Replies to Driver, Johnson King and Markovits

Philosophical Studies (2024) 181:951–960 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02111-z Replies to Driver, Johnson King and Markovits Mason Elinor1 Accepted: 31 October 2023 / Published online: 27 February 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 I am extremely grateful for these thoughtful and challenging discussions. It is a great privilege to be able to engage with such sharp and insightful critics. In what follows I cannot address every point made, but will do my best to defend my view against the main objections and worries raised. Let me start with Johnson King, who is very worried about my account of grasping Morality. It may help to begin with a bit of context. Why do I dip my toes into the murky waters of meta-ethics when my main project is clearly normative ethics and normative responsibility theory?1 The answer is that I want to give an account of what sort of blame there can be in cases of moral ignorance. Obviously if there is moral ignorance, there must be moral knowledge. So we need to say something about what sort of thing moral knowledge is. My point in introducing the idea of grasping Morality (capital M denoting broad correctness) is to distinguish between two kinds of moral ignorance: moral ignorance that is deep—someone who is not even on the bus—and moral ignorance that is the mundane, everyday sort we encounter all the time. My basic picture is that if someone is not even on the bus, if they have been raised without any glimpse of the true morality, then we cannot blame them in the ordinary way (though we can still blame them in the detached way). However, if someone is in the same basic moral framework that the rest of us are in, we can blame them in the ordinary way. This is not because they are blameworthy for their moral ignorance, it is not that they really do know that their act is wrong, and it is not because we can trace their ignorance back to some previous culpable benighting act, but because there is a plausible sense in which they should have known better. That’s what seems crucial to me to the aptness of ordinary blame—we must be able to say to the wrongdoer, although you did not know, there is a plausible sense in which you should have known. 1 Actually I am not doing metaethics at all, at least insofar as I am not talking about truth. I am assuming that our Morality is (roughly) correct, but nothing hangs on that. The point is that subjective obligation has to be indexed to some morality or other, so I choose the broad one that happens to be ours. The discussion refers to my claims in Mason (2019). * Mason Elinor 1 Santa Barbara, USA 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 952 M. Elinor So what does it mean to say that someone doesn’t know but should have known better? Johnson King rightly urges that I should have said more about what exactly that means. She focusses on a sort of case that, in fact, I think is vanishingly unlikely, but I need to say a little more in order to clarify my account here. First, let me stress that it is true for most people that when they act in moral ignorance, they should have known better. And I don’t mean, people like me, educated university professors from the Anglo world—I mean most people in the world—people from all walks of life and all places. Most people share a basic ethical framework, and although ethical theorists may get very caught up in their differences, at some level (I submit) they know they are dealing with ethical differences within a shared framework. As Johnson King herself says: “Speaking for myself, I have interacted with and learned from plenty of hardcore Kantians and Utilitarians, and I maintain personal relationships with people who harbor deeply-ingrained biases that I don’t think I can change their minds about.” That is exactly my point—we can maintain relationships with people with widely diverging ethical views, and with people who have blind spots and biases. They are not moral monsters. They are trying their best and their foundational views do not seem outrageous. Otherwise wonderful Aunt Bertha may be a bit homophobic. A dear friend is a hard core Kantian. My lovely neighbor voted for Trump. These are ordinary people making ordinary mistakes. The thought is not that people making moral mistakes already know, in the way that someone might know that their spouse is cheating, but pretend to themselves that they do not know. It is rather that a better answer is available from the basic starting points that the agent accepts, and that if the agent had tried harder, they would have been able to reach that answer. Furthermore, there is no particular route to knowledge that must be possible in order for my claim that the agent should have known better to apply. My thought is not that I should be able to change their mind—or indeed that anyone should. Rather, the thought is that at some level they could come to the correct view from their current framework. It may be that there are psychological barriers (laziness and bitterness are common ones) to them doing so, but the basic framework that they accept points to a more accurate moral view than they actually have on some topic. And by contrast, someone like JoJo, who is outside of our moral community now, could be brought in by extensive education. He couldn’t get there on his own (it’s not that if he had tried harder he would have come to a better answer), but he could get there with help. Finally, whether or not someone can come to the correct view is not a matter of the content of their view— so it is not that there is a distinction between sexist and racist and homophobic belief sets, such that some are more outside Morality than others. I think most people who hold sexist or racist or homophobic views should know better, and their beliefs are a result of laziness or blind spots or self-deception. They could and should have tried harder. The problem areas are not well integrated with the agent’s basic outlook, and the agent is failing to see that. The view I defend is a threshold view. At some point, an agent counts as having enough of a grasp on Morality to be in the moral community, and subject to ordinary blame. So what is the threshold? Here, I don’t say much, but I think I say about as much as I can say. We can see the extreme cases of people who are not in the moral community, usually fictional characters: JoJo, and Bill (who is raised in 13 Replies to Driver, Johnson King and Markovits 953 a completely isolated community). And there are the easy cases of those who are in the moral community (most people). But there are borderline cases. I take Huck Finn to be a borderline case, as I say in chapter 2. There are other potentially borderline cases, cases where an individual or a whole society is in a state of transition from one morality to another. I don’t have a firm view about such cases. But I think that is the right attitude to have: we don’t have to shoe-horn a complicated situation into a neat theory. Johnson King’s concern is not (...truncated)