Marcia Baron

What is the relation between shame and shamelessness? It may seem obvious: shamelessness is simply the absence of shame. But on reflection, it becomes clear that the story is considerably more complicated. Michelle Mason's intriguing "On Shamelessness" prompts such reflection. Mason argues that we should be mindful of the "moral importance of shame" and "unapologetic in its defense", and she does so via an examination of shamelessness and an argument to the effect that shamelessness is a moral fault. The tacit assumption is that insofar as shamelessness is a moral fault, the value of shame is vindicated. I challenge that assumption.

Gideon Rosen (2014) has drawn our attention to cases of duress of a particularly interesting sort: the person's ‘mind is not flooded with pain or fear’, she knows exactly what she is doing, and she makes a clear-headed choice to act in, as Rosen says, ‘awful ways’. The explanation of why we excuse such actions cannot be that the action was not voluntary. In addition, although some duress cases could also be viewed as necessity cases and thus as justified, Rosen wisely sets aside that complicating factor by zeroing in on those cases where the action clearly is not justified. So why do we excuse in these cases, where the action is not justified and the agent acted voluntarily?Rosen thinks the key lies in the ‘ill will’ condition, ‘the idea that an act is blameworthy only if it manifests insufficient concern or regard for those affected’. He says this is relatively uncontroversial; much of my paper is taken up with calling the ‘ill will’ condition into question. I also take issue with Rosen on just how justifications and excuses differ. I argue in favour of understanding justifications (in a context where we are asking how justifications and excuses differ) as not requiring truth, but only reasonable belief.

Justifications and excuses are defenses that exculpate. They are therefore much more like each other than like such defenses as diplomatic immunity, which does not exculpate. But they exculpate in different ways, and it has proven difficult to agree on just what that difference consists in. In this paper I take a step back from justification and excuse as concepts in criminal law, and look at the concepts as they arise in everyday life. To keep the task manageable, I focus primarily on excuses and excusing activities, distinguishing them from justifications as well as from other close relatives, in particular, forgiving and pardoning. I draw upon J.L. Austin’s classic A Plea for Excuses, but expand on his account, suggesting that we offer excuses for reasons besides those he mentions. My hope is that my examination of excuses and excusing activities will help us rethink our views on just how justifications and excuses differ, views which often are worked out without much attention to how these concepts function in everyday life and to the connection between offers of excuses and justifications and the rules of civility

Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' I have argued that such a picture of the perfectly moral person is flawed. In this paper I examine the claim that acting from duty is morally repugnant. There is some truth to this charge, but, I argue, the repugnance attaches not to acting from duty as such, but only to certain ways of acting from duty. In isolating the objectionable elements of acting from duty, I hope not only to vindicate the skeletal concept but also to offer illumination on the question of just how we should understand morally good conduct.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:25 MORALITY AS A BACK-UP SYSTEM: HUME'S VIEW? The sense of duty is a useful device for helping men to do what a really good man would do without a sense of duty..... Nowell-Smith A certain picture of morality — arguably a Humean one — has come to have a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. On this picture, morality, as Richard Brandt asserts, is "a back-up system, which operates when spontaneous personal caring fails 2 to motivate us to do as we ought." Morality — at least in the form of moral principles, whose force is felt through one's sense of duty — is, on this view, ideally superfluous. As a guide for one's own conduct it is needed only insofar as the agent's affective network is deficient. If one only spontaneously desired a, cared about b, cared for c, felt aversion towards d as, ideally, one should, moral principles and a sense of duty would be of no use. There are good reasons for supposing that this is Hume's view. After all, his characterization of acting from duty is more than a little disparaging: When any virtuous motive or principle is common in human nature, a person, who feels his heart devoid of that motive, may hate himself upon that account, and may perform the action without the motive, from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice, that virtuous principle, or at least, to disguise to himself,,as much as possible, his want of it. I will argue, however, that there is tension in Hume's ethics between two lines of thought. According to the first line of thought, and the one 26 usually associated with Hume, good conduct is conduct which is spontaneously prompted by virtuous desires. Unless our desires either are not what they should be or are motivationally weak, there is no need for mediation or tempering by a sense of duty or moral principles. According to the second line, the very good desires of a very good person may nonetheless need to be filtered, tempered, redirected or checked. This line is most evident in "Of the Origin of the Natural Virtues and Vices." Before arguing that these strains of thought are in tension in Hume's ethics, I need to clarify what is at issue and to develop the two competing pictures of moral motivation. First the issue. The issue is not 'Who is better: someone with a sense of duty but corrupt desires or someone with no sense of duty but ideal desires?' Nor is the issue one of the moral worth of actions ('Can an action have moral worth if it is not performed out of duty?') The issue, rather, is how to characterize morally good (or right) conduct. What role, if any, does a sense of duty or a Butlerian principle of reflection, i.e., an overarching, guiding conception of what is right or good which is 'juridically' supreme within the self, play in good conduct? Is morally good conduct ideally a matter of acting as one should from the proper desires? Or should the desires be governed and guided by moral principles? Consider two models of moral conduct. Model I: Morality as a Back-Up System On this picture, wrongness in conduct is traceable to an affective deficiency. The claim underlying this picture seems to be as follows: One 27 acts wrongly because one's passions are not quite what they should be. One person cheats in her business dealings because she cares too little about the welfare of others (and too much about her own); another is harsh and abrupt to a student because he cares too little about his students' concerns and is jealous and possessive when it comes to 'his time.' In each case the problem can be traced to an affective deficiency. Hume appears to be supporting this view when he asserts, "it may be establish'd as an undoubted maxim, that no act can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from a sense of its morality' (T 479). A few pages later he writes, "[E]very immorality...

Mein Beitrag untersucht die folgende Fragestellung: „Kann S gerechtfertigt sein, X zu tun, wobei es erlaubt ist, X zu tun, wenn die Bedingungen B vorliegen, wenn S fälschlich, aber vernünftigerweise glaubt, dass die Bedingungen B vorliegen?“ Ich plädiere für eine Bejahung dieser Frage, und zwar im Gegensatz zu der von Joachim Hruschka in seinem Aufsatz „Justifications and Excuses: A Sy-stematic Approach“ vertretenen Posi-tion. Ich bin der Auffassung, daß eine Rechtfertigung eine vernünftige Annahme voraussetzt; es ist nicht notwendig, daß diese Annahme auch zutrifft. Dass S vernünftigerweise glaubt, daß p, während in Wirklichkeit p nicht vorliegt, scheint jedenfalls kein entschuldigender Umstand zu sein. Diese Situation ist vielmehr wesentlich unterschieden von krankheitsbedingter Zurechnungsunfähigkeit oder sonst verminderter geistiger Fähigkeit. Es ist daher wichtig, zwischen zwei Arten von Gründen zu unterscheiden, die dazu führen, daß eine Person nicht verantwortlich gemacht wird für X, obwohl sie X getan hat; und zwar sind dies einerseits Gründe, die im Hinblick auf Probleme der handelnden Person selbst entschuldigend wirken, und andererseits solche Gründe, die weder einen Mangel noch Verwirrung der handelnden Person selbst reflektieren, noch einen Fehler in dem Entscheidungsprozeß, der zu der Handlung geführt hat. My essay addresses the following question: "Can S be justified in doing X, where it is permissible to do X when conditions C obtain, if S mistakenly but reasonably believes that conditions C do obtain?" I defend an affirmative reply, contrary to the position taken by Prof. Hruschka in his "Justifications and Excuses: A Systematic Approach". I understand justification as requiring reasonable belief; it is not necessary that the belief be true. That S believes on reasonable grounds that p when in fact p is false seems not to be an excusing condition. It is importantly different from insanity, or diminished capacity. I stress the importance of differentiating between two very different kinds of reasons for holding someone not to be culpable for X despite having done X, viz, reasons that exculpate due to problems with the agent himself and those that do not reflect any deficiency or disorder in the agent, or any flaw in the process by which she chose as she did.

The distinction between justifications and excuses is a familiar one to most of us who work either in moral philosophy or legal philosophy. But exactly how it should be understood is a matter of considerable disagreement. My aim in this paper is, first, to sort out the differences and try to figure out what underlying disagreements account for them. I give particular attention to the following question: Does a person who acts on a reasonable but mistaken belief have a justification, or only an excuse? One disagreement I highlight concerns the extent to which justification is primarily about agents rather than about actions. Those who think, as I do, of “His action, X, was justified” as “He was justified in doing X” are far more likely to allow that justification requires reasonable belief and does not require truth, than are those who think of “His action, X, was justified” as “Although actions of this type usually are prohibited, X is in these circumstances in fact permissible.” In addition to sorting out the differences and tracing them to some underlying disagreements, I defend the reasonable belief view of justification against some objections, and argue that, whether or not we continue to use the term “justified” in a way that does not require truth, we need the concept. Contrary to the claims of some who reject the reasonable belief view of justification, justification thus understood does not reduce to excuse.

The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet sympathetic assessment.

Hume scholars have been anxious to point out that when Hume calls Justice, chastity and so on artificial virtues, he is in no way denying that they are real virtues. I shall argue that they are mistaken, and that anyone who wants to understand Hume's account of Justice and his category of artificial virtues must take seriously his choice of the word ‘artifice,’ recognizing that it means not only ‘Skill in designing and employing expedients,’ but also ‘address, cunning, trickery.'My suggestion will seem strange given Hume's own repeated plea that we not take the term ‘artifice’ too seriously. Yet while it is generally good policy to take people - at least philosophers - at their word, this is a Justified exception, Justified not only by Hume's known proclivities to irony and subtlety, but also by the implications of hearkening to his plea. To see the implications of not taking the terms ‘artificial’ and ‘artifice’ seriously, one can read either Duncan Forbes’ or Barry Stroud's criticisms of Hume's account of Justice.

In this essay I rethink a view that I developed in my Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, concerning how ethical theory should handle the phenomena that are standardly classified as supererogatory acts. The view I elaborated rejects the standard contemporary picture, according to which ethics needs to draw a line separating duty from what is "beyond duty"--the supererogatory. On the Kantian picture, beneficent acts are not beyond duty, for we are required to help others, but we are not required to help whenever possible, and so it is not the case that each individual beneficent act is required by duty. Helping is required; helping here and now is not. After contrasting this view with the standard picture and explaining that much of what contemporary philosophers wanted to capture with the notion of the supererogatory can be captured with the Kantian notion of imperfect duties together with attention to the agent's character, I raise some problems for my view and try to address them. First, what about heroic actions that are not in character? Don't we need the notion of supererogatory acts to recognize their greatness? Second, isn't virtue doing all the conceptual work? Is there even any need to appeal to the notion of imperfect duties? Third, although I claimed in my book that it is an advantage of the Kantian view that moral excellence comes in many varieties, arguably it is too pluralistic. In dem Beitrag überdenke ich eine Auffassung, die ich in meinem Buch Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology entwickelt habe. Sie betrifft die Frage, wie ethische Theorien das Phänomen behandeln sollen, das üblicherweise als "Supererogation" bezeichnet wird. Die von mir ausgearbeitete Auffassung verwirft das heute gängige Bild, nach dem Ethik abgrenzen muß zwischen dem, was Pflicht ist, und dem, was "jenseits der Pflicht" steht -- dem Supererogatorischen. Nach Kants Vorstellung sind wohltätige Handlungen nicht jenseits der Pflicht, da wir verpflichtet sind, anderen zu helfen. Wir müssen jedoch nicht in jeder möglichen Situation helfen, und daher ist es nicht der Fall, daß jede einzelne wohltätige Handlung Pflicht ist. Hilfe zu leisten, ist geboten; Hilfe hier und jetzt zu leisten, nicht. In einer Gegenüberstellung dieser Auffassung mit der gängigen Vorstellung zeige ich, daß vieles von dem, was moderne Philosophen mit dem Begriff des Supererogatorischen erklären wollen, auch mit Kants Begriff der unvollkommenen Pflichten, verbunden mit einem Blick auf den Charakter des Handelnden, erklärt werden kann. Danach werfe ich einige Probleme auf, die sich meiner Auffassung stellen, und versuche, Antworten zu geben. Erstens: Wie steht es mit heldenhaften Handlungen, die nicht dem Charakter des Handelnden entsprechen? Brauchen wir nicht den Begriff des supererogatorischen Handelns, um ihre Größe zu erkennen? Zweitens: Genügt nicht der Begriff der Tugend? Besteht irgendeine Notwendigkeit, auf den Begriff der unvollkommenen Pflicht zurückzugreifen? Drittens: Obwohl ich in meinem Buch behaupte, es sei ein Vorteil der Kantischen Sicht, daß moralische Vortrefflichkeit viele Gesichter hat, ist Kants Auffassung doch vielleicht zu pluralistisch.