UC Santa Barbara

Most moral theorists subscribe to a vindicatory account of moral justification, according to which an action is morally justified if and only if the action is not morally wrong. Vindicatory accounts of moral justification are incompatible with genuine moral dilemmas, since any action the agent performs in a dilemma will fail to conform with at least one operative duty and therefore render morally wrong. Yet, in moral dilemmas, it typically seems as though there is a morally preferred solution – an action the agent is justified in performing. So, if agents are sometimes morally justified in performing the morally preferred act in dilemma cases, then the only available account of justification is a non-vindicatory account, according to which agents are sometimes justified in performing morally wrong actions. While such views have received little attention in the existing philosophical literature, I argue that rejecting vindicatory accounts of moral justification positions me to unify a range of apparently contradictory patterns of moral assessment in a single moral framework, including in moral dilemmas.

Because moral justification is closely linked to moral permissibility, by conceding the possibility of justified wrongdoing, I concede the possibility of a prima facie incoherent act-assessment: Permissible-Wrong Action [PWA] – morally permissible actions that are morally wrong. To make sense of PWA, I distinguish between wrongness (or rightness) and moral permissibility. Wrongness is a first-order act-assessment, an evaluation of the morally relevant features of the act alone. Moral permissibility is a second-order (hybrid) act-assessment, an evaluation of the relationship between the action and the motivations of the agent performing it. This distinction can help us understand the Doctrine of Double Effect [DDE] debate. The central question for the DDE is whether agent motivations inform assessments of moral permissibility. I argue that we can offer a principled explanation for our patterns of judgment in DDE cases by reframing the debate as disagreement about whether moral permissibility is a first- or second-order act-assessment. PWA is possible in light of the distinction between first- and second-order act-assessments and the novel account I develop of the relationship between moral justification and permissibility.

Specifically, I argue that genuine moral dilemmas and PWA are compatible with an adequacy account of moral justification, according to which an action sometimes overcomes concerns about its wrongness when it conforms with other important moral demands. PWA helps to explain DDE cases, where two acts comprising all of the same morally significant agent-independent features receive different permissibility assessments. While both actions are morally wrong, only one is an instance of PWA. Because the only difference in pairs of DDE cases involve differences in the agents’ motivations, I follow DDE proponents in suggesting that one act is rendered impermissible by the offending agent’s criticizeable motivations in acting. I propose that the agent’s motivations pick out the features of the action that get to do the justifying or unjustifying. If the agent is motivated by the action’s wrongness, then the action’s wrongness unjustifies the action, rendering it impermissible. If not, then it could turn out to be a case of PWA. I argue that the proper understanding of the conceptual relationships between these and other puzzling moral phenomena (including moral residue, suberogation, and praise-blame asymmetry in Side-Effect Effect cases) and their corresponding moral assessments reveals an underlying unity in our patterns of assessment, providing evidence for a new, unifying moral framework, the backbone of which I develop throughout my dissertation.