Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality

by Lisa Tessman

Moral On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable.

After offering both conceptual and empirical explanations of the experience of impossible moral requirements and the ensuing failures to fulfill them, Tessman considers what to make of such experience, and in particular, what role such experience has in the construction of value and of moral authority.

According to the constructivist account that the book proposes, some moral requirements can be authoritative even when they are impossible to fulfill. Tessman points out a tendency to not acknowledge the difficulties that impossible moral requirements and unavoidable moral failures create in moral life, and traces this tendency through several different literatures, from scholarship on Holocaust testimony to discussions of ideal and nonideal theory, from theories of supererogation to debates about moral demandingness and to feminist care ethics.

Genres: Philosophy

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Believe it or not, I received a request to live-tweet this book. Here’s the result, less the “live” part, and frequently in violation of Twitter character limitations. Perhaps I should call my adaptation of the request a Postmortem-Rattle?

Chapter One! Here we go!

Moral dilemmas and impossible moral requirements. Do they exist? Discuss!

SPOILER: YES THEY DO.

If you’re a Deontologist or Consequentialist you might be saying "SHOOT NO WAY. I can solve EVERY problem!”

But Lisa Tessman (LT) says: NOPE. All you guys think about is action-guidance! You are under the false impression that once a choice is made the other (unchosen) option magically disappears. Wishing doesn’t make it so, Young Dreamers!

The Skeptic: K, so what happens to it?

LT: It fuckin lingers and haunts you is what. As it should because in choosing one, you still failed the other. You can try to “out-out-damn-spot” it but your hands are irrevocably dirty. There’s no moment of moral triumph for you.

Morality doesn’t save the day, sheeple. If you want a philosophy of consolation, please continue towards the door marked Idealism. In here we’re grown-ups and we know that everything doesn’t always turn out fine.

The so-called “conflict-resolution” action-guiding moral theories (looking at you consequentialists) are more often than not ineffective or incapable of providing satisfactory solutions. Some resolution of conflict.

An honest moral theory needs to acknowledge that we have non-negotiable, non-voluntary moral obligations that can--and often do--conflict. Sometimes ought doesn’t imply can.

An honest moral theory doesn’t ask us to pretend there’s no moral remainder--to pretend that no one is injured by the unchosen choice. It doesn’t lie and tell us that we did the right thing when there was no right thing to do.


CHAPTER TWO! MORAL INTUITION AND MORAL REASONING!

Oh boy! Empirical studies show that two parts of the brain are activated when making moral judgments.

A judgment is first processed automatically (an intuitive or “gut reaction”), and then a reasoning process comes on the scene to check the intuitive judgment.

LT: You know what that means, my rationalist homies? It means that (ew icky messy) feelings are biologically encrypted into your putatively pristine “objective reason" you use to make a choice. Take a sec to let that soak in.

So how reasonable is reason really?

LT: Maybe we don’t need reason at all. Maybe it fouls up the whole game. My automatic intuitions have authority all their own, and, having confidence in them, I sacralize those values. To violate the sacred is unthinkable.

[LT: P.S. We still need impartial (rational) principles to tell us what to do in cases of strangers and distant others.]

CHAPTER THREE! RISKING CONFIDENCE!

LT: I gotta be up front with you. There’s no such thing as value. Well, there is, not in the way you probably think. There are no real (in the sense of “objectively existing”) values to discover. We have to make them up.

Skeptic: So aren’t we on pretty shaky ground here? How do we know our values are any good?

LT: *Sigh.* There is no ground at all. We are asea on a Neurathian boat in need of repair, and the best we can do is stand on one plank while we repair the damages.

Skeptic: What does that even mean?

LT: It means that we need a critical metaethical constructivism is what.

It means the only way to know if our values are any good is to subject them to scrutiny and see if they pass muster.

Skeptic: What kind of scrutiny if reason is essentially either unavailable or unnecessary for passing judgment?

LT: Still working on that. Something like but not Rawlsian Reflective Equilibrium.

Maybe Margaret Urban Walker’s Transparency Testing, but where we don’t use reason to test.

Skeptic: You said earlier that your intuitive judgments impose non-negotiable moral requirements that must not be violated, and said that to even call them into question in the first place would be to transgress them.

LT: Yes. “Confidence is all that can back the moral authority of any requirement, so that is all I can offer.” (102)

Skeptic: So on the one hand we must have unshaking confidence in the correctness of our intuitive judgments, and on the other we are supposed to subject them to some kind of critical review. How does that work?

LT: Messily. Socially. “All that I can do is acknowledge that this automatic (rather than reflectively equilibriated) confidence is risky, but that in some cases I am willing to take the risk.” (102)


CHAPTER 4! WITNESSING MORAL FAILURE :(

LT: Now I needta tell you something else you probably don’t want to hear. You can’t fix it. Any of it.

100% of the Tessman/BABO household agree that it is annoying when students do not dwell on suffering, but instead evade it by quickly shifting to the “prevention question:” How do we make it so [X awful thing] never happens again?

LT+BABO: These kids are living in a fairytale world if they think that suffering is a question that can be theoretically solved once and for all.

The point is PEOPLE FUCKING SUFFERED AND CONTINUE TO SUFFER. Sit on that and spin for a while. Look it hard in the face.

LT: The Holocaust isn’t a moral parable; no one is redeemed or redeemable. To find redemption therein is to pretend morality triumphed.

Morality didn’t triumph. Morality didn’t prevent Auschwitz from happening. Morality disappeared behind the camp gates.

CHAPTER 5--IDEALIZING MORALITY!

Spoiler alert: ideal theory sucks.

Spoiler alert: also (most) nonidealizing theory sucks.

Skeptic: I get why you’d reject ideal morality based on everything you've said, but what’s wrong with nonideal theory?

LT: Lemme tell ya. It’s “both insufficiently nonidealizing (because it idealizes the moral agent by falsely characterizing the agent as always able to avoid moral wrongdoing)…”

LT: Annnnnnd it’s “too strongly adapted to the nonideal (because normative expectations are lowered and detrimentally adapted to options that, while the best possible, are still unacceptable.” (7)

LT: Nonideal theorists who exclusively focus on action guidance have no space for worthier values--the first-best (rather than the second-best) choices. I’m talking about unattainable values.

PART III--ENDLESS DEMANDS!

Skeptic: So I hear you saying that the existence of moral dilemmas means we must also accept what that entails for morality, namely that there are moral requirements that are impossible to fulfill.

LT: Yes, exactly, there are endless demands that we (necessarily) constantly fail to meet. Especially so under systems of oppression because they themselves can produce indelible traumas.

Skeptic: Suppose I accept your claim about endless demands. Still, aren’t there some limitations on what can be demanded of me? I’m only one person after all.

LT: Ah, you want some theory of supererogation, to limit the realm of your obligations to a chewable portion?

Skeptic: I sense that you’re going to say that theories of supererogation of problematic.

LT: Yes and I’ll tell you why. Most of them are consent-based deontological arguments that are predicated on contract models.

LT: If you agree with me that we have automatic responses that justify the imperative to protect the ones we love, then you have to consider contract models as “off limits” for oodles of reasons.

Skeptic: So there’s no limit on what can be demanded of me?

LT: Pretty much yep. You are--unavoidably so--a moral failure. Have heart. Fail, fail again. Fail better.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tessman's book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in analytic ethics or metaethics. Some of the material towards the end gets dry, but the general thesis of the book is really interesting and well argued. Tessman's view is that we ought to reject the classical claim that "ought implies can" and there are a few other philosophers similarly who have advanced the argument, both from experimental literature on how people generally use ethical concepts and from more traditional philosophical arguments. Tessman is in line with the latter.

I won't go too much into the detail of the argument here; I want to keep the review on the shorter side and don't really feel like I can distill the argument as well as I would like in the course of a short review. I will say that for those who are really strongly committed to conventional views about how "ought" behaves in ethics, this is a worthwhile challenge to those conventions. I didn't find it really devastating to my commitment, partly because those commitments are really deeply ingrained when you're further along in the discussion of ethics; however, I do think that some thoughtful philosophers working on this issue are starting to come together over a set of problems with the conventional view that Tessman articulates well.

Those who are familiar with Thomas Nagel's old discussions on moral tragedy, and circumstances where there are no morally good decisions but only various comparable bad decisions, are likely to find this conversation really interesting. I suspect that a lot of the hyper-committal consequentialists who think that problem just reduces to what is "less bad" will find the arguments made in Moral Failure even less compelling than most, but Tessman does a good job at putting the arguments forward in a way that is generally really accessible.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone is interested, I wrote a review of this book on the metapsychology website:

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/...