Sunday, November 30, 2008
Moral Improvement and Unfamiliar Situations
One thing Adams changed my mind about is our expectations of worse moral performance in unfamiliar situations. On 161, Adams says moral excellence involves being well prepared for familiar circumstances. We cannot expect the morally excellent to know how to respond to all situations. Moral luck is involved where persons are thrown into new situations. So virtue is dependent on the circumstances we find ourselves in. My initial view was that not only the morally excellent but also those with some moral competence must have some kind of knowledge such that they know how to respond well to entirely new circumstances. Otherwise, it is hard to see how ordinary moral improvement would take place. When one progresses beyond thinking about the (relatively) morally uncontroversial, completely new situations are bound to arise. How then are agents supposed to respond? Before this point, perhaps moral exemplars were looked towards for guidance. But given controversial cases where we are supposing the agent has no relevant knowledge herself about what to do, picking a moral exemplar would seem to be arbitrary. So two options come to mind. One (my initial view) is that Adams is wrong and there is actually some kind of relevant knowledge that those with moral competence have that can often be applied to completely new situations. The other is that Adams is right and we should expect worse moral performance in new situations, even by the morally excellent. I am now somewhat friendly to this alternative. Given acceptance of moral luck, we might also say that it is a matter of luck for the agent to perform excellently given an entirely new set of circumstances. That is not to say that the agent can never learn to act excellently in this type of situation. She can look back on the situation and evaluate her performance, using this information to help in future similar situations. So moral improvement could progress just fine without agents having knowledge relevant to new situations.
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I think I am having some of the same realizations you are due to Adams chapters on moral luck. I have always been hesitant to allow for moral luck. I suppose that it is luck that one is raised in a certain environment with certain exemplars and thus becomes a virtuous person. However, once formulated into a virtuous or vicious person, I always felt that one would know how to handle any and every situation. It should not be reduced to luck that one remains or falters as a virtuous person. If one is truly virtuous, one should know how to act in a virtuous way in all situations.
However, if I am able to get on board with moral luck being involved in one developing as a virtuous person, why can't I get on board with luck being involved in remaining a virutous person? How could we expect someone to know what to do in all new situations. If one has not encountered a situation before, he or she may not know how virtue would handle it.
I still am not positive how on board I am with this idea. I am becoming more open about it, but I still wonder what virtue is if it is this susceptible to luck. I think I would be able to agree that luck helps, but if one is to be considered a virtuous person, one truly excellent in being for the good, even in a new situation a virtuous person should be able to more often than a non-virtuous person be able to figure out what to do. One's virtue should guide one to the right decision. Perhaps in new situations the virtuous person will falter more than usual, but he or she should still be able to know what is right and wrong.
The virtuous does not have to be perfect and luck is involved, but one who is excellently for the good must at least be on average better in new situations.
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