On Knobe and Leiter - by Casey Emberger

I agree with Nietzsche that our psychological and physiological traits but I do not believe these two things matter the most with regard to morality. Nietzsche also believes that there are different types of people based on a fixed psycho-physical constitution. In addition, these traits are immutable. I disagree with this point. I think that all people’s moral character are affected by their predetermined traits and genetics. But I do not think that this plays such a significant role. A person’s moral character relies on many things and I think the world is too complex for anyone to say that these things are a product of primarily one factor. A person’s life has an infinite number of variables. There are so many things that could change the course of a person’s life and so many other possible situations that it is hard to say what a person’s moral character is developed by. It could have been a specific life altering event, a hiccup in gym class, or even a choice that a person makes on their own volition. I think that this is the heart of my objection to Nietzsche.

People have choices and those choices matter. They could change the course of a person’s life or change a terrible person into a saint. Everyday we must make choices and those choices are uniquely ours. I can make decisions for myself, yes there are external factors that do effect the outcome but I am the one that ultimately makes the choice. I am the one who is responsible for my own actions. I cannot blame it on my genetics or my predetermined traits; when it comes to morality that choice is my own. All the data used in this piece to show that this is not the case does little to convince me. Most of the experiments’ focuses are not a person’s moral choices but something else. In addition these experiments can only account for about 50-60% of choices. I am interested in what accounts for the other 40-50%. It just shows that there are many factors that affect a person’s choices. I think its important to recognize all those factors and not just one or two.

On Kamtekar - by Jesse Pavelka

B. Character Traits are Broad-Based

Kamtekar does not convince me that a narrow character trait will be more stable than any broad-based trait when examined over multiple situations. She bases her argument on a study of the word 'honesty', which in her mind is comprised of 'not lying, not cheating, and not stealing'; we can assume however, that there are other behaviors associated with the word as well. While each describes a different specific action, they are all linked by a common thread: duplicity. Not only that, but if we are presented with three different individuals (one who lies, one who cheats, and one who steals), are we really comfortable having the liar drive a Brinks truck based on the notion that he won't steal? Or how about having a "truthful thief" take the witness stand in a death row case? Is that not an oxymoron? I have a firm belief that people can change their characters over time, and I don't think I disagree with Kamtekar's overall argument that character is formative in situational reactions, but I think that breaking down character into special, narrowly applicable subcharacterizations doesn't work.

Not only that, but the author admits that the narrow sub-dispositions of honesty are "deeply connected", which strikes me as *way* too much of a concession to make. The common thread is much more important than she makes it out to be. I think she uses somewhat twisted logic in her attempt to defeat Harman, though of course I might be off the mark here because I found her style difficult to follow. It seems to me that she undermines her case further in her example of the cheater who starts to lie based on the grounds that cheating has worked, and both are based on deception. Isn't her point that honesty, and character traits in general, are made up of many more narrow dispositions that are applicable to specific situations only? Isn't she trying to argue against the unity of honesty, because its unity defeats her idea of applicability across multiple situations? If I have this right, then it would seem a very weak argument on her part, one that she partially defeats all on her own.

C. Subjective Construal

Kamtekar's analysis of subjective construal I find much more palatable. Situationists claim that behavior correlates not only with a situation, but the situation as we interpret it. I think the author asks a great question in wondering why construal is not part of character. "How exactly are we to understand situation, when one's situation includes how one sees one's situation?" (471) How we see a situation is essentially the way in which we filter stimuli and give each stimulus importance in any give set of circumstances. These filters are undoubtedly influenced by our upbringing and heredity (the genetics/environment combination argument). Is this not the same as character? It would seem to me that character could also be defined in its essence as how we see a given situation and how we react to what we see. This basically admits that differences in character result in different behaviors.

On Doris - by Andrew Shindel

One major point of contention that I have with Doris' piece is the main focus of the piece. He talks about situationalism and an experiment conducted by Isen and Levin in 1972. Their experiment showed that subjects were more likely to help a stranger who had dropped a stack of papers when leaving a payphone if they found a dime in the change slot of the phone. Isen and Levin concluded that this showed a strong influence of situations on the moral actions of people. Doris agrees with this and spends the majority of his piece advocating it and defending possible doubts in this position. I cannot argue with this point, since it is based on research which I cannot disprove. Instead I will argue with Doris' assumption that since situationalism exists, it leads to a world in which people will knowingly avoid morally questionable situations. This comes when he provides the example of a married person being invited to a coworker's house with whom they have been flirtatious in the past. Doris contends that the married person will avoid the situation after realizing that they might become intoxicated and not follow their beliefs in fidelity. I think this entire argument is ridiculous, and it sounds like an excuse that I used in high school for cheating on my girlfriend. If you believe in fidelity, some Barry White and wine won't have you throwing yourself at your coworker after dinner. While situationalism may have some undeniable impact on the actions of agents, I do not feel as though it is as strong as Doris implies.

The Importance of the Tangible World - by Debbie Jensen

I do not think it is possible to give moral blame or praise based on situations that could have existed in other possible worlds. I was always taught that we cannot live second-guessing our actions because we will only regret those actions that we have actually taken. If this is how we live our lives then how can our morality be judged by what may have been? We make hundreds of decisions each day which may or may not be morally important. The amount of potential situations which could arise from these decisions is innumerable. It is preposterous to think that a large part of our morality may be judged based upon a decision such as whether we decided to tell a lie to our parents in fifth grade about what you were doing after school.

Imagine a situation in which you have four morally important decisions to make in a single day. At choice one, you can either do it or not do it, and the same goes for each subsequent choice. If you make a diagram of this, it looks similar to a family tree with only two strong branches. Since you are making four decisions and each has two options, that makes 15 possible situations on either major branch (after the first decision the two branches make a V). It ends up that only 1/30 of your potential situations are the actual one which exists in this physical world. This type of judging based upon all weighing all potential situations does not take into account our character, or our recognition of poor morally important decisions. There have been times in my life that I have lied and felt so guilty about it that I have resolved myself to not ever do it again in such a situation. A system of judging morality that does not take into account one's character is also not satisfactory. Many of the potential situations only have one answer because never in that particular agent's life would he do what one of the potential situations asks of him. A moral system which assigns blame and praise cannot take into account possible worlds which may have existed had the agent been in another time period or made different decisions which could have changed the course of his life indefinitely.

Consequentialism Unjust in Assigning Moral Responsibility - by David Carrier

Having become convinced that morality operates in two realms, namely in judging us (moral responsibility) and in dictating which aspirations we ought to have (moral significance), I cannot help but see Jackson's piece as somewhat confused for not acknowledging this distinction. In proposing a theory of consequentialism, he asserts (to the best of my understanding) that an agent can determine how she ought to act in a situation by determining, via a probability function and a value function, which action maximized the expected moral utility in the situation. More simply, the agent must attempt to determine the course of action which will produce the best moral consequence; once this determination is made, the agent ought to act upon the action she's discovered to be best. The consequence produced is then the ultimate determinant of the moral rightness or wrongness of the action. The confusion comes in that he never directly mentions moral responsibility in his account, though we can guess that it is assigned, like the evaluation of the action, on the basis of the consequences of the action. Even if we grant him this clarification, it seems to me that the consequentialist view Jackson presents adequately answers the question of how we might practically determine moral significance but misplaces the emphasis in the moral responsibility realm of morality.

Seeking the consequences that maximize moral utility in a situation gives clear guidance for what end an agent ought to pursue or aspire to reach and effectively establishes what the most morally desirable outcome of a situation will be. However, it seems to me that assigning moral responsibility based on those consequences opens the door to a host of problems. One such problem is acknowledged by Jackson in a footnote on p. 471, though he apparently doesn't see it as a problem: under consequentialism, one can do the right thing for the wrong reason. Conversely, it is possible for an agent to perform all of the required calculations to determine what one ought to do, perform the required action, and then by luck of a bad or unintended consequence (perhaps the result of insufficient information in making the calculation?) be judged morally blameworthy for the negative consequence. Though some may be willing to swallow this pill and accept that judgments of moral responsibility need not be in accordance with justice, I cannot. Perhaps consequentialism has a use in the moral significance realm of morality, but clearly an intention-based system of judgment is necessary when assigning moral responsibility.

Dissing Domsky - by Tom Richter

Domsky thinks that believing in moral luck is merely because of internal biases, that benefit no one (but ourselves), and that therefore we must disregard it in favor of the opposing intuition that there is no moral luck. However, this seems to me to be an unconvincing argument. Even if our intuition that we are subject to moral luck can arise out of crass psychological biases, that does not mean it is the only case that is sufficient cause for believing in that intuition as such. (I believe Domsky shows that our biases are sufficient for explaining our beliefs in moral luck, but he shows no reason why they are necessary as explicanda, and why we could not arrive at it by some other means.)

In addition to this, I do not see why the first intuition (which he basely supports) would NOT be subjectable to the same biases that he holds against the intuition of moral luck. In fact, it appears to me, that believing there IS no moral luck is more-so prone to such biases. The very nature of optimistic bias is that one believes they are impervious to luck, and that they can win out due to some skill regardless of the chancy circumstances. This, in Domsky's view leads us to take the moral luck intuition, because we can escape blame on the hinge of luck. We can dump our misfortune on external factors, and waltz away thinking that we are super-beings that always roll high on the die table. But is seems more natural for this bias to lead us in the other direction. To say that THERE IS NO moral luck, because we're impervious to it. I see no argument for why intuition number one is any less prone to optimistic bias.

As for selfish bias, it seems intuition number one can't escape either. For, one wouldn't want to let other people who were negligent get off scot free when we got slammed unfairly because ours resulted in the death of a child. That wouldn't be fair at all...

How can Domsky explain intuition one, in a way that is not subject to the very biases he holds against intuition number two?

Zimmerman and Blame - by Alex Frey

While Zimmerman's position on moral luck does an admirable job in reconciling many of the flaws found in other pieces on this topic, there are various holes in this paper (many of which the author concedes, saying that it was not his intent to discuss certain topics within this essay in the first place) that do make it seem somewhat disjointed. One such area is his comparison of the noncollaborator (as opposed to the Nazi collaborator) to those like the unsuccessful driver (as opposed to the successful one who "succeeds" in hitting a pedestrian). The trouble here is Zimmerman's seeming need to apply some sort of *blame* in all such cases, regardless of the success of the agent. He finds it difficult to locate some reason to blame the noncollaborator, who hasn't actually done anything.

This problem, however, could be solved if he were actually to take a page from Richards' book. While we may be able to rightfully apply blame to people in certain situations, it is not necessary, in a morally negative evaluation of someone, to apply some sort of blame. A much more pragmatic and functional way to deal with a person who has the personal propensity for performing morally bad actions, given the correct circumstances, would be to simply say that there is something morally flawed with their character. Such a person, regardless of how constitutively bad their character may be, are those that we would hope to have seek or perform some sort of character-correcting activity before they find themselves in a situation where they would be apt to do something blameworthy. Thus, thus solution to Zimmerman's problem of blame in such situations is to realize there is some other way to judge (passively or actively) a person without having to actually see them as blameworthy.