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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 7:30 am
Subject: The Paul Gaugauin Problem

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=66995

http://www.ipfw.edu/phil/faculty/Strayer/Ethics%202%20Divorce.ppt

What if the following conditions hold: a) the good which someone can
do for the world is much greater than the good which he or she can do
for his or her spouse and family; and b) the person can only do this
good for the world by leaving his or her family and working and
living apart from them?

I call this The Paul Gauguin problem, and it fits not just cases of
artistic genius, such as Gauguin's, but any case in which the world
benefits from the efforts of someone but at the expense of the
suffering of others, in particular, his or her family.

For instance, would a medical genius who could cure cancer only if he
leaves his family to work in a foreign laboratory be obligated to
society or to his family? Why? Is beauty for the world worth even a
single child's suffering? If yes why, and if no, why not?

Paul Gauguin, Fe Tata Te Miti (By the Sea), 1892

http://www.artunframed.com/images/artmis30/gauguin91.jpg

http://www.artunframed.com/gauguin89.htm

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/moralluc.htm

Moral Luck: A case of moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral
difference. The problem of moral luck arises from a clash between the
apparently widely held intuition that cases of moral luck should not
occur with the fact that it is arguably impossible to prevent such
cases from arising.

The literature on moral luck began in earnest in the wake of papers
by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. Though Nagel's paper was
written as a commentary on Williams', they have quite different
emphases. Still, the same question lies at the heart of both papers
and, indeed, at the heart of the literature on moral luck: can luck
ever make a moral difference? This idea of a moral difference is a
wide one. Various sorts of difference have been considered. The most
obvious is, perhaps, a difference in what a person is morally
responsible for, but it has also been suggested both that luck
affects the moral justification of our actions and that it affects a
person's moral status in general (that is, that it affects how
morally good or bad a person is). We shall pay more attention to
these varied differences in time, but the important point for now is
that both Williams and Nagel argue that luck can make a moral
difference. So what? The problem is that the idea of luck making a
moral difference is deeply counterintuitive. We know that luck enters
into our lives in countless ways. It affects our success and our
happiness. We might well think, however, that morality is the one
arena in which luck has no power, that when it comes to a person's
moral standing (an expression I will use to stand for all the sorts
of moral difference luck might be thought to make), her standing is
exactly the one she deserves. Luck, we might think, cannot alter that
standing one bit. This seems a reasonable position, but it is a
position both Nagel and Williams cast into doubt. We will first
consider Williams' argument, primarily because it is the least
successful. I will suggest that Williams' argument fails and that
what is interesting in his argument is captured much better by Nagel.

(excerpt):

The most popular response to the problem of moral luck has been to
deny that cases of moral luck ever occur. This is usually done by
suggesting that cases in which luck appears to make a moral
difference are really cases in which luck makes an epistemic
difference, that is, in which luck puts us in a better or worse
position to assess a person's moral standing (without actually
changing that standing). Consider the case of the fortunate and
unfortunate drivers. On this line of argument, it is claimed that
there is no moral difference between them, it is just that in the
case of the unfortunate driver we have a clear indication of his
deficient moral standing. The fortunate driver is lucky in the sense
that his moral failings may escape detection, but not in actually
having a moral standing any different from that of the unfortunate
driver. Along these lines, we find passages like the following:
the luck involved relates not to our moral condition but only to our
image: it relates not to what we are but to how people (ourselves
included) will regard us. (Rescher, 1993, 154-5)
A culprit may thus be lucky or unlucky in how clear his deserts are.
(Richards, 1993, 169)
if actual harm occurs, the agent and others considering his act will
have a painful awareness of this harm. (Jensen, 1993, 136)
the actual harm serves only to make vivid how wicked the behaviour
was because of the danger it created. (Bennett, 1995, 59-60)
While appealing, the difficulty with this response to the problem of
moral luck is that it tends to work better for some sorts of luck
than others. While it is plausible that resultant or circumstantial
luck might make only epistemic differences, perhaps revealing or
concealing a person's character, it is not at all clear that
constitutive luck can be said to make only epistemic differences. If
a person possesses a very dishonest character by luck, what feature
of the person does luck reveals to us that (non-luckily) determines
his moral status? One response to this worry has been to deny that
the notion of constitutive luck is coherent. (See, in particular,
Rescher, 1995, 155-158 and also Hurley, 1993, 197-198.) This claim
turns upon a substantive claim about the nature of luck, a topic that
has been surprisingly absent from the literature on moral luck. It is
my own view that it is only by investigating the nature of luck that
we will be able to reach any sort of a final conclusion regarding the
problem of moral luck. My own conclusion, which I shall leave
undefended here, is that such an investigation leads to the view that
cases of moral luck are both inescapable and troubling. The problem
of moral luck is both real and deep.

http://www.filosofia.pro.br/sir_bernard_williams.htm

Gauguin's desertion of his family, although arguably it merits
reproach, is also arguably justified because he succeeded in
producing beautiful pictures. Had he failed to, he really would have
done the wrong thing. "While we are sometimes guided by the notion
that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were
universally respected . . . we have, in fact, deep and persistent
reasons to be grateful that that is not the world we have."

http://www.info.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~iseda/works/hare_copp.html

According to Copp, Hare's overridingness is "the thesis that one's
morality is something that yields prescriptions which, as a matter of
psychological fact, one lets override all other prescriptions" (77,
his emphasis). Copp raises a counterexample to this thesis. The
example (taken from Bernard Williams) goes as follows (77-78):
Gauguin took up the life of a creative artist as his ideal, and
strived to live up to it. He might well agree that by pursuing this
life he neglected what he morally outght to do (to take care of his
family, for example), but his ideal override the moral obligations.
He might well also agree that his ideal is not a moral ideal in any
sense. Apparently non-moral ideal can override a moral judgement
psychologically.

Copp's example is an insider code, which "assigns different status to
insiders and outsiders simply on the basis that outsiders are not
members of the insider group" (Islamic view of Kafir: Camp of Shaitan
vs. Camp of Allah). Now, suppose there is an insider group which
allows to enslave an outsider, and let Alan be an outsider and Bill
be an insider. Then to enslave Alan is right, while to enslave Bill
is wrong, even thogh Alan and Bill are totally the same in their
universal properties. According to universalizability thesis, either
these judgements are non-moral or inconsistent, but neither of the
interpretations is tenable.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/AyerHareWilliamsrevs.html

WAS GAUGUIN MORALLY RIGHT?

Professors Williams and Hare met on television once, and the first
put it to the second that he would have trouble, as a Utilitarian, if
he had to choose between saving his son from the burning airliner
after the crash, and saving the surgeon who could then save the lives
of some more passengers. Would Hare, committed as he is to what used
to be called the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, not be
committed to abandoning his son, and wouldn't that be morally
unthinkable?

The apparent foundation of Williams's moral philosophy is the nature
and importance of an individual life. An individual life has its
value m the projects which define it and are the very reason for its
being carried forward. They issue in the demand of integrity, a kind
of truth to oneself, take as essential to the unity of the
individual.

There is not just the question of what possible states of affairs,
what possible consequences of human action, would in some sense be
the best ones. A man is not to be regarded as merely a possible cause
of this or that outcome. There is the question of his own commitment.
Much of the present book comes into focus by way of one of Williams's
earlier examples, that of the chemist who will not himself do certain
foul research, despite the fact that his refusal will issue in the
research being carried forward more vigorously by someone else.

To persist in this way, to stay true to one's life, is not
necessarily to be engaged in the strategy of keeping one's own hands
clean. It is not necessarily self-indulgence. That possible failure
is no more tied to the life of integrity than to any other moral
outlook. The man who judges actions by their consequences, whether in
terms of fair distribution or largest totals of satisfaction, may
also care less about others than he cares about the image of himself
as a moral agent of his preferred kind.

Connected with the idea of an individual life is the idea of a
certain primacy of deep feeling. It is to overbear general doctrines
or theories, supposedly objective or perspectiveless views of
reality, and indeed many conceptions of rationality. Irresoluble
moral conflict is thus inevitable. If going by consequences is to be
rejected, so are the traditionally opposed categorical imperatives of
Kantianism, or any such self-denying impartiality. There is "that
worthwhile kind of life which human beings lack unless they feel more
than they can say, and grasp more than they can explain".

It is possible to disagree. What is the life of integrity? "...one
who displays integrity acts from those dispositions and motives which
are most deeply his, and has also the virtues that enable him to do
that." It seems awfully clear that not any old deep dispositions or
motives will do. The torturer whose activities are owed to the
profound belief that he is on the side of history is presumably not
much more engaging than the torturer who is only there to earn a
living wage. Still more to the point, although Williams does not like
the distinction between rightness of acts and moral standing of
agents, it can hardly be that there is more to be said for the
identical acts of the first torturer.

In my view, then, we here have a morality whose true foundation has
not been brought into view. However capacious and however atuned to
moral sentiments, it will be of the order of what has been put aside:
a general claim as to what human life is best and how it is to be
ordered.

To come round to moral luck, the essential question is whether
culpability is wholly a function of a man's intentions, reasonable
concern for others, negligence and the like, or is in part a function
of what was unpredictable when he acted. Now we are of course
inclined to take a bad upshot -- no great paintings or the lorry
driver's killing the child -- as evidence of greater unreasonable
self-concern or negligence. What happens if we contrive cases where
the upshot does not touch such matters?

Two appalling thugs, neither leading the other, use their revolvers
to play Russian roulette with someone else's head, their captive's.
When they pull their triggers, one gun kills the man. Might their
being monsters affect the issue? Then consider two hunters, standing
shoulder to shoulder, who negligently fire at the deer just after the
moment it disappears into the bushes. One kills a person. It will
take an awful lot of invention to convince me that the lucky thug, or
the lucky hunter, should have less on his conscience.

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