Parfit strikes me as extremely overrated. Why do you think he may be the greatest moral philosopher of all time?
Regarding the argument: you say “Plausibly, Trish deserves to feel guilty.” What work is “Plausibly” doing here? It doesn’t strike me as plausible that anyone deserves to feel guilt as an end in itself, nor does it seem to me to be the case that they deserve to suffer even if there’d be no negative consequences to them being guilt-free. Are you reporting what seems plausible to you, or making a more general statement about how things seem to others?
I see a lot of philosophers talk about what seems plausible, or is intuitive, and so on, without qualification. Such remarks strike me as unclear: are they statements about the speaker’s own evaluations, or a more general statement about what most people think, what most reasonable or right-thinking people think, etc.? Personally, I think it’s important to be clear on such matters, since these differences are relevant to the strength of the claims and the arguments those claims figure into.
I think if you accept his underlying metaphilosophy/metaethical framework, the quality of the work he did within that framework is staggeringly impressive.
On the scope of “plausible”: I’m only making a claim about what seems plausible to me. I suspect I’m not the only one who has this intuition, but the share of ordinary of “reasonable” people who share it is unknown.
I guess we just have different intuitions about the comparison case between the world where Trish feels guilt and the world where he doesn’t.
I don't want to just drop in and say "I'm not impressed with Parfit." I do not understand what it is about his work or views that impresses people. That may be due to my unfamiliarity with much of what he's said, but what I have seen not only didn't impress me, it struck me as utterly mediocre. I've been much more impressed with work from far less prominent philosophers. I'd really like to understand what it is about Parfit that people find impressive.
If you're only making claims about what seems plausible to you, do you think it may help to explicitly say this? Personally, I think that when you say "It is plausible that" this is ambiguous, and can and sometimes does make it seem like the person making such a claim is making a stronger claim than what seems plausible to themselves. I often don't share "mainstream" intuitions in philosophy, and when I've reported not sharing the same intuition or not finding some notion plausible, I've been on the receiving end of incredulity, hostility, and outright accusations of dishonesty.
For instance, I don't have "qualia intuitions," and don't recall ever having them. Illusionism seems to me like a fairly obvious default position. I worry that philosophers who are in the majority help themselves to leveraging that majority to pressure people who don't share their intuitions into either reporting those same intuitions, or backing out of at least part of the dialectic.
Regarding the Trish scenario: That we have different intuitions is why I find intuitions an unreliable guide in philosophy. Too much philosophy strikes me as building a house on a foundation of sand. If all it takes for me to reject your position is not sharing some fundamental intuition, everything built on top of that foundation may not appeal to me either.
I think I'm inclined to believe that wrongdoers should feel regret for what the have done. Though I may only believe this because it seems like an appropriate feeling to have in such a situation (and thus shows of a proper character). I'm not sure whether they actually deserve the pang of guilt–even if their actions merit it. However (a bit of an aside) I think there is still something interesting going on with wrongdoers and ethics, such as it seems we should save a saint and an ordinary person over a wicked person, and not just because of possible consequences of saving the wrongdoer. It seems they deserve to be rescued less compared to the others.
“All else equal, a world where Trish feels guiltless about what he did seems worse than a world where he feels the appropriate guilt. “
Worse to whom? The “all else equal” stipulation seems to exclude that anyone else is affected, or that the change in situation has ongoing consequences. And certainly one is better than the other for Trish. Can we make sense of “all else equal” in a way that actually means what was intended?
All else is not equal. Should we decide something as if it were? Does the thought experiment give us any useful information?
What is at stake here? Whether the word “deserves” applies?
Intuition says that Trish ought to feel guilt and suffer. But the point of reflecting on questions like this is to question intuition.
What is at stake? What should we do differently depending on our answer? If we already have good reasons for doing as we do, and lack reasons for changing, will the answer to this question change anything?
If Trish is a danger to other people, we want a way to avert that danger. If Trish is capable of becoming a better person, we would prefer that to happen (all else equal, ha ha). Either of these might cause Trish to suffer, and people might say it is justified. It might be possible (or might not) that Trish's victims, or the community, benefit from his suffering. Do these things happen in the “all things equal” thought experiment? Or does it envision two worlds that are identical with the exception of Trish's suffering?
I am probably being too literal. But I’m not sure how far “all else equal” should stretch.
But that is to personify the universe. It does not care.
What about the ideal perspective of an omniscient, infallible, impartial observer? This seems to be what many people have in mind when they speak of morality. But can we actually know what such a being would care about? Perhaps due to its impartiality, it would prefer that Trish not suffer, if all else is truly equal. Hence, “all else equal” just doesn’t give us what I want. Something has to be at stake, or who cares?
“happy family” is just another metaphor, another simplification of a complex reality.
We might be able to use the perspective of the universe if we agreed on what that meant. It seems useless unless we have a pretty clear agreement on it. It is literally meaningless, and metaphorically ambiguous. People use it to mean something, probably something equally unknowable. It is just hand waving.
“the aggregate well-being of people in New Jersey vs Ukraine today” is an aggregate, the result of a formula. It reduces many dimensions into one, which inevitably loses information. What formula? Why is it better than other formulas? What do people use it for? Maybe they would use it to summarize a complex reality: what are the differences, what is getting better/worse, what is of concern? Any useful purpose requires people to disaggregate it. It can go in the executive summary, not in the premises of a critical argument.
People like myself who think something like aggregate well-being "from the standpoint of the universe" makes sense and is important to normative ethics, don't think that psychologically caring is necessary for having what we mean by such a standpoint.
I seems pretty clear, for example, that we can talk pretty reasonably about the aggregate well-being of people in New Jersey vs Ukraine today, despite those collectives (probably) not having the structure of minds that can care about their respective aggregates.
Perhaps “caring” and “standpoint” are not the right terms.
Sorry to be obtuse, but a standpoint is the result of judgements, or perhaps the basis for such judgements. The universe does not make judgements. “The standpoint of the universe” can’t apply literally. What is the metaphor supposed to mean? How should it be used?
A perfectly wise, impartial yet compassionate, infallible and omniscient being would know the resolution for every moral question or dilemma that has one. Imagining such a being at least is easier to explain, but no more instructive. How can we learn what evaluations such a being would make, or what reasons they would register? We have arguments for various alternative positions, but they each presuppose different basic assumptions, or interpret them differently.
I thought I answered the question in your first paragraph rather directly: the metaphor of a "happy family", for example, seems easy to understand in the absence of a belief that the family qua family has a consciousness. The "standpoint of the universe" is meant to be understood as a projection of much more directly intuitive metaphors like "standpoint of the family".
Hmm, I don't actually feel like the world in which they feel guilty is better, all else being equal. In the real world it's better because of it's instrumental value, and the justice felt for the victims, but if we remove those variables, I don't feel like it's better really. I'd probably just bite the bullet on that
I agree with everything except the last point: I see only instrumental value in guilt, but I don't think there's any reason to think of this as biting the bullet. Why grant that this is any kind of concession?
That's fair. I just know people leverage that phrase to imply other people are making concessions or that their position is some kind of more plausible default position.
I agree that intuitively, guilt necessarily requires suffering.
But once, while very stoned, I had a pretty philosophically interesting experience: I was deeply sad but in a way that was purely positive in valence. If anything should involve suffering as part of the package it’s sorrow, but apparently it doesn’t.
One could also imagine someone in the throes of religious or quasi-religious awakening, who is utterly reformed and regrets everything wrong they’ve done, but in a way that fills their heart with joy rather than any suffering.
If an alien species was found, morally similar to humans in other respects, but whose experience of turning away from wrongdoing worked in the above way with no suffering, it wouldn’t seem deficient of them.
In actual practice guilt is often quite helpful, of course.
You stipulate here that "regret" necessarily involves suffering. I could grant that. I will now stipulate a different term that I will call "shregret". Shregret involves sincerely acknowledging that you have done something wrong, admonishing yourself for it, and committing to doing better going forward, but it does not necessarily involve experiencing any suffering. In other words, shregret is essentially just regret minus the suffering.
If you are somebody who doesn't find it independently intuitively plausible that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, I don't know why you would opt to say that wrongdoers deserve to experience regret, rather than simply saying that they deserve to experience shregret instead. The latter statement seems to capture all of the intuitive force of the former, besides the brute intuition that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, which somebody with the view that you're arguing against obviously doesn't accept.
It's not obvious and intuitive to me that on the "abstract ethics" wrongdoers deserve/should suffer at all, unless some further good could come out of it: either prevention of further harm, or "improvement" of the wrongdoer. So guilt is instrumentally useful, but it's not in itself a desirable thing. We can imagine an alternative hypothetical Trish who goes through a process of pain-less reconsideration and arrives at the conclusion that killing the toddler was a wrong thing to do but does not suffer for it. It feels (to my entirely layperson intuitions anyway) a BETTER outcome than the same conclusion + "feeling bad".
Obviously I want Trish to feel bad and maybe even suffer outside the guilt aspect too, but that's my emotionally revengeful inner monkey in cahoots with knowing that in practical terms guilt DOES prevent wrongdoing.
Oddly, on reflection, when getting to Hitlers of this world (people who did extreme wrongs but thought they were doing the right thing) I actually don't want them to feel guilty at all. It would feel vaguely offensive, as if claiming moral legitimacy through remorse, or at least common humanity with "us", and as the revengeful monkey I definitely don't want that.
It's plausible that the world is intrinsically a better place if wrongdoers come to understand that what they did was wrong. Good moral orientation is plausibly an intrinsic good.
But does the emotion of guilt add anything to this? That, I think, is much less clear.
1. Phi comes to understand that what they did was wrong. They improve greatly as a person. There is no chance they will do the same thing again. They are filled with love for their former victim and resolve to give restitution if possible, and if not, to do extra good to "compensate". Phi wishes they hadn't done their bad act, but feels no pain.
2. Rho comes to understand that what they did was wrong. They improve greatly as a person. There is no chance they will do the same thing again. They are filled with love for their former victim and resolve to give restitution if possible, and if not, to do extra good to "compensate". Rho feels bad about their wrong acts.
Once we stipulate these points of similarity, the point of difference- the pain- seems to matter less or not at all, and become, from the point of view of the universe, regrettable.
I might even be a bit cheeky and suggest that Phi, in feeling an attitude of love towards himself, and not self-inflicted pain, has reached a higher moral status!
I disagree with this. Of course, I disagree because my world view is different than yours. Since I am ultimately a necessitarian like Amy Karofsky and Spinoza, and a hard determinist, so guilt is something that is instrumental to me. If guilt makes the person do the good thing or promote wellbeing more efficiently, then guilt is good! But guilt and/or any pain intrinsically is just bad.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, as appeal to reactive attitudes like guilt, resentment, etc. does seem like the most promising approach to grounding desert claims. But I'm not sure about the claim that a wrongdoer's guilt actually adds value to the world - that seems dubious, and I don't think you need to take on that commitment in order to run an argument along these lines. Unless there's some reason to think that guilt is a peculiar case, that claim seems like a particular instance of the moral general view that fitting attitudes as such are impersonally good. And I'm not sure about that one - would it add impersonal value to the world were I to have true beliefs about the composition of the grass in my parent's backyard? (I'm assuming here that it is fitting to believe P iff P is true.) I'm inclined to think, rather, that the normative force of fitting attitudes comes from them being fitting, without the mediation of value claims: the fact that phi-ing is a wrongdoing directly grounds a normative reason for the phi-er to feel guilt over phi-ing. It's not that feeling guilt over phi-ing would be impersonally good, with that putative fact providing the reason to feel guilt.
We should obviously deny that people should feel guilty if this implies a sort of necessity, people should feel guilty if that furthers aggregate welfare. Following JJC Smart and Harman here
An interesting defence. A couple of thoughts spring to mind:
D Shoemaker wrote in "responsibility from the margins" that we have two agents in arguments over responsibility.
Type 1 = agent is normal but the circumstances are not (accidents, excuses and justifications)
Type 2 = circumstances are normal but the agent is not (psychopathy, childhood, depression)
In both cases what is lacking is an understanding of what is a normal situation or a normal agent.
I'm thinking the defence you've identified is especially important in Type 2 cases. I'm also wondering if we don't need to identify Type 3 cases where both the agent and the circumstances are not normal; as these open up avenues for thought experiments on guilt and suffering which could deal with very odd behaviours.
Also have you read JK Roths - The Failures of Ethics. Has an interesting take on how evil actually functions practically in the world.
I wonder if wrongdoers do 'deserve to feel guilt' or if it's more a matter of feeling guilt having some utility that offsets the detriment of guilt. This would still suggest that the only suffering really morally warranted is that with some wider purpose, eg in character building a la Hicks.
I might see why someone would say —though I disagree— that “a world in which Trish feels guilty is better than a world in which he does not”, but I just can’t see how that implies that Trish *deserves* to suffer.
Consider:
A world in which people have more intense orgasms is better than a world where people have subdued ones. Does this entails people *deserve* intense orgasms? Hardly!
Parfit strikes me as extremely overrated. Why do you think he may be the greatest moral philosopher of all time?
Regarding the argument: you say “Plausibly, Trish deserves to feel guilty.” What work is “Plausibly” doing here? It doesn’t strike me as plausible that anyone deserves to feel guilt as an end in itself, nor does it seem to me to be the case that they deserve to suffer even if there’d be no negative consequences to them being guilt-free. Are you reporting what seems plausible to you, or making a more general statement about how things seem to others?
I see a lot of philosophers talk about what seems plausible, or is intuitive, and so on, without qualification. Such remarks strike me as unclear: are they statements about the speaker’s own evaluations, or a more general statement about what most people think, what most reasonable or right-thinking people think, etc.? Personally, I think it’s important to be clear on such matters, since these differences are relevant to the strength of the claims and the arguments those claims figure into.
I think if you accept his underlying metaphilosophy/metaethical framework, the quality of the work he did within that framework is staggeringly impressive.
On the scope of “plausible”: I’m only making a claim about what seems plausible to me. I suspect I’m not the only one who has this intuition, but the share of ordinary of “reasonable” people who share it is unknown.
I guess we just have different intuitions about the comparison case between the world where Trish feels guilt and the world where he doesn’t.
I don't want to just drop in and say "I'm not impressed with Parfit." I do not understand what it is about his work or views that impresses people. That may be due to my unfamiliarity with much of what he's said, but what I have seen not only didn't impress me, it struck me as utterly mediocre. I've been much more impressed with work from far less prominent philosophers. I'd really like to understand what it is about Parfit that people find impressive.
If you're only making claims about what seems plausible to you, do you think it may help to explicitly say this? Personally, I think that when you say "It is plausible that" this is ambiguous, and can and sometimes does make it seem like the person making such a claim is making a stronger claim than what seems plausible to themselves. I often don't share "mainstream" intuitions in philosophy, and when I've reported not sharing the same intuition or not finding some notion plausible, I've been on the receiving end of incredulity, hostility, and outright accusations of dishonesty.
For instance, I don't have "qualia intuitions," and don't recall ever having them. Illusionism seems to me like a fairly obvious default position. I worry that philosophers who are in the majority help themselves to leveraging that majority to pressure people who don't share their intuitions into either reporting those same intuitions, or backing out of at least part of the dialectic.
Regarding the Trish scenario: That we have different intuitions is why I find intuitions an unreliable guide in philosophy. Too much philosophy strikes me as building a house on a foundation of sand. If all it takes for me to reject your position is not sharing some fundamental intuition, everything built on top of that foundation may not appeal to me either.
I think I'm inclined to believe that wrongdoers should feel regret for what the have done. Though I may only believe this because it seems like an appropriate feeling to have in such a situation (and thus shows of a proper character). I'm not sure whether they actually deserve the pang of guilt–even if their actions merit it. However (a bit of an aside) I think there is still something interesting going on with wrongdoers and ethics, such as it seems we should save a saint and an ordinary person over a wicked person, and not just because of possible consequences of saving the wrongdoer. It seems they deserve to be rescued less compared to the others.
“All else equal, a world where Trish feels guiltless about what he did seems worse than a world where he feels the appropriate guilt. “
Worse to whom? The “all else equal” stipulation seems to exclude that anyone else is affected, or that the change in situation has ongoing consequences. And certainly one is better than the other for Trish. Can we make sense of “all else equal” in a way that actually means what was intended?
All else is not equal. Should we decide something as if it were? Does the thought experiment give us any useful information?
What is at stake here? Whether the word “deserves” applies?
All else is equal apart from the fact that in one world, Trish feels guilt, whereas in the other world, he doesn’t.
I’m thinking the situation is impersonally worse - worse from the point of view of the universe.
Intuition says that Trish ought to feel guilt and suffer. But the point of reflecting on questions like this is to question intuition.
What is at stake? What should we do differently depending on our answer? If we already have good reasons for doing as we do, and lack reasons for changing, will the answer to this question change anything?
If Trish is a danger to other people, we want a way to avert that danger. If Trish is capable of becoming a better person, we would prefer that to happen (all else equal, ha ha). Either of these might cause Trish to suffer, and people might say it is justified. It might be possible (or might not) that Trish's victims, or the community, benefit from his suffering. Do these things happen in the “all things equal” thought experiment? Or does it envision two worlds that are identical with the exception of Trish's suffering?
I am probably being too literal. But I’m not sure how far “all else equal” should stretch.
But that is to personify the universe. It does not care.
What about the ideal perspective of an omniscient, infallible, impartial observer? This seems to be what many people have in mind when they speak of morality. But can we actually know what such a being would care about? Perhaps due to its impartiality, it would prefer that Trish not suffer, if all else is truly equal. Hence, “all else equal” just doesn’t give us what I want. Something has to be at stake, or who cares?
“happy family” is just another metaphor, another simplification of a complex reality.
We might be able to use the perspective of the universe if we agreed on what that meant. It seems useless unless we have a pretty clear agreement on it. It is literally meaningless, and metaphorically ambiguous. People use it to mean something, probably something equally unknowable. It is just hand waving.
“the aggregate well-being of people in New Jersey vs Ukraine today” is an aggregate, the result of a formula. It reduces many dimensions into one, which inevitably loses information. What formula? Why is it better than other formulas? What do people use it for? Maybe they would use it to summarize a complex reality: what are the differences, what is getting better/worse, what is of concern? Any useful purpose requires people to disaggregate it. It can go in the executive summary, not in the premises of a critical argument.
People like myself who think something like aggregate well-being "from the standpoint of the universe" makes sense and is important to normative ethics, don't think that psychologically caring is necessary for having what we mean by such a standpoint.
I seems pretty clear, for example, that we can talk pretty reasonably about the aggregate well-being of people in New Jersey vs Ukraine today, despite those collectives (probably) not having the structure of minds that can care about their respective aggregates.
Perhaps “caring” and “standpoint” are not the right terms.
Sorry to be obtuse, but a standpoint is the result of judgements, or perhaps the basis for such judgements. The universe does not make judgements. “The standpoint of the universe” can’t apply literally. What is the metaphor supposed to mean? How should it be used?
A perfectly wise, impartial yet compassionate, infallible and omniscient being would know the resolution for every moral question or dilemma that has one. Imagining such a being at least is easier to explain, but no more instructive. How can we learn what evaluations such a being would make, or what reasons they would register? We have arguments for various alternative positions, but they each presuppose different basic assumptions, or interpret them differently.
I thought I answered the question in your first paragraph rather directly: the metaphor of a "happy family", for example, seems easy to understand in the absence of a belief that the family qua family has a consciousness. The "standpoint of the universe" is meant to be understood as a projection of much more directly intuitive metaphors like "standpoint of the family".
Hmm, I don't actually feel like the world in which they feel guilty is better, all else being equal. In the real world it's better because of it's instrumental value, and the justice felt for the victims, but if we remove those variables, I don't feel like it's better really. I'd probably just bite the bullet on that
I agree with everything except the last point: I see only instrumental value in guilt, but I don't think there's any reason to think of this as biting the bullet. Why grant that this is any kind of concession?
I just meant bite the bullet in the sense that I'm willing to accept a conclusion others find unintuitive. Might have been too strong a wording
That's fair. I just know people leverage that phrase to imply other people are making concessions or that their position is some kind of more plausible default position.
I agree that intuitively, guilt necessarily requires suffering.
But once, while very stoned, I had a pretty philosophically interesting experience: I was deeply sad but in a way that was purely positive in valence. If anything should involve suffering as part of the package it’s sorrow, but apparently it doesn’t.
One could also imagine someone in the throes of religious or quasi-religious awakening, who is utterly reformed and regrets everything wrong they’ve done, but in a way that fills their heart with joy rather than any suffering.
If an alien species was found, morally similar to humans in other respects, but whose experience of turning away from wrongdoing worked in the above way with no suffering, it wouldn’t seem deficient of them.
In actual practice guilt is often quite helpful, of course.
You stipulate here that "regret" necessarily involves suffering. I could grant that. I will now stipulate a different term that I will call "shregret". Shregret involves sincerely acknowledging that you have done something wrong, admonishing yourself for it, and committing to doing better going forward, but it does not necessarily involve experiencing any suffering. In other words, shregret is essentially just regret minus the suffering.
If you are somebody who doesn't find it independently intuitively plausible that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, I don't know why you would opt to say that wrongdoers deserve to experience regret, rather than simply saying that they deserve to experience shregret instead. The latter statement seems to capture all of the intuitive force of the former, besides the brute intuition that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, which somebody with the view that you're arguing against obviously doesn't accept.
It's not obvious and intuitive to me that on the "abstract ethics" wrongdoers deserve/should suffer at all, unless some further good could come out of it: either prevention of further harm, or "improvement" of the wrongdoer. So guilt is instrumentally useful, but it's not in itself a desirable thing. We can imagine an alternative hypothetical Trish who goes through a process of pain-less reconsideration and arrives at the conclusion that killing the toddler was a wrong thing to do but does not suffer for it. It feels (to my entirely layperson intuitions anyway) a BETTER outcome than the same conclusion + "feeling bad".
Obviously I want Trish to feel bad and maybe even suffer outside the guilt aspect too, but that's my emotionally revengeful inner monkey in cahoots with knowing that in practical terms guilt DOES prevent wrongdoing.
Oddly, on reflection, when getting to Hitlers of this world (people who did extreme wrongs but thought they were doing the right thing) I actually don't want them to feel guilty at all. It would feel vaguely offensive, as if claiming moral legitimacy through remorse, or at least common humanity with "us", and as the revengeful monkey I definitely don't want that.
Hey Amos, How would you define “deserve?” I seriously find the concept to be obscure and I really don’t know what it means.
I don’t think it means anything at all, tbh
It's plausible that the world is intrinsically a better place if wrongdoers come to understand that what they did was wrong. Good moral orientation is plausibly an intrinsic good.
But does the emotion of guilt add anything to this? That, I think, is much less clear.
Consider two people:
1. Phi comes to understand that what they did was wrong. They improve greatly as a person. There is no chance they will do the same thing again. They are filled with love for their former victim and resolve to give restitution if possible, and if not, to do extra good to "compensate". Phi wishes they hadn't done their bad act, but feels no pain.
2. Rho comes to understand that what they did was wrong. They improve greatly as a person. There is no chance they will do the same thing again. They are filled with love for their former victim and resolve to give restitution if possible, and if not, to do extra good to "compensate". Rho feels bad about their wrong acts.
Once we stipulate these points of similarity, the point of difference- the pain- seems to matter less or not at all, and become, from the point of view of the universe, regrettable.
I might even be a bit cheeky and suggest that Phi, in feeling an attitude of love towards himself, and not self-inflicted pain, has reached a higher moral status!
I disagree with this. Of course, I disagree because my world view is different than yours. Since I am ultimately a necessitarian like Amy Karofsky and Spinoza, and a hard determinist, so guilt is something that is instrumental to me. If guilt makes the person do the good thing or promote wellbeing more efficiently, then guilt is good! But guilt and/or any pain intrinsically is just bad.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, as appeal to reactive attitudes like guilt, resentment, etc. does seem like the most promising approach to grounding desert claims. But I'm not sure about the claim that a wrongdoer's guilt actually adds value to the world - that seems dubious, and I don't think you need to take on that commitment in order to run an argument along these lines. Unless there's some reason to think that guilt is a peculiar case, that claim seems like a particular instance of the moral general view that fitting attitudes as such are impersonally good. And I'm not sure about that one - would it add impersonal value to the world were I to have true beliefs about the composition of the grass in my parent's backyard? (I'm assuming here that it is fitting to believe P iff P is true.) I'm inclined to think, rather, that the normative force of fitting attitudes comes from them being fitting, without the mediation of value claims: the fact that phi-ing is a wrongdoing directly grounds a normative reason for the phi-er to feel guilt over phi-ing. It's not that feeling guilt over phi-ing would be impersonally good, with that putative fact providing the reason to feel guilt.
We should obviously deny that people should feel guilty if this implies a sort of necessity, people should feel guilty if that furthers aggregate welfare. Following JJC Smart and Harman here
An interesting defence. A couple of thoughts spring to mind:
D Shoemaker wrote in "responsibility from the margins" that we have two agents in arguments over responsibility.
Type 1 = agent is normal but the circumstances are not (accidents, excuses and justifications)
Type 2 = circumstances are normal but the agent is not (psychopathy, childhood, depression)
In both cases what is lacking is an understanding of what is a normal situation or a normal agent.
I'm thinking the defence you've identified is especially important in Type 2 cases. I'm also wondering if we don't need to identify Type 3 cases where both the agent and the circumstances are not normal; as these open up avenues for thought experiments on guilt and suffering which could deal with very odd behaviours.
Also have you read JK Roths - The Failures of Ethics. Has an interesting take on how evil actually functions practically in the world.
https://academic.oup.com/book/25587
I wonder if wrongdoers do 'deserve to feel guilt' or if it's more a matter of feeling guilt having some utility that offsets the detriment of guilt. This would still suggest that the only suffering really morally warranted is that with some wider purpose, eg in character building a la Hicks.
Agreed - this is why I am a misanthrope.
I might see why someone would say —though I disagree— that “a world in which Trish feels guilty is better than a world in which he does not”, but I just can’t see how that implies that Trish *deserves* to suffer.
Consider:
A world in which people have more intense orgasms is better than a world where people have subdued ones. Does this entails people *deserve* intense orgasms? Hardly!