In a previous post, I provided an account of society S being required to be some way (or do some particular thing) W entirely in terms of more familiar requirements that participants (individuals, but perhaps also collectives that count as agents) do enough or do their part to help S realize W. In the comments, I noted that David Estlund provides something of a different account, in terms of: (a) participants being required to do their part to help S realize W, but only if everyone else does their part and (b) it being the case that S ought to be W (this being the evaluative use of ‘ought’, distinct from S being required to be W). I voiced some general sympathy with the need to include something like [b], while preferring my imperfect but unconditional agential requirements (that might well entail Estlund’s perfect but conditional agential requirements).
Here is a sketch of what I think is a better analysis: for S to be required to be W = (i) S failing to be W being indignation-worthy and because of this (ii) all participants being required to do something (or enough or their part) to help S be W.
Several points. First, this is an explanatory account (while Estlund’s is conjunctive). Second, both [i] and [ii] would probably require some additional elaboration in a fuller account. For there is warranted guilt and resentment (and the actions these might justify). The (partial) culprit position (and associated avoidance-type action) seems particularly salient to the source and nature of the requirements faced by each participant. Third, I’m relying on, but would need to defend, a normative bridge principle like this: if indignation is warranted, then some relevant type of action is appropriate as well and, in this, required. Fourth, S failing to be W being indignation-worthy seems to be a particular way in which S ought to be W. When S ought to be W, the participants ought (or at least have some reason) to take actions to help S realize W, but this might be for any number of reasons (not necessarily grounded in indignation).
Why not, as the suggested analysis of S ought to be W suggests, analyze S being required to be W as simply [ii], omitting [i] and [i] explaining [ii]? Because, in this case, we have a specific ground for the agential normative properties and that seems to be part of what we want to capture by using the language of requirement. [All participants being required to do something to help S be W – ed.], while centrally relevant to S being required to be W, does not hit the nail on the head.
With this sketch in hand, we can start to validate two important intuitive claims: (A) that we should get mad and do something about societal injustice and (B) that there are limits to how much we are required to do. The right account here, in other words, should help us thread a needle between an overly moralistic and an overly cynical approach to societal (“social”) justice and what it requires of us.
Policy of Truth 
You’ve probably heard me make these criticisms, but it might be helpful to find them all stated in one place.
(1) Your account requires a requirement to be explained by a failing. In general, I don’t think any requirement can explained by invoking a negative concept. Imagine trying to cash out the necessity of a hypothetical imperative by invoking what would not be there if the imperative weren’t realized. It’s just a general methodological principle that we should avoid negative terms in an analysis except as a last resort.
(2) Indignation is paradigmatically a response to interpersonal injustice. For instance, some person does something unjust to you, and you feel indignation as a response. But if a society is structurally unjust, indignation will lack an object and seem out of place. There is no one about whom to feel indignation in that case. Yet it doesn’t at all follow that society shouldn’t be restructured to eliminate the structural injustice.
(3) Conditions can be bad or dangerous without being unjust, in which case they won’t provoke justifiable indignation. Yet society has to do something about them. If a pandemic arises, it’s no one’s fault. So indignation is out of place. But we can’t just sit there. If someone says, “Well, the indignation would arise over inaction vis-a-vis the pandemic,” that strikes me as begging the question in a non-explanatory way. Why would one justifiably feel indignation? Presumably because some great value was at stake. But indignation is too far downstream to identify what that value is. Once you identify the value (and its value), you can explain why indignation is a proper response to inaction about it. But you can’t just analyze the concept of indignation and hope to reason backwards to the value.
(4) Maybe a repeat of (3): Indignation is a highly problematic guide to injustice. Indignation is a response to injustice. But it’s not clear how you use a response to something to produce a criterion for the thing. Grimacing is a response to pain, but an account of grimacing is not an account of pain. Even if you defined pain as the “grimace worthy,” it’s not clear how much mileage that would give you as an account of pain.
Similarly: People might just differ in their susceptibility to the reaction. Two people might differ greatly in the indignation they feel to the same injustice. But it could still be the same injustice. It’s not obvious to me that there is some obligation that everyone must feel indignation precisely in proportion to the degree of injustice of an act. (Nor is it obvious that “proportional indignation” is what’s fitting.) It’s certainly justifiable for two people to witness the same act, for one to feel deep indignation, for the other to feel nothing, and yet for both to judge the injustice the same way. Indignation just seems like a fifth wheel or worse here. Indignation is somewhat contingent on personality, context, and interests. The requirements of justice aren’t, at least not to the same degree.
The whole problem with “fitting attitudes” accounts is that it’s totally mysterious to me how one retro-fits the “fitting attitude” to give an account of the original thing. Bereavement produces grief, and grief is a fitting attitude, but how do you produce an account of the “grief-worthy” that gives us an account of bereavement?
I don’t think your elaboration in “Several points” addresses the preceding, but the preceding issues strike me as logically prior to the ones you do address.
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That’s super-helpful, Irfan. We are hardly going to settle matters regarding fitting-attitudes-type analyses of the target normative features here, but maybe we can move the ball forward a bit. Here, then, are some responses to your points (apologies — I was hoping to be more brief).
(1*) Formally, reference to failing is just a function of the grounding, appropriate attitude here (indignation) being negative, not positive. There is not really a distinctive positive attitude toward S being W that would correlate with it being “required” that S be W. I could run the analysis this way: because it is appropriate to be indignant about S being W, it is “forbidden” that S be W. And from there we get S is “required” not to be way W (the scare quotes here are meant to indicate the institutional-social deontic features are very different from familiar, agential deontic features). There is, admittedly, some verbal clunkiness in the way I ran the analysis, but I don’t think it is either an important methodological problem or something that can very well be avoided.
(2*) Do you disagree that one might be appropriately indignant that society is this or that way? Such claims seem intuitive to me (and not to involve anything like a category mistake or a basic misuse of language). I agree that the most intuitive, core appropriateness-conditions for indignation (and resentment and guilt) concern individual agents and how they treat each other. But I think humans have, pretty long ago in our cultural history, stretched the purpose (and appropriateness conditions) for these reactions, systematically using them to react to damages meted out by society (and sometimes smaller-scale organizations) in its institutional aspects. This extended context has been integrated into the functional nature of the reactions (and the associated normative standards). I think it is an exclusive focus on the core or original cases that has led conservatives (and libertarians) to be skeptical about truly structural or institutional wrongings and wrongs (that are typically matters of injustice).
(3*) It is not that there are no prior reasons or values presupposed on this sort of fitting-attitudes analysis. There are. The question is how it is appropriate to react when the interactions of a collection of persons, through public or generally-accepted norms and institutions, results in something like persons in some particular position being needlessly being harmed (both the ‘needlessly’ and the ‘harmed’ are to be understood in terms of some sort of prior value; what is to be explained here, though, is the appropriateness of indignation, resentment and guilt — and the correlated appropriateness in and requirement to do things with respect to the situation). If I fail to notice that society is problematic in this way, that is still a fact – a fact that makes it objectively appropriate for me to be indignant. Importantly, I’m indignant at society itself. If society is not, in such cases, to be strongly analogized to being an agent (as it is not in its institutional aspects), then my indignation apparently is not directed toward any culprit at all! That might seem strange, but I think the strangeness here is just a function of overgeneralizing from the original, paradigm agential or interpersonal cases. Correlatively, I might be indignant toward you for failing to notice the social problem (speak up, rally people, fail to do your part, etc.). Usually, many of us will be partial culprits and, in this, warrant some degree of indignation (of the more common, interpersonal sort).
Maybe the “institutional” indignation here is reducible to the “personal” (or interpersonal) indignation? That can’t be right if, apart from knowing anything about how relevant individuals are with respect to correcting the problem, it is appropriate for me to be indignant simply because the problem exists. (I agree as well that, if some disaster strikes society and this calls for action, this is not the kind of thing that warrants indignation. But, societal injustice deniers to the contrary notwithstanding, institutional, society-directed indignation is not like this. It is not like we are inappropriately getting morally angry at the weather.)
(4*) We do say that the indignation is appropriate because one person has wronged another (or because an injustice has been done). The question is whether the explanatory relationship here is epistemic or metaphysical (constitutive) — I say the former. It might help to distinguish three closely-related properties: (i) X being D (having some first-order, often descriptive, property D), (ii) it being appropriate to react to X being D by having attitude A, (iii) X, in virtue of being D, being N (having some normative property N). In some cases – those that are the model for fitting-attitudes approaches – it is pretty clear that [iii] reduces to [ii]. For X to be scary is simply for X to warrant fear (in virtue of X having some first-order property D). However, in the more-interesting cases, it is not obvious that something like [iii] reduces to something like [ii]. That’s the proverbial non-obvious analysis! I’m inclined to say things like this: for an action to be a wronging is for it to warrant (victim) resentment, for an action (at least usually a wronging) to be a wrong is for it to warrant (observer) indignation and (culprit) guilt. It is not obvious that wronging and wrongs are like desirability or being scary in the way that they relate to the relevant fitting-attitudes facts. They might, in fact, be independent normative properties in virtue of which the fitting attitudes are fitting (in fact, I think this is the dominant view). I’m saying no: this is a non-obvious case of the same explanatory pattern that being desirable or scary exhibits. It is a non-obvious analysis or constitutive account. (Applied to groups of people in their institutional aspect, I’m saying this: groups can wrong their participants (because it is appropriate to feel resentful when the norms and institutions in a societal or smaller-group setting needlessly put one in a vulnerable or disadvantaged position or the like) and this is morally wrong (because, due to the victim-resentment being appropriate, culprit-guilt and observer-indignation are appropriate).)
I’m not sure how to negotiate the issue of whether or not it is plausible, promising or correct to say that, say, moral wrongness is to be constitutively explained the same way that desirability or being scary is. I agree that potential (and probably actual) individual variability in appropriateness, at least in respect of the strength of degree of the reaction in attitude, is an important issue that a full defense of a fitting-attitudes account of wronging (and wrongness) — both individual and social-institutional — would have to address. Presumably, though, everyone has this problem, as it applies to desirability and being scary as well (and as the entirely-unsurprising fitting-attitudes analysis of these is nearly-universally held).
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