I would just point to the concept that Catholics call invincible ignorance. Some things are bad, but you didn't realize it, and furthermore you wouldn't be expected to realize it based on the normal level of due diligence you apply to similar beliefs.
I think a big part of what makes a Holocaust denier especially culpable is that they had to go far out of their way and against the grain of social convention to arrive at their evil and irrational beliefs. Their evil is their own in a way that it wouldn't be if Holocaust denial was just the default stance of every normal person.
Similarly, we live in a society where everybody is taught that slavery is evil from a very young age. To become a slaver today, you have to be open to actions that are not only objectively evil, but that everybody around you condemns in the harshest possible terms. But I would not consider a slaveholder from 500 BC especially culpable. The idea that slavery was categorically evil would have been extremely innovative at the time, and to oppose it would have undermined an established way of life.
We currently live in a society where meat eating has been conventional for approximately forever, and there is a relatively small group of people who started to challenge it fairly recently. A person who does not take that group very seriously is basically giving meat eating the same level of due diligence that they apply to other conventional practices that are opposed by small groups of radicals, and choosing not to upend their way of life based the views of a tiny faction.
I've encountered a few Holocaust deniers (they prefer the term "revisionists") whom I'd judge as non-antisemitic. At least one of them genuinely admired Jews - he was just the sort of person who's naturally attracted to a bunch of very weird beliefs and theories, e.g., he endorsed Benatar's anti-natalism and thought humanity should voluntarily go extinct. And he simply took this one historical incident to be dubious in the same mundane way that some historians think the theory that Marco Polo actually made it all the way to China (rather than stopping short somewhere else in Asia, and passing along stories from there he heard about China) is dubious. That said, this was years ago, and it's possible he mutated into some more virulent strain since then.
Anyway, I completely agree with your larger point that no one is truly blameworthy, and that our concept and intuitions of such are ultimately incoherent. All that really matters is the outcomes.
I would say that we should judge people for things that they have agency regarding, but we should do so within the context of their environment. For example, I don't actually think slave owners are inherently evil people even if the action of slavery is extremely evil. Even though I have agency in my moral beliefs through things such as moral reasoning, my beliefs are still heavily influenced by my surroundings. Were I to he inculcated into the surroundings of the Antebellum South, I probably would have morally failed to the same degree most people in that society did. As such, I can't morally condemn them if the biggest difference between them and myself is that I am morally lucky.
Instead, I think that we should judge people based on how well they measure compared to what is expected by their society. This is why I actually do like the argument that someone was 'a (wo)man of their time', I just think we aren't consistent when applying this sort of lens.
To see this in a modern context, I had commented in another one of your posts that I think Europe is having issues integrating immigrants from certain Arab and sub-Saharan African countries partially due to differences in moral values. While I would say that Western values are superior, I wouldn't say that the average immigrant from these countries are worthy of moral condemnation, even if they hold beliefs about women, homosexuals, Jews, etc. that I find abhorrent. If I was born in their society, I would probably have similar views to them, meaning that the superior values I hold are primarily due to moral luck. Since I can't take credit for being morally lucky, I cannot use that as a justification for being a better person than them, even if I do nominally hold better moral values.
I think there are (at least) two interesting kinds of "morally bad beliefs" worth distinguishing:
(1) Beliefs that reflect malice or *bad quality of will*. Unreasonable beliefs that would basically only appeal to bigots (e.g. holocaust denial) are very strong evidence of bigotry, even if it's logically conceivable that someone come to the belief more innocently. If someone has a likely-viciously-motivated belief, it seems reasonable to regard them with moral suspicion. (But it's interesting to compare how quickly people "rush to judgment" in such cases compared to their explicit beliefs about how much worse it is to punish the innocent than to fail to punish the guilty. I suspect there's a fair bit of inconsistency there!)
(2) Beliefs that are both (deeply) unreasonable and expectably harmful. A delusional but well-meaning inquisitor who tortures people to death in the sincere belief that this is the only way to save their immortal souls would be an example of this. This person isn't ill-meaning, but they are certainly dangerous, which calls for a different kind of negative judgment, and associated moral caution, than the malicious agent discussed previously.
Note that the badness of one's quality of will only correlates very loosely with the harmfulness of the resulting actions, since (as other commenters have noted) our behaviors are hugely influenced by social conformity and convention. So doing normal bad things (like eating meat, or failing to donate as much to charity as would be ideal) don't indicate an unusually bad quality of will. I discuss some related issues in the first half of 'Virtue and Salience': https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVAS-3
Yeah, that's basically the accounts I settle on. Do you think this implies that most meat-eaters are super blameworthy? After all, their action is "(deeply) unreasonable and expectably harmful."
I think of paradigmatic blameworthiness as more tied to quality of will, so no. But are factory-farmed-meat-eaters relevantly similar to the delusional inquisitor? Well, in some ways. They do a lot of harm, without good enough reason. But a (possibly) important difference is that meat-eaters don't pose a danger *to other moral agents*; they're still eligible for social co-operation. It's also not really feasible to ostracize the overwhelming majority of the population. So insofar as the question here is the practical one of "should X-ers be ostracized?" it seems like the answer has to be 'no' for meat-eating (at least currently; I could see that changing in future).
Not the focus of your piece but I think for point 1, you would need to address this more accurately in keeping with what the Christians have historically believed. It’s not that anyone gets punished for failing to believe in Jesus. Rather, the claim is that everyone gets treated fairly, which involves receiving punishment for the other bad things they have done. Believing in Jesus gets you an unmerited exception to what you would otherwise deserve (because it involves accepting a sort of payment on your behalf). People can argue about this story (e.g., you reject desert in section 4 altogether, which bears on the story in separate ways), but it would have to look a lot different from saying that the claimed unfairness is punishing people for failing to accept Jesus. They are, the claim is, punished for separate bad acts.
I think you could argue that an anti-semite who doesn't deny the Holocaust is, in some ways, worse than one who doesn't. The anti-semite who denies it is presumably doing it out of a desire to believe that the movement they are a part of isn't a group of evil mass murderers. One who doesn't deny the Holocaust is acknowledging that they are part of a movement of mass murderers, but they are apparently fine with that.
In general, as I was reading this essay I found that my intuitions pretty much matched up with the suggested revisions at the end. Two equally antisemitic people both seem pretty bad to me, their specific beliefs aren't that relevant (maybe the one who doesn't deny it is worse, like I said, but if they are both really awful it seem pedantic to argue about it). If someone came to disbelieve in the Holocaust through honey mistake, or because they were tricked by a denier, they seem less blame worthy.
Seems to me the reason we tend to think holocaust deniers are morally bad is because we've (reasonably) defined it as a horrible thing to believe to push it out of socially acceptable belief so generally the people who believe it are those who don't mind being so judged which correlates with being horrible. After all it's no more of an epistemic error than believing the moon landings were faked and I don't think we'd see someone in a culture where this is just seen as another random historical fact as particularly awful for doubting it (no worse than the people who believe the middle ages didn't happen).
However, it's interesting to note that's merely a correlational fact but leads to the following very odd situation. When you are deciding what you should believe it seems like one should ignore the moral approbation in which we hold holocaust deniers.
But then that means that when we judge someone as bad because they ignore the moral prohibitions we’ve created around being a holocaust denier we are judging them negatively for doing something they ought to do. Sure, we can still judge them for getting it wrong but it seems like we shouldn't judge them any more harshly than for any other mistake as they shouldn't be influenced by social pressure in what beliefs they reach.
I don't actually have an issue with this because I see social disapproval as just another act one can take and don't connect up judgements and morality but I feel like that creates at least a tension for some people.
On the brain in a vat proposition, it's necessary to assume epistemic closure for one to assert that being a skeptic entails being a Holocaust denier. It uses the same structure as GE Moore's "I have hands" argument and arguments that there's no external world. It's possible to reject epistemic closure and retain logical closure. Lottery propositions render epistemic closure a questionable principle
> I don’t think there are comprehensive judgments about the badness of people—that people are an eclectic mix of good and bad, not the kinds of things that merit precise amounts of blame. David Lewis captured it best:
You've made a contingent judgment about people because you think any account of desert and badness of character fails a series of contrivied hypotheticals where every complicating factor is stipulated away.
Why can't I do the same thing here:
What if we stipulate into existence a person who's sole goal is to act contrary to the moral law in the maximal way possible. They do so by creating increasingly intricate simulations of conscious agents being tortured. Because they accept moral humility, they ensure they they create torture universes of people who are living the worst lives possible under any plausible theory of goodness.
They also randomly kill and eat babies, and pay 1,000,000,000 dollars to every factory farm and all politicans who want to ban lab-grown meat.
We can also further stipulate that this person has no redeeming qualities.
His examples are just meant to show that holding any given belief is not sufficient for culpability. Or, equivalently that holding any given belief does not necessarily make one culpable.
Meanwhile, the claim the people are an eclectic mix of good and bad is an empirical statement about what (almost all) people are actually like, it was not meant as a Necessarily True statement.
I guess it seems like an isolated demand for rigor? He’s holding a bunch of views of desert up to these examples, but he’s saying that his worldview is justified merely because it’s empirically true for most people.
I think they are just different types of claims. If he was saying that [necessarily] people are a mix of good and evil, then I would agree with you. But empirically most people are a mix of good and evil and also empirically most people's beliefs do actually tend to give insight into their character, but this is not [necessarily] the case.
I would just point to the concept that Catholics call invincible ignorance. Some things are bad, but you didn't realize it, and furthermore you wouldn't be expected to realize it based on the normal level of due diligence you apply to similar beliefs.
I think a big part of what makes a Holocaust denier especially culpable is that they had to go far out of their way and against the grain of social convention to arrive at their evil and irrational beliefs. Their evil is their own in a way that it wouldn't be if Holocaust denial was just the default stance of every normal person.
Similarly, we live in a society where everybody is taught that slavery is evil from a very young age. To become a slaver today, you have to be open to actions that are not only objectively evil, but that everybody around you condemns in the harshest possible terms. But I would not consider a slaveholder from 500 BC especially culpable. The idea that slavery was categorically evil would have been extremely innovative at the time, and to oppose it would have undermined an established way of life.
We currently live in a society where meat eating has been conventional for approximately forever, and there is a relatively small group of people who started to challenge it fairly recently. A person who does not take that group very seriously is basically giving meat eating the same level of due diligence that they apply to other conventional practices that are opposed by small groups of radicals, and choosing not to upend their way of life based the views of a tiny faction.
I've encountered a few Holocaust deniers (they prefer the term "revisionists") whom I'd judge as non-antisemitic. At least one of them genuinely admired Jews - he was just the sort of person who's naturally attracted to a bunch of very weird beliefs and theories, e.g., he endorsed Benatar's anti-natalism and thought humanity should voluntarily go extinct. And he simply took this one historical incident to be dubious in the same mundane way that some historians think the theory that Marco Polo actually made it all the way to China (rather than stopping short somewhere else in Asia, and passing along stories from there he heard about China) is dubious. That said, this was years ago, and it's possible he mutated into some more virulent strain since then.
Anyway, I completely agree with your larger point that no one is truly blameworthy, and that our concept and intuitions of such are ultimately incoherent. All that really matters is the outcomes.
I would say that we should judge people for things that they have agency regarding, but we should do so within the context of their environment. For example, I don't actually think slave owners are inherently evil people even if the action of slavery is extremely evil. Even though I have agency in my moral beliefs through things such as moral reasoning, my beliefs are still heavily influenced by my surroundings. Were I to he inculcated into the surroundings of the Antebellum South, I probably would have morally failed to the same degree most people in that society did. As such, I can't morally condemn them if the biggest difference between them and myself is that I am morally lucky.
Instead, I think that we should judge people based on how well they measure compared to what is expected by their society. This is why I actually do like the argument that someone was 'a (wo)man of their time', I just think we aren't consistent when applying this sort of lens.
To see this in a modern context, I had commented in another one of your posts that I think Europe is having issues integrating immigrants from certain Arab and sub-Saharan African countries partially due to differences in moral values. While I would say that Western values are superior, I wouldn't say that the average immigrant from these countries are worthy of moral condemnation, even if they hold beliefs about women, homosexuals, Jews, etc. that I find abhorrent. If I was born in their society, I would probably have similar views to them, meaning that the superior values I hold are primarily due to moral luck. Since I can't take credit for being morally lucky, I cannot use that as a justification for being a better person than them, even if I do nominally hold better moral values.
Also, I know that this argument requires biting a TON of bullets, and I am happy to bite every one of them 😈
I think there are (at least) two interesting kinds of "morally bad beliefs" worth distinguishing:
(1) Beliefs that reflect malice or *bad quality of will*. Unreasonable beliefs that would basically only appeal to bigots (e.g. holocaust denial) are very strong evidence of bigotry, even if it's logically conceivable that someone come to the belief more innocently. If someone has a likely-viciously-motivated belief, it seems reasonable to regard them with moral suspicion. (But it's interesting to compare how quickly people "rush to judgment" in such cases compared to their explicit beliefs about how much worse it is to punish the innocent than to fail to punish the guilty. I suspect there's a fair bit of inconsistency there!)
(2) Beliefs that are both (deeply) unreasonable and expectably harmful. A delusional but well-meaning inquisitor who tortures people to death in the sincere belief that this is the only way to save their immortal souls would be an example of this. This person isn't ill-meaning, but they are certainly dangerous, which calls for a different kind of negative judgment, and associated moral caution, than the malicious agent discussed previously.
Note that the badness of one's quality of will only correlates very loosely with the harmfulness of the resulting actions, since (as other commenters have noted) our behaviors are hugely influenced by social conformity and convention. So doing normal bad things (like eating meat, or failing to donate as much to charity as would be ideal) don't indicate an unusually bad quality of will. I discuss some related issues in the first half of 'Virtue and Salience': https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVAS-3
Yeah, that's basically the accounts I settle on. Do you think this implies that most meat-eaters are super blameworthy? After all, their action is "(deeply) unreasonable and expectably harmful."
I think of paradigmatic blameworthiness as more tied to quality of will, so no. But are factory-farmed-meat-eaters relevantly similar to the delusional inquisitor? Well, in some ways. They do a lot of harm, without good enough reason. But a (possibly) important difference is that meat-eaters don't pose a danger *to other moral agents*; they're still eligible for social co-operation. It's also not really feasible to ostracize the overwhelming majority of the population. So insofar as the question here is the practical one of "should X-ers be ostracized?" it seems like the answer has to be 'no' for meat-eating (at least currently; I could see that changing in future).
I agree they shouldn't be ostracized. But it seems like they'd be super blameworthy!
I'd say never. Believing is morally inert, it's only actions that can be good or evil.
Not the focus of your piece but I think for point 1, you would need to address this more accurately in keeping with what the Christians have historically believed. It’s not that anyone gets punished for failing to believe in Jesus. Rather, the claim is that everyone gets treated fairly, which involves receiving punishment for the other bad things they have done. Believing in Jesus gets you an unmerited exception to what you would otherwise deserve (because it involves accepting a sort of payment on your behalf). People can argue about this story (e.g., you reject desert in section 4 altogether, which bears on the story in separate ways), but it would have to look a lot different from saying that the claimed unfairness is punishing people for failing to accept Jesus. They are, the claim is, punished for separate bad acts.
I think you could argue that an anti-semite who doesn't deny the Holocaust is, in some ways, worse than one who doesn't. The anti-semite who denies it is presumably doing it out of a desire to believe that the movement they are a part of isn't a group of evil mass murderers. One who doesn't deny the Holocaust is acknowledging that they are part of a movement of mass murderers, but they are apparently fine with that.
In general, as I was reading this essay I found that my intuitions pretty much matched up with the suggested revisions at the end. Two equally antisemitic people both seem pretty bad to me, their specific beliefs aren't that relevant (maybe the one who doesn't deny it is worse, like I said, but if they are both really awful it seem pedantic to argue about it). If someone came to disbelieve in the Holocaust through honey mistake, or because they were tricked by a denier, they seem less blame worthy.
Seems to me the reason we tend to think holocaust deniers are morally bad is because we've (reasonably) defined it as a horrible thing to believe to push it out of socially acceptable belief so generally the people who believe it are those who don't mind being so judged which correlates with being horrible. After all it's no more of an epistemic error than believing the moon landings were faked and I don't think we'd see someone in a culture where this is just seen as another random historical fact as particularly awful for doubting it (no worse than the people who believe the middle ages didn't happen).
However, it's interesting to note that's merely a correlational fact but leads to the following very odd situation. When you are deciding what you should believe it seems like one should ignore the moral approbation in which we hold holocaust deniers.
But then that means that when we judge someone as bad because they ignore the moral prohibitions we’ve created around being a holocaust denier we are judging them negatively for doing something they ought to do. Sure, we can still judge them for getting it wrong but it seems like we shouldn't judge them any more harshly than for any other mistake as they shouldn't be influenced by social pressure in what beliefs they reach.
I don't actually have an issue with this because I see social disapproval as just another act one can take and don't connect up judgements and morality but I feel like that creates at least a tension for some people.
What paper is the David Lewis quote from?
One thing I'm confused about, that I might have missed—did you make an exception for racism as the one belief that deserves blame?
On the brain in a vat proposition, it's necessary to assume epistemic closure for one to assert that being a skeptic entails being a Holocaust denier. It uses the same structure as GE Moore's "I have hands" argument and arguments that there's no external world. It's possible to reject epistemic closure and retain logical closure. Lottery propositions render epistemic closure a questionable principle
What makes any of these things good or evil? If we are merely specks on a rock in space, the Holocaust holds no great significance to that space.
> I don’t think there are comprehensive judgments about the badness of people—that people are an eclectic mix of good and bad, not the kinds of things that merit precise amounts of blame. David Lewis captured it best:
You've made a contingent judgment about people because you think any account of desert and badness of character fails a series of contrivied hypotheticals where every complicating factor is stipulated away.
Why can't I do the same thing here:
What if we stipulate into existence a person who's sole goal is to act contrary to the moral law in the maximal way possible. They do so by creating increasingly intricate simulations of conscious agents being tortured. Because they accept moral humility, they ensure they they create torture universes of people who are living the worst lives possible under any plausible theory of goodness.
They also randomly kill and eat babies, and pay 1,000,000,000 dollars to every factory farm and all politicans who want to ban lab-grown meat.
We can also further stipulate that this person has no redeeming qualities.
Seems very clear that this person is evil!
His examples are just meant to show that holding any given belief is not sufficient for culpability. Or, equivalently that holding any given belief does not necessarily make one culpable.
Meanwhile, the claim the people are an eclectic mix of good and bad is an empirical statement about what (almost all) people are actually like, it was not meant as a Necessarily True statement.
I guess it seems like an isolated demand for rigor? He’s holding a bunch of views of desert up to these examples, but he’s saying that his worldview is justified merely because it’s empirically true for most people.
I think they are just different types of claims. If he was saying that [necessarily] people are a mix of good and evil, then I would agree with you. But empirically most people are a mix of good and evil and also empirically most people's beliefs do actually tend to give insight into their character, but this is not [necessarily] the case.