That is, it seems to me that there are certain cases where the rightness or wrongness of an act depends on whether the doer thinks its right or wrong, but in other cases such impressions don’t matter.
I want you to pick a topic that you think is a moral grey area- something that is perhaps dubious, but not clearly wrong. In particular, I want you to pick something that you personally don’t think is wrong, but other people do, and you can understand their viewpoint. The example I’m going to use is dating a friend’s ex, where there are no obvious aggravating factors (e.g., there was no nasty break up or anything like that). Personally, I don’t think that dating a friend’s ex is wrong, but I can see that it’s a bit of a grey area.
However the nature of moral grey areas is that, often, not everyone sees a given case as a grey area. Some people will say “what on earth are you talking about Philosophy Bear, that is obviously wrong and I am deeply offended you would suggest otherwise” and other people will say “what on earth are you talking about Philosophy Bear, that is clearly okay and I’m deeply offended you would suggest otherwise.” So if you don’t like my choice of a grey area, pick your own.
Some examples of topics that certain people consider grey areas (but not necessarily me) include: certain kinds of cultural appropriation, age gaps in relationships between consenting adults, eating meat, not voting because you’re exceptionally busy and stressed, only giving five percent of your income to charities etc. If you don’t find any of those to be moral grey areas, find your own. Remember, a grey area action should be one that you personally don’t consider wrong, but that some people do, and you find you can understand and sympathize with their point of view.
Now consider Juliet and Tristan. Juliet believes that it is morally wrong to date a friend’s ex. Tristan believes it’s morally permissible to date a friend’s ex. Both of them are otherwise in an exactly identical situation, and have the same beliefs about how dating a friend’s ex would affect their friendship etc. They are both contemplating dating a friend’s ex. There are no aggravating factors- this would be a pretty typical, vanilla case of dating a close friend’s former partner.
It seems to me that if Juliet goes ahead with it, she’s done something wrong, but if Tristan does, he hasn’t- and that’s difficult to explain. In an agent relativist framework- a framework according to which an action is right if the doer thinks it’s right, it would be easy to explain, but as Lance argues, agent relativism isn’t a very attractive view.
One obvious explanation of this is that it’s always wrong to some degree to go against your moral views- but I don’t think this is right. Consider a committed Nazi who does not report a Jewish fugitive to the Nazis, despite her view that this is the right thing to do, because she cannot bring herself to be responsible for someone’s death. I don’t think her choice is in any sense even a little wrong.
I want to say our moral views here are best explained if morality has a little bit of give- a little bit of agent relativism in relation to edge cases. There are some actions at the border between morality and immorality such that the rightness or wrongness of these action depends on moral beliefs. Interestingly this is a claim similar to the doctrines held by some major religions, which often hold that in very specific and debatable questions of religious morality, the believer should follow their own conscience.
I tend to think the give only goes one way- thinking an action is wrong can make a right-but-ambiguous action wrong, but it can’t make a wrong-but-ambiguous action right- though I’m not sure of this. So I call this phenomenon of apparent agent-relativism in these edge cases tender conscience wrongdoing. Wrongdoing that is made wrongdoing by bad conscience. I’m sure it’s been discussed in the philosophical literature before- but I like blogging and haven’t got time to try and find it in the literature.
I suspect- but won’t get into here- that character-involving accounts of ethics might be especially well positioned to help explain why Juliet’s action is wrong but Tristan’s isn’t. This is because the violation of one’s own self imposed ethical framework- even where the framework is wrong- can reflect poorly on your character depending on the nature of those rules, or well on one’s character depending on the nature of those rules (as in the Nazi case). A good rule of thumb is “would this rule breaking look to me like conscience poking through, or just weakness of the will”.
Also, I want to add, if the distinction makes sense, that if agent-relativism is true in some of the cases I’ve described, I suspect it’s for normative rather than metaethical reasons, although articulating exactly what I mean by that intuition would be hard.
Interesting! (Apologies for the rambling comment):
I should note that at least some religious forms of the idea that you're ethically bound by your own conscience can function in the direction of greater leniency as well. At least in the case of the Catholic view, the one I'm most familiar with, I've heard some liberal-leaning Catholic authorities say that people who truly feel obligated by their own conscience to use birth control to avoid having children that they can't adequately care for aren't guilty of sin.
You raise a good point point, however, about whether they would give the same "follow your conscience" advice to a Nazi who felt like his conscience obliged him to turn in Jews. Reading the Catechism, while it says that you're obligated to try to form your conscience in the light of Catholic teaching, if you truly just can't make your conscience agree with what the Church teaches you have to go with your conscience, and will sin by *not* following it. There don't seem to be any exceptions here. Disagreeing with the Church on birth control and disagreeing with it on genocide don't actually seem to be treated differently--it's a surprisingly universal agent-relativism.
(I do think this may be an illustration of how religious moral systems, where "will this person be *punished in the afterlife* for their behavior?" is an extremely-important question, may make agent-relativism more plausible.)
There's also the fact that the conscience-based arguments I've seen for birth control all appeal to countervailing moral *obligations* to responsible parenthood, not a mere conviction of one's conscience that contraception isn't morally wrong. The Church may, then, follow your position that conscience is only permitted to impose *additional* moral obligations (which can in some cases override incompatible ones imposed by Church teaching), rather than simply exempt one from obligations you don't agree with.
> rightness of wrongness
Typo, "of" should be "or".