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Show Chapter IX. "Ought" 372 moral judgments about those who violate all of its precepts. However, there is no real conflict. Theory K meets this requirement - but not by generating judgments of obligation for these circumstances. On the suggested analysis, the moral "ought" applies to particular types of actions (promise-keeping, rendering aid, and so forth). It thus presupposes our conditional recognition of the agent as a candidate for the ideal moral community. So it cannot apply to those whose actions reveal a degree of incorrigibility that conclusively places them beyond its reach. It would be not just feeble but frivolous to express our moral judgment of Hitler by asserting that (23) Hitler ought not to have gassed six million Jews. - as though somehow five million would have been less objectionable. The horror of Hitler's actions enlarges the focus of moral judgment to include his motives, character, and indeed his very existence. Our attitude toward Hitler is better expressed in sheer speechlessness, perhaps; or in the judgments that he was an abomination, that what he did was unspeakable, and the like. In such cases, Theory K implies what we might call judgments of negative identification, i.e. truly rational dissociative judgments that the agent does not merely act in violation of some one particular moral obligation, but is a conceptually anomalous assault on the very conception of morality that a moral theory like K expresses. The challenge, of course, is to retain one's theoretical investment in K in the face of such repeated assaults. A second challenge that I do not address here would be to identify those cases in which judgments of negative identification are actually warranted. By contrast with the oddly feeble sound of "ought" when applied to radically incorrigible agents such as Hitler, consider its application to an innocuously incorrigible agent of the sort who might remark with a smirk, (24) I ought to stop drinking; but you know me, I'm not going to do it. On my account, this remark is to be understood as expressing the tentative expectation that I shall stop drinking (in the first clause), conjoined with the prediction that I will not (in the third). It is a paradigm case of epistemic ambivalence, redundantly expressed. It is not unusual to entertain certain tentative expectations of oneself based upon a flattering but insecure selfconception, and simultaneously suspect in one's heart that it is a delusion. We use the moral "ought" of tentative expectation in cases of innocuous incorrigibility because the innocuousness of the dereliction undermines our belief in its incorrigibility. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
