According to me: for an action to be a wronging of a person is for it to be an action worthy of victim resentment. And similarly: for an action (at least usually a wronging of a person) to be morally wrong is for it to be an action worthy of observer indignation. So I take wronging and moral wrongness to be (non-obviously) fitting-attitude-type evaluative properties, similar to events being scary, jokes being funny, people being admirable.
Here is a potential problem for this idea: excuses can render wrong actions non-blameworthy (and so, it would seem, non-indignation-worthy) without their ceasing to be wrong. Boom. So much for my pretty little idea!
But is this right? Let’s look at some cases. First, suppose that I insult you, but do so on the basis of believing, with iron-clad justification, that you insulted me first. So my mindset is not one of lack of regard for you in the relevant sense (because the malice here is retaliatory). My bad behavior toward you is thus excused. But, in this kind of case, the excuse renders the action non-wrong (and not a wronging of you). The structure here is as follows: the wrongness in the action is partially constituted by disregard and so, when the disregard is taken away the action is no longer wrong. We might, then, consider excuses and wrong actions when the wrong action (or wronging) fits the objective violation (V) pattern, not the expression of disregard (ED) or violation from disregard (VD) pattern.
Second, then, suppose that I grab your pen and use it for a couple of minutes, quite reasonably thinking you will not miss it. But you do. You need the pen to write down something extremely important and now you don’t have it and cannot write down the important thing. I have wronged you because, despite having adequately good regard for you and your interests, I have in fact needlessly imposed costs on you or harmed you (though note that some would deny this…). In this case, innocent moral motivation is built-in to the type of wrong. So it does not really function as an excuse. So the objection here has a bit of a different pattern. But this is what matters: the action seems to be wrong, but it seems that I’m not blameworthy for performing it.
I’m gonna close off some of the exits for myself. Assume that actions are blameworthy only because they are indignation-worthy. And that my taking the pen is wrong in the sense of being an objective violation of you (so we are assuming there is a V pattern of wronging and doing wrong, similar to strict liability in the law). Finally, assume that, in some important sense, it is not appropriate to be indignant with me or blame me for taking and using your pen. My approach, then, should say this: there is still a kind of indignation that is warranted by my taking your pen. This, I think, is plausible. And independently motivated by accepting V-pattern wrongings (and wrongs). For we get mad at and blame people for doing such things, even while not getting mad at them or blaming them *for doing something from (or as an expression of) a shitty motive or mindset*. We can and should distinguish different sorts of indignation and blame here.
There is more to say, but that is the basic move. Technically, the position is that there are no non-indignation-worthy (and no non-blameworthy) wrongs. However, the contrary intuitions are explained (and to an extent vindicated, a la error theory) by a certain kind of motivation- or character-incriminating indignation (and blame) indeed being inappropriate responses to this sort of wrong action.
Policy of Truth 
You:
One confounding factor in your analysis is your assumption that retaliatory insulting is “malicious.” I don’t see why it would be, at least not necessarily. Supposing that it is, I don’t see how the bad behavior is “excused.” It may not show “disregard,” but it expresses malice. I’m more inclined to suppose that it’s not malicious. In this case, I don’t see why the behavior is bad. What’s bad about it?
LikeLike
I think there is malice in such a case because I’m intending to emotionally hurt or disrespect you. What everyone was supposed to agree is absent here — and that would make the action wrong if it were present — is the kind of bad will (motivation, mindset) that would raise appropriate outrage or objection (e.g., that of an unprovoked insult that is viewed by the perpetrator as such). But even if the action being expressive of this (worse) sort of motivation or mindset would make it wrong, perhaps the more salient thing that would make it wrong is just this: it not being the case that you insulted me first (despite my justified belief to the contrary). So perhaps this kind of case as much suggests the V (objective violation) as the ED (expression of disregard) pattern of wronging (and wrong) action. So maybe this was not the best or clearest type of putative counterexample to my approach.
I take it you share the intuition that my retaliatory (in intention, based on justified belief, whether or not in reality) insult is excused (that I’m not culpable, that I should not be blamed) — but would not if the action were malicious (in your different sense of ‘malicious’). Is this right?
LikeLike
“I think there is malice in such a case because I’m intending to emotionally hurt or disrespect you.”
I think the situation is misdescribed. Suppose you hit me and I hit you back. Is there malice in such a case because I intend to hurt you? I don’t see why. Is my hitting you “disrespecting” you? I don’t know, but if it is, it seems that you deserve it. So if malice is present, it seems deserved; alternatively, since the action is deserved, “malice” seems a misdescription.
The second option is my preferred one. Same reasoning, mutatis mutandis, with insults.
It seems to me that the proper motivation in cases of retaliation is to get the other party to stop initiating the offending act by visiting the same treatment back on the initiator and asking, “Would you like reciprocation? That can be arranged,” and then arranging it.
Yes and no. I agree that retaliatory insult is not culpable. What I would dispute is that it’s “excused.” “Excuse” implies something morally problematic, but subject to some mitigating condition. I don’t find it morally problematic. It’s not excused; it’s justified.
LikeLike
I go with the first option, you the second. This might, in the end, amount to different conceptual bookkeeping (no substantive disagreement).
I agree with the verdict in your retaliation case (justified, not excused). But retaliatory action that is not actually retaliation (because the agent’s relevant justified beliefs are not true) would be something like an excused initiation of aggression or insult (because no moral disregard), right?
LikeLike
You:
I just don’t think this example works. I realize that you’re trying to bake non-culpability into the example, but it’s not plausible. “I grab your pen and use it for a couple of minutes, quite reasonably thinking you will not miss it. But you do.” It doesn’t seem plausible to me to bake “reasonability” into that. More plausibly, the action is both wrong and blameworthy. I realize you can stipulate that the taking of the pen is “reasonable,” but then the example simply doesn’t work as a thought experiment. No one could run this thought experiment without being distracted constantly by the thought that the taking was slightly unreasonable, so that the action was slightly wrong.
This all just seems to me a predictable consequence of insisting that every wronging is indignation-worthy. There are just too many obvious counter-examples. Any case where the act is wrong, but merely a venial wrong, will fall beneath the threshold for indignation. It’s not “fitting” to get indignant about a venial wrong. Beyond that, there are some wrongs about which one reasonably feels no indignation at all. There are too many wrongs in the world for anyone to feel indignation about all of them. We simply acknowledge that some things are wrong, but feel nothing. Maybe under some counterfactual conditions, we would feel indignation for any wrong qua wrong, but in fact, we don’t.
It seems to me that you have to massage “indignation as fitting response” in some ad hoc ways to get it to work. I don’t see the point of incurring the cost involved.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The case could be constructed more carefully. We might even specify that the pen isn’t yours, but you were using it recently (maybe this would mitigate the tendency to think that there is, in any case, some small bit of inconsideration and culpability). The point is just that there are cases of utterly proper regard but de facto wronging (and wrongness). Do you think such cases exist?
The case of small wrongs speaks to either using a term other than ‘indignation’ or specifying a technical use. The relevant thing is just that observation-standpoint moral anger is appropriate or fitting (and that this constitutes an action being morally wrong). That fixes that. That fittingness does not entail that one has all-in most reason handles the cases of no degree of anger being appropriate (because the sense of ‘appropriate’ here includes all the salient normative factors, not just the local one of fitting attitude). The payoff here is explanatory: with this approach, we get an economical explanation of both what makes an act a wronging (or a wrong) and why wrongings (and wrong action) is so strongly connected to the salient attitudes (like resentment, indignation, guilt).
LikeLike
I’m highly skeptical they do. In this case, if the pen isn’t mine, and you take it, I don’t see any wronging at all. That I was using it recently seems neither here nor there.
I don’t get this sentence:
“…does not entail that one has all-in most reason” to do what?
LikeLike
to have the attitude
LikeLike
You: “for an action to be a wronging of a person is for it to be an action worthy of victim resentment.”
This is a smart-ass objection, I realize, but your formulation has to exclude self-wronging. A person can wrong himself, but it strikes me as very implausible to insist that when you do, your action is resentment-worthy. Self-resentment is not a fitting attitude; it’s something to be avoided. So it seems to me that you have to treat self-wrongings as outside the scope of your analysis.
You: “for an action (at least usually a wronging of a person) to be morally wrong is for it to be an action worthy of observer indignation.”
Again, I don’t think that will work for cases of self-wrongings. “I feel indignation for myself” is, I suppose, possible, but not desirable, even in cases where you’ve done wrong. So it can’t work for cases of self-wrong. Whatever it is, wrongness can’t be an unfitting attitude. But self-indignation is.
LikeLike
‘Resentment’ is really just a stand-in for something like this: first-personal moral anger at being treated (or thought of) in some negative way that inherently aims at inducing guilt in the agent. I’d need some cases, but it does not seem super-odd (any more odd than the category of self-wronging) that I might have this complicated, divided stance toward how I treat or think of myself on occasion. Similarly in such cases for observer-position moral anger (anger with more of a public aim, perhaps having the inherent action-tendency of rallying people to discourage, punish, etc.). But maybe there is something odd or incoherent about these reactions that I’m missing.
LikeLike
I agree: it’s not (at all) odd that you might have this complicated, divided stance toward how you treat yourself on this occasion. But you might also think that it’s a counter-productive attitude to have, so you might train yourself out of having it. If so, “self-resentment” can’t be constitutive of self-wronging. In other words, “might” is too weak, but “must” is too strong.
LikeLike
That you have most reason to train yourself out of having the appropriate attitude does not make the attitude not appropriate (and it is appropriateness in self-resentment, not actually having the attitude, that would be constitutive of self-wronging). So I wouldn’t be training myself out of avoiding wronging myself or anything like that (if that is the thought). (Similarly, it would be coherent to say that all sorts of things are wrongings, and wrongs, but we have most reason, in all cases, to train ourselves out of having our holding-responsible attitudes toward people being victimized, etc.)
LikeLike
One last, broader point. I know that not everyone shares my wholesale rejection of moral luck, but you don’t have to go as far as that to think that there’s something wrong with examples of wrongness where the wrongness of an act turns on happenstance contingencies that transform an otherwise blameless action into a wronging (or a wronging minus blameworthiness). Too much work is being done by the contingent events that arise after the performance of the act. At that point, it seems to me, we’re not really discussing the wrongness of acts any more, but the wrongness of acts concatenated with unpredictable subsequent events. The more we focus on the wrongness of the act qua act, the less important these happenstance contingencies will seem to any account of wrongness.
LikeLike
If an action can be made a wronging (and a wrong) by facts as well as disregard (e.g., de facto needlessly imposing costs on another person) it is hard to avoid moral luck. Actions will sometimes be made wrongings (and wrongs) by chance circumstances. And, if I’m right in my speculation here, in these cases, one is, in a certain “less personal” sense, blameworthy (unless there is some barrier to moving from appropriateness in first- and second-personal moral anger to appropriateness in blaming).
Why would this be so? How are these two worlds different: (i) that of wronging (and wrongness) being solely a function of disregard and (ii) that of wronging (and wrongness) also sometimes being a function of relevant facts?
My guess is this: though the original function (and fittingness standards) for first-, second- and third-personal moral anger was response to disregard, we expanded the functional profile based on the need to achieve adequate compliance with rules, compliance with which can be determined in a pretty obvious, public way. Roughly, we started using our “moral cudgels” in ways that, initially, were inappropriate. And may at times still seem so. The same with having moralized, holding-responsible attitudes with respect to institutional, social conditions victimizing people (victims with no culprit). The very identity of first-, second- and third-personal anger has evolved with human culture and institutions.
LikeLike
“If an action can be made a wronging (and a wrong) by facts as well as disregard (e.g., de facto needlessly imposing costs on another person) it is hard to avoid moral luck.”
This is a classic case of the adage that one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, at least if we take “facts” to be facts outside of the agent’s epistemic ken or scope of control.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I guess what I would say here is that act types like “reckless action” are wrong, regardless of what actually happens as a result of the performance of the action. Epistemically, we often need to rely on subsequent events to figure out what really happened, but purely as a matter of rendering an ethical verdict, if we had access to all of the relevant information ab initio, the subsequent events wouldn’t matter. If you drive drunk and run over a child, you’re culpable, but if you drive drunk and don’t run over a child only because there happened not to be a child at the place where, had there been one, you would have run it over, you’re equally culpable. In that sense, I would insist, “the facts” don’t matter to the ethical verdict.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, that is what you have to say about those cases. At a more general level, the needless imposition of cost (harm, risk) has to be wrong (and blameworthy) because ‘needless’ describes something about the agent’s motivation, intent or mindset, not the facts (specifically, some kind of negligence).
LikeLike
I think one paradigm case of wronging fits what I call the VD pattern: objective violation as an expression of disregard (roughly, malice or negligence). (The other paradigm case is insult or disrespectful speech-acts more generally, what I call ED (expression and communication of disrespect). The drunken driver who kills is an example of this pattern. The one who happens not to kill also expresses disregard and violates, but it is a different violation — a risk-imposition (from disregard) not a death-causing (from disregard). If D (or its expression) has to do all the work (wronging-making, wrong-making, blameworthiness-making), then we cannot get two different levels or degrees of blameworthiness from the different VD patterns here.
I can agree with your sort of position this far: the portion of blameworthiness (wrongness, wrongingness) that is due entirely to D is the same in the two cases. This will involve appropriateness in a negative personal evaluation (same in both cases) and in a corresponding kind of moral anger (or guilt) and blameworthiness. But since this does not exhaust appropriate moral anger (or guilt) and blaming, I can still say that the different VD patterns here exhibit different degrees (and types) of appropriateness in moral anger (or guilt) and blame. Of course, I’ll have to deny, downplay or explain away intuitions to the effect that things that one cannot control cannot matter for blameworthiness, etc.
LikeLike
True enough. The two paragraphs after constitute an attempt at movement beyond that intuitive loggerhead.
LikeLike