Blogosophy

I Do Believe in Miasma, I Do, I Do!

OK, possibly to find the headline funny you have to have seen Peter Pan as recently as I have.

Do you believe in miasma?

Excellent post by John Holbo about the apparent contradiction in holding both utilitarian or deontological ethical views but nevertheless believing that one can have "dirty hands":

It’s the problem of what to do when, in order to ‘do the right thing’, you have to ‘do the wrong thing’. Torture the prisoner to learn the location of the bomb. Allow a thoroughly unsavory political group to be part of your governing coalition because otherwise you can’t retain power.

I'm not sure, though, that what he calls "virtue-grubbers" (people who think "Oh, goody! A poor person! Now I can be virtuous!" And as an aside, you gotta love a philosopher who is willing to take examples from The Tick) are necessarily an outcome of some sort of virtue ethics. It strikes me as entirely possible to desire to be the type of person who would do X when confronted with situation Y without actually also desiring that situation Y comes about so that you can demonstrate. For instance, I might harbor a hope that I will die well (e.g. with dignity) but that might not translate into a hope that I will die.

This seems exactly right, though:

But in the realm of moral merit and demerit, nothing ever goes away or gets subtracted or divided through by anything else. Everything sticks and stays and just piles up over time. (At most, it fades a bit with repeated washing.) There is no double-entry bookkeeping in the ledger of your soul. Killing three people to save four is not equivalent to just plain saving one. And if you kill two people to save two people the latter deed does not simply erase the first, neatly restoring your soul to the pristine mint condition it enjoyed before things took an exciting hairpin turn through better and worse. A person who has killed two people to save two people is a person who has killed two people to save two people. People who do this sort of thing on a regular basis – killing people to save people, say – end up complicated. Ditto for the sorts of crimes that we regard as reparable – property crimes as opposed to crimes against life and limb. If I steal a million dollars, spend it, then manage to earn it all back with interest, and pay it back, I am not therefore indistinguishable in point of moral virtue from someone who has never stolen a cent. I am not clearly better or worse. I am certainly quite a different sort of character, though.

Posted by joshua at February 19, 2004 01:37 PM