is it always right to do what you think is right?

95

IS IT ALWAYS R I G H T TO DO WHAT YOU T H I N K IS RIGHT?*

For those of my students who thought the answer was "Yes."

JOHN T. WILCOX

This paper arises primarily out of a discouragement many teachers of philosophical ethics share: after we have exposed students to the most sophisticated ethical thinking we can discover, and have presented the most careful and penetrating critiques of that thinking which we can discover or construcV, we regularly ask our students to come to some reasoned conclusions of their own about the right and the good; and just as regularly we have some students who, rejecting the giants in moral philosophy, defend points of view few philosophers consider even worth discussion - like, "Just act with a feeling of love"; or, "Just do what you think is right." We teach the sublime, and they finish the course defending the ridiculous. I t is this experience, and the conviction that sometimes philosophers should discuss the ridiculous, that first led me to consider the claim that it is always right to do what you think is right. Since the claim appears to be presupposed in Jiminy Cricket's advice to Pinocchio, "Always let your conscience be your guide," I call it the Jiminfl Cricket doctrine. 1

However, as I looked into some relevant philosophical literature, I found that my own conclusions lacked some of the uniformity of acceptance and, apparently, the obviousness which I first attributed to them. True, no philosophers to my knowledge accept the doctrine in its most discouraging form. But there are philosophers who regard certain versions of the doctrine as correct, whereas my view is that it is objectionable in all of its forms. So perhaps my conclusions will be of interest to the professionals, as well as to my students.

In its most discouraging form, the Jiminy Cricket doctrine presents itself in my ethics classes when we are discussing, or later when the students are

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology on April 8, 1966, in New Orleans.

1 If the reader feels that I am doing Jiminy Cricket a double disservice here, let me assure him first, that I know that the cricket's primary intention was to assert the suprema- cy (perhaps on prudential grounds) of moral reasoning, and that the doctrine here dis- cussed acquires its urgency only in connection with the variability of conscience, a variability Jiminy doubtless would have rejected; and, second, that I mean to do the little friend of Pinocchio honor, not the opposite, in associating him with a doctrine I regard as mistaken.

96 The Journal of Value Inquiry

being examined on, theories of the criterion of morally right conduct. We will be considering, perhaps, questions designed to illuminate the modern teleological-deontological contrast: To be right, must an act do more good than its alternatives? Or would it ever be right, for example, to keep a promise if you could do more good by breaking it? One brave student in every class sweeps aside all such venerable questions with the declaration that the crucial matter is neither the promise nor the consequences, but rather the agent's own opinion of the act; an act is right, he says, if the agent believes it is right.

The student who puts forward the doctrine in this context claims to mean that if someone sincerely believes that something he is doing is right, why then it is right for him to do it. He does not mean that the same thing would be right for me to do, unless I too believe it is right; he claims that each man's sovereign conscience can decide for him what he should do, and that no one of the rest of us has any right to gainsay its pronouncements. Typi- cally, the student who says this has already thought through some of the gruesome consequences and accepted them; he may be quite prepared to say, for example, that it was morally right for Hitler to have had most of Europe's Jews killed if Hitler really believed that that was what he should do. The student believes that he should not try to kill any Jews, and hence that it would be wrong for him to do so; but if Hitler believed that his acts were right, then they were right.

But the problem with the Jiminy Cricket doctrine, when it arises in this context is not in the first instance its repulsiveness, but rather its oddity; the proponent must be brought to see how strange are its implications for moral deliberation. The doctrine implies that if two spectators disagree about whether some act was right or wrong, the only legitimate reason for their disagreement would be ignorance of what the agent thought about his act. Of late, for example, people have disagreed about the propriety of President Johnson's conduct of the Vietnamese War, with many urging that the scope of hostilities be restricted more sharply, while many others have urged that the scope be expanded. In evaluating the President's decisions, the critics on both sides have mentioned such matters as the U.S. Constitution, the U.N. Charter, the SEATO agreements, the precedents of former administrations, the attitudes of our allies, world opinion, the state of the tensions between Moscow and Peking, the rate of infiltration from the North, the constituency of the Viet Cong, and the legitimacy of the Saigon regime. Now according to the Jiminy Cricket doctrine, all of these considerations are irrelevant. The only matter relevant to the question of whether President Johnson acted rightly is, Did he think it was right? If he did, then what he did was right; if not, it was not. What the hawks and the doves should have been discussing were such questions as, Did the President say it was right? Does his past behavior suggest that he believes what he says? Did he have a sincere expression on his face, did he have a steady gaze, did his face flush or his pulse quicken, did he seem to perspire when he said it was right? On the Jiminy Cricket view, this is the only kind of relevant question. All the other questions are simply

Is it Always Right to do What you Think is Right? 97

beside the point. Acceptance of the Jiminy Cricket doctrine would make the debate about President Johnson's conduct of the war in some ways easier, in some ways harder - but it would certainly make it radically different.

Notice, further, that if the President himself wonders - after the fact - whether he did the right thing in ordering some particular step taken, he is in the same position as these critics, and needs to ask the same kind of question. Of course, he may perhaps know the secrets of his own heart better than the spectators, and he may already have a clear memory that he was sincere or insincere, as the case may be. But the issue for him would be the same that it would be for them - viz., Did he really believe in the rightness of his act when he did it? Yet, though there have been some strange things in the President's defense of his decisions about the war, I am not aware of any which took this to have been the sole issue.

So much for the oddity of passing judgment on accomplished facts by the Jiminy Cricket principle; but the oddity increases when we ask how a man might use the principle before he acts. Suppose President Johnson has to decide today whether to order mining the harbors of North VietNam; 2 how will he apply the doctrine to facilitate his decision?

Now the President and his advisers sit down to discuss mining the harbors. He announces, "Gentlemen, at this point I feel that mining the harbors would be right. So it would be right." In rushes a special aide, with a late message from North VietNam, a word from the British and Soviet Am- bassadors, and a new report on the relation of the shipping in the North to the war effort in the South. The aide tries to introduce his new information - but the President brushes it aside. "We are trying to do the right thing, gentlemen," he says. "What I think is right for me to do, is right for me to do. If you have some evidence that I do not really believe in the rightness of mining the harbors - perhaps some notes that I wrote expressing doubts, or any lie detector evidence you may possess - then present your evidence. But do not interrupt our deliberations with irrelevant evidence, like estimates of the effect of my decision on the course of the war. I must do what is right." Or perhaps he says, "I find that I do not really have a conviction about the rightness of mining the harbors. Therefore it would be neither right nor wrong to order the mining. Present your evidence about my convictions, if you have any; but do not interfere with our policy-making by intruding irrelevant material concerning the war." What a strange way to decide what to do, and what a strange way to decide which matters are relevant! Indeed, has anyone ever made a decision in such a manner?

There are, to be sure, times when we say to one another, and when, if we were his advisers, we might say to the President, "You'll just have to decide what you think is the right thing to do" - and one not familiar with the situations in which we say that might suppose that such advice could lead

2 In case the harbors have already been mined by the time you read this, please construct another issue for an example - e.g., should we use atomic weapons in North VietNam?


to the weird situations imagined above, a But when we advise someone to decide for himself what he thinks is right we never intend that he simply examine himself to discover his convictions, ignoring the circumstances and effects of the actions under consideration; indeed, if we did, in what sense would the actions be "under consideration"? Rather, we intend that our advisee, who lacks a firm conviction, should examine the actions in order to form a conviction, to get himself one, to come to one. If a judge tells a jury to decide whether a crime was committed, he means for them to examine the evidence; if a lawyer tells the jurymen to decide whether they really think a crime was committed, he means the same thing. It is not as if the judge told them to examine the evidence, while the lawyer told them to examine something else, their own heads; rather, they are both saying, "Examine (with your own heads) the evidence." Similarly, if an adviser tells the President to decide what he thinks is right, he means for him to examine the evidence in order to come to a conviction. When we add, "in your own heart," "in your own mind," or "in the privacy of your own conscience," we only indicate - at most - where we fancy the decision-making goes on, not what we intend the decision-making to be about.

Clearly the Jiminy Cricket doctrine is confused, when it appears in this context. No philosophers, so far as I can discover, defend it in this form; and when I present such examples as those above to my students, most of them realize that something is amiss. But where does the confusion lie, and how did my hapless students fall into defending such a doctrine? If they did not really intend to be recommending such strange proceedures for decision- making, what did they intend?

I!

Although what my students meant to maintain may not be clear from the example of the hawk-dove debate, most of them can see in the example of the Presidential decision where the trouble lies. They did not intend that the President "decide what he thought" in such a strange manner; they believed and hoped that he would consider the effects of his decisions upon the course of the war. They did not intend their doctrine to alter his method of making decisions; rather they intended it to alter our method of passing judgment upon him after he made his decisions. Some of their acquaintances were calling the President an evil man, a bad man, because they thought he should have been making different decisions; my students wanted to insist, against them, that the President should not be condemned for doing what he thought was right.

To make that point, without getting into the absurdities of section I, my students need to make a distinction between two kinds of moral judgments, or two kinds of decisions. There is what we might call a first-level decision,

This point, and the tone of several others, I owe to conversations with Nicolas D. Goodman, who read an earlier draft and made suggestions.


like that President Johnson makes when he decides whether to order the mining of the harbors; he looks at the circumstances and effects of alternative courses of action and decides for one of them. But after his decision, he and his act 4 are open to a second-level kind of judgment and decision: we - and he h imse l f - can ask whether he or his act should be praised, blamed, excused, or whatever. In the first-level judgment, one does not try to discover what one's convictions are, rather one comes to a conviction by making a judgment; but in the second-level judgment, what the agent's first-level judgment or conviction was often becomes relevant. If, on the first level, the agent thought his act was right, then we may be willing, on the second level, to excuse him, to exonerate him from any blame, even perhaps to praise him. My students were recommending a second-level procedure: they wanted us to excuse all acts which the agent himself regarded as right.

It is misleading then, to present the Jiminy Cricket doctrine in the form, "I t is always right to do what you think is right," because "right" is used in two different senses, as the term of approbation for questions on two different levels. To do justice to their real intentions, those who propose the doctrine should formulate it in some other way - e.g., "It is always excusable to do what you think is right" - where the terms "excusable" and "right" indicate moral judgments on two separate issues or levels. It follows that my students who introduce the doctrine into the teleology-deontology debate mentioned above have introduced it at the wrong point; it is a doctrine about the criteria for praise, blame, excusability, and the like, not about the criteria for right conduct.

When we are young, we begin the process of learning, and formulating for ourselves, first-level moral principles: never lie, always keep your promises, don't harm or take other people's property without their permission, and so on. All through our lives, to greater or lesser extents, we formulate these principles for ourselves and others, teach them to our children, indignantly proclaim them when we think others break them, pass laws to punish those

4 Some philosophers say that though the first-level judgment concerns the act, the second concerns only the agent; but, although we cannot punish an act, we can praise it, excuse it, or decry it, on the same grounds that we praise, excuse, or blame the man who did it. However, philosophers who make the distinction in this way are probably noting an important point neglected in the text above. For the second-level judgment is logically, not temporally, "second," and the word "after" and the tense of some verbs in the text may obscure this point. The first-level question abstracts from the agent's opinion of the alternative acts in order to arrive at an opinion about those alternatives; the second-level asks about the moral character of the act or agent on the supposition of certain first-level opinions. But the act need not have actually occurred. Before acting, when a conscientious man finds himself uncertain which course of action would be best, he may well raise the second-level question, Could I be reasonably blamed for the possible bad consequences of my choice, given that I cannot foresee the outcome any better? And when we philosophize, we can generalize such second-level questions and inquire about the moral character of whole classes of hypothetical actions.


who break (some of) them, consult them before we act in order to do what we regard as right, feel proud of ourselves for "keeping" them and ashamed of ourselves when we admit that we have broken them. In short, we try to follow them and to get other people to follow them; then we pass second- level moral judgments on ourselves and others largely in respect to the degree to which we succeed in following them. We praise, blame, reward, punish, censure, ostracise, eulogize, and hold up as examples persons sus- pected of keeping or breaking those rules - largely; but we also permit excuses of various sorts. True, I injured his property, but I should not re- ceive moral censure; for I had no way of knowing I would injure it, and, in addition, I am willing to make restitution. No, I did not keep my promise to be there at noon, but if the subway had not stalled for two hours, I would have been there in plenty of time. So we come to have second-level principles, too: no one is to be blamed for what he could not help; great personal temptation reduces guilt (or increases merit). The state does not try to punish all lawbreakers or to punish them all with equal severity, because many factors (including some kinds of ignorance) are regarded as amelio- rating circumstances. We normally think of the "moral law" as similar to the law of the state in this respect.

A difference between the two levels of moral judgment is presupposed in much of commonsense morality. It is also involved in many of the most fundamental distinctions drawn by moral philosophers - distinctions between the material and formal goodness of actions, between abstract and practical virtue, between objective and subjective rightness, and between the moral agent's theoretical and his practical tasks; and many philosophers have seen that the crudest form of the Jiminy Cricket doctrine depends upon a failure to make such a distinction. I have no plea here for any special way of drawing the distinction; but the language some philosophers use - particularly when they contrast the "objectively right" with the "subjectively right" - often leads my students to think that you have to have an "objectivist" or a "rationalist" metaethics in order to make the distinction. 5 Now many of my students, and many others, believe that there are basic ethical disagreements between different people and different cultures which cannot be resolved by rational methods alone, hence that nothing is "objectively right" in this sense. And many of my students subscribe to non-cognitivist metaethical theories, and they are reluctant to call anything "objectively right" in that sense. Many of these "relativists" or "subjectivists" fancy that they are committed to the Jiminy Cricket doctrine. Some of their critics suffer from the same delusion; Brand Blanshard, for one, has charged in a widely reprinted article that "the new subjectivist"

There is another disadvantage to making the distinction in these terms, too. That is that it involves a temptation to make it "subjectively right" by definition to do what you think is objectively right, and then to think that the substantive issue has been solved - the issue of whether one who does what he thinks is right can be legitimately censured or blamed. See section IV for a discussion of this substantive issue.


(the emotivist) cannot make the distinction between the subjectively and the objectively right, and that consequently he must accept what amounts to the Jiminy Cricket doctrine. ~ This line of reasoning is fallacious; a non- cognitivist or a non-objectivist can find his way out of the Jiminy Cricket thicket quite as well as anyone else.

Nothing is so universally regarded as the paradigm case of a "subjective" judgment as a judgment about the tastes of food. I find the dish I am served at the party quite uninteresting, my hostess thinks of it as wonderful. But even there we can make a distinction between two levels of judgment: I judge separately my hostess's dish and her decision to serve it. I may say, for example, that the dish is only mediocre, while praising my hostess for doing so much better than last time. Or I may criticize both the dish and the hostess; the dish, I may say, was without any merits, and the hostess should have known better than to serve it. The fact that she may say similar things about me and the dish I serve is irrelevant; the two levels of judgment remain, and remain even if I shift to more "tolerant," "first-person psycho- logical" language. I may say, for instance, that I dislike the dish and also resent the hostess's serving it, or that I dislike the dish but will defend to the gastronomical death her decision to serve it. Surely, if an emotivist, relativist account of dining tastes can distinguish between two levels of approval and disapproval, an emotivist or relativist account of ethics can do the same.

Richard Price, who saw that there are two kinds of moral judgment - they concern abstract virtue and practical virtue, he said - exhorted his readers not to forget the former in their preoccupation with the latter. "But what purpose is it to multiply words on this occasion," Price asked, "when it is so apparent, that all enquiries after our duty, all instructions in it . . . imply objective rectitude, or something separate from, and independent of the mind and its perceptions . . . ? " 7 But what is apparent and implied is that the first-level judgment judges things separate from and independent of the judging mind - namely the alternative courses of action, their circumstances and consequences; not so apparent is any guarantee that any other well-informed mind would judge those courses with the same standards, or would come to the same verdict. It may be that there is no way to reconcile the differences between your criteria of moral judgment and mine, and it may be that there are emotional bases for our holding the criteria we hold; that does not undermine the distinction between the first- and second-level criteria that either of us holds.

III

Once the student has seen the strangeness of the first form of the Jiminy Cricket doctrine, and the need for a distinction between two different

"The New Subjectivism in Ethics," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research IX, 3 (March 1949), 509-510.

.4 Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 178.


kinds of moral judgment, he is ready to advance the doctrine in a new form: "it is always excusable to do what you think is right." This form expresses what I have found to be the hard core of sentiment in my students who advanced the doctrine in its various forms; it says what they most want to say. However, it is often accompanied by another claim, and it is the ac- companying claim that I want to discuss in this section, before proceeding to the hard core doctrine.

The considerations above show that a moral agent can make two kinds of moral judgments: (1) What should I do? and (2) Was I to blame for doing what I did? Normally we assume that a spectator or third party can ask similar questions, viz., (1) What should he do? and (2) Was he to blame for what he did? That is, normally we assume that either the first-level or the second-level question can be asked by either the agent or his spectators or judges. Our example of President Johnson's deliberation shows how weird it is to forget that an agent asks first-level questions, and our example of the hawk-dove considerations was intended to show that the spectators ask the first-level questions, too. Now some of my students, though they see that the agent must ask the first-level question, deny that the spectator should. How could someone else know what Johnson should do, they ask? What right has anyone else to say? Each man must decide for himself, they argue, and it is sheer impudence for someone else to try to say for him what is right. Our relations to other people are so complex, the effects of our actions so unpre- dictable, and our principles so far from consistent or precise, that it often moves us to despair to try to decide for ourselves what we ought to do; how much harder is it to decide for other people, whose circumstances we know less well than our own! Moreover, there are positive dangers in making pronouncements about the moral obligations of other people - it is con- ducive to slavishness of spirit on the one hand, and to meddling and fanati- cism on the other. These are points which college students, trying to come to moral maturity, can urge with conviction and vigor.

On the other hand, as much recent discussion has shown, there is a logical difficulty in the attempt to renounce judgment on other people. If I claim that x is right then I implicitly claim that anything similar to x in the relevant particulars is also right. If I claim something about my own case, e.g., that I have an obligation to tell the truth under oath, then I have already, willy-nilly, claimed that anyone else in similar circumstances has a similar obligation. I cannot, in other words, confine my judgments to my own case, whether I want to or not. My principles apply to other cases, or else they are not principles at all. How to formulate this logical point has been much debated of late, and I do not try to resolve the details of the debate, but the general point is widely acknowledged. And it shows that the judgments we make on ourselves implicitly apply to others as well.

However, that application is only implicit; and my students argue that it should remain that way and should never become explicit. When I say that x is right for me, I imply that it is right for anyone else like me; but I do not have to determine whether you are in fact enough like me to make x right for


you. I can leave that judgment unmade, and this is what some of my students urge that I do. What can be said against such urging?

For one thing, to use the ad hominem, the doctrine itself does what it claims no one should do. It says that no one should, or has the right to, pass judgment on what other people should do. But surely that's you telling me what I should do, or what I have a right to do.

For another thing, one of the best ways to decide whether I think something is right for me is to see whether I think it right for someone else. This helps me to assume an impartial point of view, to consider the matter as a moral problem and not merely as a matter of tactics within the confines of my normal non-moral interests. If we give up this kind of judgment on others, we give up one of the traditionally most-recommended means of determining what is right for ourselves.

Further, some principles which most of us hold require that we determine not merely the (non-moral) "facts" of the case, but also whether others have acted rightly or not. Ought I let this man beat this child? - Well, does he have a right to beat the child? I must decide what is right for him to do, before I can decide what is right for me to do. Should I lend this boy my rifle? - Well, does he plan to do something wrong with it? Should I report this student to the Honor Council? - Has he done anything wrong? Now, granted that our judgments about such matters are fallible, still we have to make them. I think, fallibly, that my student is guilty of plagiarism; so I report him to the Council. The Council thinks, fallibly, that he is guilty; so it says so (and punishes him). Now such judgments can do harm; we are convinced that they can also do good, or help avoid harm.

Further, we have to pass judgments on our children in order to teach them right from wrong. We have to say, "No, you don't have a right to take Jimmy's tricycle." "I t doesn't matter whether Peter called you names or not, you should not have hit him with your baseball bat." We can't simply say, "This is what I do (or these are my principles). Try to see how they apply in your own case." What child could figure out how his parents' principles applied to his so-different situations, or would if he could; and what child would live by them, without some case-by-case parental insistence?

Furthermore, though we can trust some adults to make their own decisions, there are others who will gun us down on the streets, or round up all the Jews and execute them, if we leave them alone to decide within their sovereign consciences what they should do. Should we give the paranoiac the right to decide whether he ought to shoot everybody who "threatens" him, while we deny to his victims, the police, the lawmakers, and the rational bystanders the right to say that what he is doing is wrong? Should we give Hitler the fight to decide whether to liquidate the Jews, but deny to the Jews, the German citizens, and the citizens of the world the right to say his decision was, to say the least, in error? Granted meddling in other people's affairs by saying they are acting wrongly can have unfortunate consequences, it is not the only thing that can. And if we want to justify moral meddling, surely the fact that Hitler meddled with the Jews, and with all of us, is


justification enough for meddling in his affairs. Or is moral meddling the only kind of meddling which is immoral? The only defensible position, I think, is that there are evils worse than the evils of saying what other people ought to do, and that when we can help avoid those evils by speaking out, we have a right and sometimes an obligation to do so.

IV

Granted, then, that there is nothing in principle wrong with saying that what somebody else has done or is about to do is wrong, however careful one must often be with such judgments; what about the hard core Jiminy Cricket doctrine, the claim that whether one does what is right or not, his action is excusable, he is not to be blamed or morally condemned, if he thought it was right?

Now all of the concessions made to the doctrine in the preceding section can be made to the hard core of the Jiminy Cricket doctrine. It is true that second-level moral judgment on others can be the meddling, the interference with personal responsibility, the intolerance and stupidity that first-level judgment can be; one can do most of the kinds of harm the other can do. Furthermore, the second-level judgment, coming after the fact as it normally does, and hence being unable to prevent the deed in question, often serves no other function but to vent the judge's cruelty or sense of self-righteousness. This helps to explain why the great world religions and many secular thinkers are so scathing about the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not as other men. Moral censure has certainly taken a frightful toll over the centuries.

Nevertheless: our first-level judgments about what is right acquire their teeth, their sanctions, from our willingness to blame, to censure, to physically coerce or restrain, and to punish. Punishment is not the same as blame, but it presupposes blame. What a proposal not to "criticize" others comes to is this: we should make judgments about what people ought to do, but then we should not blame them for doing something else. But if we don't blame them (when they lack a good excuse) for doing what we say they ought not to do, then how are we to back up what we believe is right? Suppose the state legislature were to pass a law forbidding some kind of activity, declaring it illegal, and then add to the bill a statement that nobody who engaged in the activity should be punished? "No one shall drive faster than seventy miles per hour, but there shall be no penalty for disobedience." The result would be that speeding has not been made illegal. Similarly, suppose we say, "It is wrong to steal from your neighbor, but nobody who steals shall be condemned." What kind of convictionless, half-hearted judgment is that?

Granted, many people already regard stealing, for example, as wrong; and, furthermore, many will not steal, simply because they do regard it as wrong. Praise, blame, punishment, and the like will not be needed to keep them from stealing. Even with our children, for that matter, the sanctions are often unnecessary; if we say to them, "You should not do that," our


word is often sufficient. But every child, sooner or later, decides to "test" his parents, to see whether they "really mean what they say" - and these are perceptive ways to put it; for if we really think stealing is wrong, the day comes when we have to descend from the heights of first-level procla- mation into the unpleasant business of coercion and punishment. So for the criminal; however much we may sympathize with him, eventually he pushes us to the choice - do we really think what he has done is wrong, or not? Then we have to blame and punish, or go over to his side and argue that he is in the right - or else go to pieces, the way a mother sometimes does when she is unable to bring the rod to bear.

The point is that our moral censure, our unfavorable judgment on the second level, is not just a means to Pharisaical self-satisfaction. It can be a means of educating the young; of influencing those who have done or may do what we regard as wrong; and of encouraging those who are acting to combat what we regard as evil. Granted that it is what we regard as wrong, etc.; it is not necessarily "merely" what we regard as wrong, for we may have reached our conclusions carefully, informedly, impartially, benevolent- ly. And anyway, do we regard it as wrong, or don't we? If we do, why not (granted certain excuses) condemn those engage in it, so as to discourage it and to encourage its opponents? And in morals as in law, it is the "test case" that pushes us to condemn which helps us to decide whether we should believe in the principle in question.

It is in this context, I think, that we should appraise the excuse that the wrongdoer thought what he did was right. My students are often inclined to excuse everybody, provided he is conscientious. They find support for their view in many philosophers. Kurt Baier, for example, in a relevant passage, con- siders various meanings of the question whether one ought to do the subjectively or the objectively right act. His concluding remarks are most pertinent:

"Should a person who has worked out what he ought to do as carefully as can be expected be rebuked for acting on his results?" the answer is plainly "No ." . . . "Is a man ever to be rebuked for doing what he thought he ought to do?" the answer is, of course, "Yes. sometimes, for he may culpably have failed in his theoretical task." s

The implication seems to be that the reason we would "rebuke" a conscientious Hitler is that "he has not worked out what he ought to do as carefully and conscientiously as can be expected" - that he has been "negligent or careless," has not "taken sufficient care" 9 in deciding what he ought to do. On Baier's view, though murder is wrong, we should not blame anyone for murdering, but only for (1) not figuring out carefully enough whether murder is wrong or (2) not doing what he thinks is right. The absurdity of this view stares us in the face, if I am right about the function of blame or about the parallel between law and morality. Aristotle was much nearer the

8 The MoralPoint o f View: ,4 Rational Basis o f Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 146-47.

9 Ibid., p. 145.


truth when he said, " . . . all wicked men are ignorant of what they ought to do and what to abstain from, and it is being mistaken about this that makes men dishonest and bad in every way." 10 A claim by Hitler that he did not know it was wrong to do what he did would just show what we thought - that he was evil through and through.

There are temptations to waver between appraisals of moral censure which are, respectively, too small or too large. Moral censure should not be underrated; we need it to reinforce our first-level moral judgments. On the other hand, the effect of moral censure should not be overrated. Many of my students are motivated, I suspect, by a desire to escape the moral judgment of others - or, one told me, by a desire to help a friend escape censure. But is moral censure, by itself really so awful? If I say you are a knave and a scoundrel, are you going to collapse? I do not intend to collapse, if you say that I am one. My students want moral autonomy, the right and the ability to make their own judgments; but you can't have that pearl of great price without paying the price - willingness to have others defame you. And becoming morally mature involves becoming able to withstand defa- mation, which, after all, is not by itself fatal or damning; it is not really so bad as being bombed, for example.

No, think some of my students, being condemned is worse than being bombed. Or rather, they think, it is worse to condemn than to bomb - worse for Churchill to use his moral rhetoric on Hitler than to bomb him to smithereens. Why? Because, they say, we are playing God when we try to pass judgment on our fellow men. But are we? One would be playing God, ! suppose, if he pretended that his judgment were infallible; or that his moral judgment could send anyone to eternal damnation; or that he himself were morally perfect. But it is not necessary to make any of those assumptions to censure someone else. Moral censure, like academic or aesthetic, can be made with a recognition of fallibility; it certainly does not plunge the censured into damnation, and need not be thought to do so; and I can condemn my own vices in the same breath that I condemn yours. Further, one can censure someone without denying him dignity or rights; we can censure someone we respect or even love. Moral judgment requires neither divinity in the judge nor complete worthlessness in the judged.

Failure to judge others is the easy liberalism. The hard liberalism tries to forsee the effects of judging and of failing to judge; it tries to understand its own motives and to criticize them; it seeks to clarify the focus and limits of the judgments passed. It tries to avoid the dangers of judgment; but it believes that, without judgment, the just, the kind, and the enlightened move into that failure of nerve that Yeats bemoaned: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." 11 A reader of an early draft of this paper said that it made her wonder, "Whatever happened to

lo Nicomachean Ethics, 1110b28 (Ross translation). al W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming."


Western Civilization, anyway?" I suspect that that will not be an idle questions, if all the enlightened - like my students - fall prey to Jiminy Cricket.

State University of New York at Binghamton

is it always right to do what you think is right?

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