Topics Ethics

Question The painter Gauguin abandoned his wife and family. Which seems a pretty rotten thing to do. Eventually he went to the South Seas to paint. He painted masterpieces. So now his abandoning of his family doesn't look so rotten after all. However, if aesthetic opinion changes and Gauguin's work comes to be classed as second-rate, his abandoning of the family once again takes on a sinister aspect. Can the consequences of an action determine its moral value so clearly?

Accepted:
December 30, 2008

Comments

You've picked up on an interesting case some philosophers have used to discuss "moral luck" (see, e.g., Owen Flanagan's Varieties of Moral Personality and I think Bernard Williams discusses this case). It seems like the moral value of an agent's action should not depend on factors that are clearly outside the control of the agent, such as whether the art Gauguin believed he could only produce by doing something bad is deemed to be so good that his action may be deemed a "necessary evil" that he was right to carry out. Your nice twist is to point out that the moral value of his action seems like it might change over time depending on how his art is perceived. (Another case of moral luck is exemplified by the drunk driver who hits and kills a child who happens to be crossing the street when a similarly drunk driver makes it home, though he would have hit the child had he been less lucky. We not only blame the "unlucky" driver more but we prosecute him differently with much worse legal consequences.)

Here are three reactions to such cases:

1. Try to correct for the luck. Praise and blame people only for what is in their direct control, ignoring any consequences of their actions that are beyond their control (such as how their art is perceived or whether a child crosses their path at the wrong time). The problem with this approach is that it seems to clash with our intuitions. We think the drunk driver who kills is more blameworthy than the one who "only" drove drunk. We think Gauguin's wonderful art mitigates his abandoning his family (though we may also find his art less valuable once we learn about what he did to produce it). Another painter may have been as justified as Gauguin in believing he could produce great work by leaving his family, but failed (or even died on the voyage across the sea), and we would be inclined to judge him more harshly (what a jerk--he left his family for nothing!).

2. Accept that our judgments of praise and blame and of the moral value of actions and agents depends on factors that are beyond the control of the agent. Perhaps these judgments are more like aesthetic judgments in that we respond to the product created more than the process of creation. The product (action) must be intentionally produced but luck may play a large role in the success or failure of the intended action. The problem with this approach is that it clashes with other intuitions we have about fairness. We tend to think it is unfair to blame people for things beyond their control (praise may work differently).

3. Try some hybrid approach. Blame (or praise) the agent for exactly what is in their control (this will be a matter of dispute of course, and bring in debates about free will). Then judge the product of their action separately. Gauguin was a jerk but his art was great. The "unlucky" drunk driver was no worse than the other one, but the killing was terrible. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't seem to work, because the agent and the product are too intertwined. How much do we punish the drunk driver? How do we consider Gauguin's life? (Notice that we tend to care somewhat about the process of creation when we make aesthetic judgments--a lucky chimp is no Jackson Pollock.) Nonetheless, I think I think this sort of approach is the right one to attempt.