performances (...) even though they had no idea what they were doing. After presenting my argument and defending it against possible replies, I explore broader implications of the falsity of cognitive conditions in the philosophy of action and of moral worth. I then close by presenting an alternative account of creditworthy performance that explains why success can be non-accidental even if one was not aware of what they were doing. (shrink)

Many ethical systems hold that agents earn merit and demerit through their good and bad deeds. Some of these ethical systems also accept merit transference, allowing merit to be transferred, in certain circumstances, from one agent to another. In this article, I argue that there is a previously unrecognized paradox for merit transference involving a phenomenon I call “merit inflation”. With a particular focus on Buddhist ethics, I then look at the options available for resolving this paradox. I conclude that (...) merit inflation poses a serious challenge for any ethical system that broadly permits the transfer of merit. (shrink)

What is aesthetic appreciation? In this paper, I approach this question in an indirection fashion. First, I introduce the Kantian notion of moral worthy action and an influential analysis of it. Next, I generalise that analysis from the moral to the aesthetic domain, and from actions to affects. Aesthetic appreciation, I suggest, consists in an aesthetically worthy affective response. After unpacking the proposal, I show that it has non-trivial implications while cohering with a number of existing insights concerning the nature (...) of appreciation and the constraints to which it is subject. In closing, I note some limitations on the analogy between aesthetic appreciation and morally worthy action. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of what makes an action morally worthy. I start with a popular theory of moral worth which roughly states that a right action is morally praiseworthy if and only if it is performed in response to the reasons which make the action right. While I think the account provides promising foundations for determining praiseworthiness, I argue that the view lacks the resources to adequately satisfy important desiderata associated with theories of moral worth. Firstly, the view (...) does not adequately capture the degree to which an action has moral worth, and secondly, the view does not identify if right actions produced from overdetermined motives have moral worth. However, all is not lost; I also argue that the account can satisfy the desiderata when it attends to the agent’s counterfactual motives in addition to their actual motives. By considering counterfactual motives, we can measure the robustness of the actual praiseworthy motive, and attending to motivational robustness allows the new proposal to fully satisfy the two desiderata. At the end of this paper, I respond to some criticisms typically brought against a counterfactual view of moral worth. (shrink)

The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth proposed as the foundation of ethics. Ethics in the usual sense of right and wrong actions, rights and virtues, and how to live a good life, is founded on something more basic that is not itself (...) about actions, namely the worth of persons. Human moral worth arises from certain properties that distinguish humans from the rest of creation (though some animals share a lesser degree of those properties): rationality, consciousness, the ability to act for reasons, emotional structure and love, individuality. This complex package makes humans the "piece of work" of which Hamlet says, “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty." The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans. Endless debate about ethical dilemmas, rules, and principles fails to connect with what is really important ethically, that is, what makes humans matter. (shrink)

According to a prominent view in Jewish-Halakhic literature, “mitzvot (commandments) require intention.” That is, to fulfill one’s obligation in performing a commandment, one must intend to perform the act because it’s a mitzvah; one must take the fact that one’s act is a mitzvah as her reason for doing the action. I argue that thus understood, this Halakhic view faces a revised version of Thomas Hurka’s recent dilemma for structurally similar views in ethics: either it makes it a necessary condition (...) for the act’s being a mitzvah that one has a false belief about the act’s Halakhic status, or it commits proponents of the “mitzvot require intention” view to a sort of rational failure in performing the mitzvot. The dilemma arises, however, only if we interpret this Halakhic view as requiring one to have a belief about her act’s Halakhic status in order for it to have this status. I suggest that the dilemma can be avoided by interpreting the intention requirement as requiring a make-belief, instead of a belief. Under this understanding, Halakha (or God) doesn’t care about why one performs an act of a mitzvah, but rather about how she does it; how she sees and experiences her action. This suggests another form of worship central to Judaism—worship via make-believing. (shrink)

This essay concerns two forms of moral non-naturalism according to which general moral principles or laws enter into the grounding explanations of particular moral facts. According to bridge-law non-naturalism, the laws are themselves partial grounds of the moral facts; whereas according to grounding-law non-naturalism, the laws explain the grounding connections that obtain between particular natural facts and particular moral facts. I pose and develop an objection to BLNN concerning moral worth: as compared to GLNN, BLNN has trouble accommodating the common (...) intuition that actions performed out of motivation for rightness de dicto are, at least in paradigm cases, deficient in their moral worth as compared to those performed out of motivation for rightness de re. After presenting the moral worth objection to BLNN, I respond to a possible defense of the view and explain why GLNN is not itself imperiled by an analogous objection. I finally argue that in light of the moral worth objection, a purported analogy between the law and morality fails to give us any reason to prefer BLNN to GLNN. I conclude that non-naturalists who accept the existence of general and explanatory moral principles should adopt GLNN rather than BLNN. (shrink)

What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in (...) common. They focus almost exclusively on the moral worth of right actions. But there is a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions, which we will call moral counterworth. In this paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that forgiveness is a morally appropriate response only when it is grounded in the wrongdoer’s demonstration of genuine remorse, their offer of a sincere apology, and, where appropriate, acts of recompense and behavioral change. I then respond to John Kleinig’s suggestion (in his paper “Forgiveness and Unconditionality”) that when an apology is not forthcoming, there are at least three additional grounds that, when motivated by virtues such as love and compassion, could nevertheless render “unconditional forgiveness” (...) a morally laudable option. I argue that such grounds could indeed constitute or result in laudable responses to wrongdoing, but only if they are not conceived of or described in terms of forgiveness. (shrink)

In my paper “Moral Grounds for Forgiveness,” I argued that forgiveness is morally appropriate only when a sincere apology is received, thus ruling out the three grounds for unconditional forgiveness suggested by John Kleinig in his paper “Forgiveness and Unconditionality.” In response to his reply “Defending Unconditional Forgiveness,” I argue here that my terminology, once clarified, does not undermine my construal of resentment; that conditional forgiveness is just as discretionary as unconditional forgiveness; and that what we choose to take into (...) account when we forgive must be a morally appropriate grounding for that particular end, but that only a sincere apology could satisfy this condition. I end by conceding that the three grounds suggested by Kleinig nevertheless play an essential role in the process of (conditional) forgiveness insofar as they facilitate a willingness to forgive and an openness toward accepting an apology. (shrink)

The reasons view holds that morally worthy actions are right actions motivated by the reasons that make them right. Opponents object that such actions are only accidentally right, and it is widely held that morally worthy actions cannot be accidentally right. My aim here is to defend the reasons view from this objection by considering conditional reasons. Once these reasons are in view, actions motivated by the reasons that make them right will no longer appear accidentally right. Keywords: Moral worth; (...) Moral reasons; Conditional reasons. (shrink)

It’s one thing to do the right thing. It’s another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non-accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non-accidentality constraint: the first (...) because it morally credits agents who make heavy-duty moral mistakes; the second because it fails to generalise and is too conservative – a point which this paper gives renewed defence. The paper then goes on to defend and develop an alternative according to which moral worth is mediated by the agent’s knowing how to respond to the reasons of the type which make acting in that way right. It’s argued that this view avoids the problems for the alternatives, and it’s shown that in order for the view to avoid collapsing into a problematic form of Reliabilism we’ll have to think of states of knowing how as essentially successful in character. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of ​bad beliefs,​ beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called ​moral encroachment​, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad (...) beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s ​Groundwork​, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness. (shrink)

While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis by proposing and defending a (...) heterodox account of both normative and motivating reasons that is inspired by Donald Davidson’s primary reasons. We should adopt the heterodox view, I argue, because it addresses an overlooked but fatal defect in the orthodox conception of reasons, of which challenges to the tempting analysis are a special case. (shrink)

A major point of debate about morally good motives concerns an ambiguity in the truism that good and strong-willed people desire to do what is right. This debate is shaped by the assumption that “what’s right” combines in only two ways with “desire,” leading to distinct de dicto and de re readings of the truism. However, a third reading of such expressions is possible, first identified by Janet Fodor, which has gone wholly unappreciated by philosophers in this debate. I identify (...) Fodor’s nonspecific reading of “desire to do what’s right” and briefly discuss its merits. (shrink)

Many follow Kant in thinking that morally worthy actions must be carried out solely from the motive of duty. This outlook faces two challenges: (1) The One Feeling Too Few problem (actions that issue from, say, compassion also seem to have moral worth), and (2) The One Thought Too Many problem (some actions have moral worth precisely because they’re not motivated by duty). These challenges haven’t led Kantians to dispense with the motive of duty. Instead, they have proposed to push (...) it into the background. We should not (the thought goes) construe duty as a primary motive, a consideration that motivates the agent to act. Duty is best thought of as a secondary motive, a background concern that constrains her choice. Since it is consistent with acting from duty at the secondary level that one is motivated at the primary level by compassion, this move is thought to overcome both challenges. In this paper, I argue that secondary motive views don’t live up to their stated ambitions. Such proposals either fail to make progress on issues with which primary motive views continue to grapple, or they render the motive of duty ill-suited to underwrite a plausible account of moral worth. (shrink)

It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The (...) problem of moral testimony is thus not a problem with testimony generally, but a problem of deferential testimony specifically. (shrink)

It is commonly recognized that one can act rightly without being praiseworthy for doing so. Those who act rightly from ignoble motives, for instance, do not strike us as fitting targets of moral praise; their actions seem to lack moral worth. Though there is broad agreement that only certain kinds of motives confer moral worth on our actions, there is disagreement as to which ones are up to the task. Many theorists confine themselves to two possibilities: praiseworthy agents are thought (...) to be motivated by either the consideration that their actions are morally right, or the considerations that explain why their actions are morally right. Though there is an important element of truth in these proposals, each has limited explanatory purchase. In this paper, I develop a pluralist conception of moral worth that acknowledges both sorts of motives as grounds for moral praise. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of moral worth. Moral worth is a status that some, but not all, morally right actions have. Unlike with merely right actions, when an agent performs a morally worthy action, she is necessarily creditworthy for doing the right thing. First, I argue that two dominant views of moral worth have been unable to fully capture this necessary connection. On one view, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the (...) features of the action that make it right. On the other, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the action’s rightness itself. Neither of these views captures the connection between moral worth and creditworthiness, because each view leaves room for cases of accidentally doing the right thing. Next, I develop a new account, which I call the Guise of Moral Reasons Account. On my account, morally worthy actions are right actions that are motivated by moral reasons as such. This account rules out cases of accidentally doing the right thing, thus capturing the necessary connection between moral worth and creditworthiness for doing the right thing. (shrink)

Actions can have, or lack, moral worth. When a person’s action is morally worthy, she not only acts rightly, but does so in a way that reflects well on her and in such a way that she is creditable for doing what is right. In this paper, I develop and defend an analogue of the notion of moral worth that applies to belief, which I call epistemic worth. When a person’s belief is epistemically worthy, she not only believes rightly, but (...) does so in a way that reflects well on her and in such a way that she is creditable for believing what is right. The notion of epistemic worth, I suggest, is of interest to both epistemologists and ethicists. (shrink)

Associative duties are agent-centered duties to give defeasible moral priority to our special ties. Our strongest associative duties are to close friends and family. According to reductionists, our associative duties are just special duties—i.e., duties arising from what I have done to others, or what others have done to me. These include duties to abide by promises and contracts, compensate our benefactors in ways expressing gratitude, and aid those whom we have made especially vulnerable to our conduct. I argue, though, (...) that reductionism faces a problem: special duties are not strong enough to account for the strength of our associative duties. At the bar of associative duties, we are required to do what no special duty can warrant. I then present an alternative reductionist analysis of associative duties—the ‘Identity-Enactment Account’—which not only accounts for the peculiar strength of our associative duties, but also characterizes them in an intuitively compelling way. On this account, our strongest associative duties are special duties to protect or promote the welfare of the duty’s beneficiary by adopting and enacting a practical identity in which the duty’s beneficiary features prominently. There are persons who can legitimately demand a prominent place in our mental lives, for the protection and intimacy it affords. They can, in effect, legitimately demand to be among our nearest and dearest. The correlative of such a demand is, on our part, an associative duty we have toward them. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of moral offsetting: the idea that good actions can offset bad actions in a way roughly analogous to carbon offsetting. For example, a meat eater might try to offset their consumption of meat by donating to an animal welfare charity. In this paper, I clarify the idea of moral offsetting, consider whether the leading moral theories and theories of moral worth are consistent with the possibility of moral offsetting, and consider potential benefits of moral offsetting. (...) I also compare moral offsetting to a related practice that I call ‘moral triaging’. (shrink)

I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver and (...) bribe taker are more blameworthy than their counterparts. I offer three arguments for that view, and, in doing so, I exemplify a general way to advance the moral luck debate. First, I argue against an account of moral responsibility that implies that the judges are equally blameworthy. Second, I argue that the killer driver is more blameworthy than the merely reckless driver. Third, I locate an alternative sense in which the agents in each case pair are morally on par. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the fetishism objection to moral hedging fails. The objection rests on a reasons-responsiveness account of moral worth, according to which an action has moral worth only if the agent is responsive to moral reasons. However, by adopting a plausible theory of non-ideal moral reasons, one can endorse a reasons-responsiveness account of moral worth while maintaining that moral hedging is sometimes an appropriate response to moral uncertainty. Thus, the theory of moral worth upon which the (...) fetishism objection relies does not, in fact, support that objection. (shrink)

I defend the widely-held view that morally worthy action need not be motivated by a desire to promote rightness as such. Some have recently come to reject this view, arguing that desires for rightness as such are necessary for avoiding a certain kind of luck thought incompatible with morally worthy action. I show that those who defend desires for rightness as such on the basis of this argument misunderstand the relationship between moral worth and the kind of luck that their (...) argument employs. Consequently, the argument provides no reason to doubt the popular view that a desire for rightness as such is no part of virtue. I conclude by suggesting that a family of worries about merely accidentally right action presuppose one side of the recent debate about objectivism and perspectivism about moral rightness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTKantian conceptions of moral worth are thought to enjoy an advantage over their rivals in virtue of accommodating two plausible intuitions—that the praiseworthiness of an action is never ac...

This paper introduces and argues for the hypothesis that judgments of testimonial worth are central to our practice of normatively appraising speech. It is argued that judgments of testimonial worth are central both to the judgement that an agent has lied, and to the acceptance of testimony. The hypothesis that, in lying, an agent necessarily displays poor testimonial worth, is shown to resolve a new puzzle about lying, and the recalcitrant problem raised by the existence of bald faced lies, and (...) selfless assertions. It is then shown that the notion of testimonial worth allows us to capture the distinction between taking a speaker at their word, and treating them as a mere indicator of the truth in a way other theories fail to do. (shrink)

Sometimes, agents do the right thing for the right reason. What’s the normative significance of this phenomenon? According to proponents of the special status view, when an agent acts for the right reason, her actions enjoy a special normative status, namely, worthiness. Proponents of this view claim that self-effacing forms of consequentialism cannot say this plausible thing, and, worse, are blocked from having a perspicuous view of matters by the self-effacing nature of their consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that (...) this claim is based on an illicit assumption. I show that whatever version of the special status view proponents of that view prefer, self-effacing consequentialists can adopt a version of it. Moreover, I show that proponents of extant versions of the special status view have reason to prefer the specific version of that view I articulate on behalf of self-effacing consequentialists. (shrink)