Chelsea Rosenthal

Often, we’re unsure what morality requires, and a debate has emerged about whether our moral uncertainty and beliefs about morality matter to what we should do. I argue that (1) our moral-epistemic circumstances (our beliefs, credences, and evidence about moral norms) matter to what we morally ought to do; (2) many objections to this view are only problems if we assume all moral norms are sensitive to our moral-epistemic circumstances; and finally, (3) we should avoid this with an account that incorporates procedural norms that are sensitive to our moral-epistemic circumstances (analogous to legal due process norms) and substantive norms that are not sensitive to them (analogous to norms of substantive justice).

The costs of privacy losses don’t only come from what others know about us, but also what they don’t know. Living with limited privacy can involve bits and pieces of our lives being observed in isolation: surveillance algorithms may only call attention to activities with certain features, social media followers may scroll past half of our posts, and no observer is likely to experience the full context of our words and actions. And distinctive structural features of being under observation make it difficult to correct misconceptions observers form when they lack context. So, losing privacy can create pressure for us to lead more fragmented lives, lives that seem okay when encountered as isolated sound bites, rather than richer, coherent wholes. But many of the especially meaningful aspects of our lives—lasting interpersonal connections, long-term goals and projects, and personal growth and change—are extended over longer periods of time and woven into our lives in more complicated ways. Focusing on producing good fragments can undermine features of our lives that we usually recognize as meaningful. In this sense, part of privacy’s value is underappreciated: privacy can help us to lead more meaningful lives—or at least reduce one obstacle to it.

(Invited contribution to a special issue of Philosophy in honor of Sam Scheffler) - To live meaningfully, we can’t just be receptacles for the right sorts of activities – it has to matter that it’s us living our lives. Something is missing in valuable activities, if the same value could be achieved by anyone who performs the task. Meaningfulness requires that it be our own ideals, personalities, and priorities contributing to the value of what we do. Recognizing this can shed light on our relationship with meaning in three ways. First, it shows a distinctive reason that autonomy is important: what we do without autonomy will lack meaning. Second, it helps us understand a challenge we encounter when facing trade-offs between different types of meaning, navigating between opportunities to have a few of our characteristics matter widely (e.g., as a filmmaker or an activist) and intimate contexts in which much more of who we are matters to a small group of people. Finally, if living meaningfully involves our central characteristics shaping what’s valuable about our actions, then discovering pre-set purposes (e.g., from fate, God, or the cosmos) might actually undermine our capacity to live meaningful lives.

Traditional accounts of legal ethics put lawyers in a difficult position. They require lawyers to take on surprisingly high risks of wrongdoing when they navigate the narrow passage between differing demands of legal ethics. And this occurs even if we accept the standard conception of legal ethics on its own terms while disregarding possible clashes with external norms. According to the standard conception of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities, lawyers should “zealously” advocate for their clients—further their clients’ interests right up to the limits of the law. Under this view, a lawyer might violate ethical obligations to their client if they decline to take effective, legally permissible steps out of moral squeamishness or because they’re inclined to be generous with adversaries. But these same traditional views take lawyers to be ethically obligated to not violate the law. On the standard conception, lawyers must approach that line for their clients, but not cross it. And both a lawyer’s duties to the client and their duties to obey the law are treated as moral obligations. According to standard accounts of professional ethics, when a lawyer falls short of these duties, it is a moral failing. Navigating these two requirements—finding the line but not crossing it—seems to require a very high level of clarity about both the law and the legally relevant facts. And that clarity may be difficult to achieve in ordinary legal practice. Real life involves uncertainty about the law and legally relevant facts, often with too little time to resolve it. But the structure of lawyers’ obligations means that when they face uncertainty, they may not be able to use one approach that’s common in day-to-day life: avoid a questionable activity just in case it’s morally wrong and opt for an alternative that’s clearly morally permissible. For a lawyer, there may not be an alternative that is clearly morally permissible. Instead, this avoidance strategy would often mean a lawyer either errs in the direction of violating an obligation to a client or errs in the direction of violating obligations to the law. If standard accounts of lawyers’ ethical obligations are correct, then we are asking lawyers to assume an unusually high risk of moral wrongdoing. And it may be unfair to lawyers to expect them to take this on. In other areas, our legal system provides standards for what it takes to move from one way of handling an ambiguous circumstance to another—“proof beyond a reasonable doubt” or a “preponderance of the evidence,” for example. These are messy and imperfect. But lawyers are left with even less guidance—the equivalent of telling a jury to “be sure to get it right” and saying very little about what to do when it’s unclear what “right” involves.

We’re often unsure what morality requires, but we need to act anyway. There is a growing philosophical literature on how to navigate moral uncertainty. But much of it asks how to rationally pursue the goal of acting morally, using decision-theoretic models to address that question. I argue that using these popular approaches leaves some central and pressing questions about moral uncertainty unaddressed. To help us make sense of experiences of moral uncertainty, we should shift away from focusing on what it’s rational to do when facing moral uncertainty, and instead look directly at what it’s moral to do about moral uncertainty—for example, how risk averse we morally ought to be, or which personal sacrifices we’re morally obligated to make in order to reduce our risk of moral wrongdoing. And orthodox, expectation-maximizing, decision-theoretic models aren’t well-suited to this task—in part because they presuppose the answers to some important moral questions. For example, if approaching moral uncertainty in a moral way requires us to “maximize expected moral rightness,” that’s, itself, a contentious claim about the demands of morality—one that requires significant moral argument, and that I ultimately suggest is mistaken. Of course, it’s possible to opt, instead, for a variety of alternative decision-theoretic models. But, in order to choose between proposed decision-theoretic models, and select one that is well-suited to handling these cases, we first would need to settle more foundational, moral questions—about, for example, what we should be willing to give up in order to reduce the risk that we’re acting wrongly. Decision theory may be able to formalize the conclusions of these deliberations, but it is not a substitute for them, and it won’t be able to settle the right answers in advance. For now, when we discuss moral uncertainty, we need to wade directly into moral debate, without the aid of decision theory’s formalism.

Our moral judgments are fallible, and we’re often uncertain what morality requires. I argue that, in the face of these challenges, it’s not only rational to use effective procedures for trying to be moral – we have a moral responsibility to do so, and being reckless when navigating moral uncertainty, is, itself, a form of moral wrongdoing. These strategic requirements present a large class of under-explored norms of morality. I use these norms to address moral and social questions concerning, for example, interpersonal toleration, exceptions to moral rules in high-stakes cases, and principal-agent relationships (such as those between lawyers and clients). (email for full text)

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level – that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide a non-ad hoc justification for it. This chapter develops a new justification, showing that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad.