moral dilemmas, collective responsibility, and moral progress

Moral Dilemmas, Collective Responsibility, and Moral ProgressAuthor(s): Patricia MarinoSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 104, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 203-225Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321158 .

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PATRICIA MARINO

MORAL DILEMMAS, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORAL PROGRESS*

(Received 14 November 2000)

ABSTRACT. Ruth Marcus has offered an account of moral dilemmas in which the presence of dilemmas acts as a motivating force, pushing us to try to minimize predicaments of moral conflict. In this paper, I defend a Marcus-style account of dilemmas against two objections: first, that if dilemmas are real, we are forced to blame those who have done their best, and second, that in some cases, even a stripped down version of blame seems inappropriate. My account highlights the importance of collective responsibility in understanding dilemmas, and I suggest that it sheds light on understanding moral progress.

Many disagreements that arise in theorizing about moral dilemmas center on the fundamental question of whether there is, in fact, any such thing. In their simplest form, moral dilemmas purportedly arise when there are two possible actions, and we are obligated to do each, and we cannot do both. But it is possible to deny the existence of moral dilemmas altogether, and philosophers from a range of traditions have offered theories that explain them away. One simple method is to argue that the obligations in question are always weighted with respect to their hold on us, and that we are only obligated to meet the stronger obligation; in this case the weaker demand falls away, and we would have only one "all-things- considered" obligation.1 Another way to rule out moral dilemmas is to claim that our moral codes are qualified by exception clauses, so that for example, the rule against breaking your promises, actually says don't break your promises unless you need to to prevent some great harm, or .. .2

One philosopher who argues explicitly for the existence of moral dilemmas is Ruth Barcan Marcus. She argues that moral dilemmas are real, that when we opt to satisfy one obligation, the unchosen one still retains a hold on us, rather than falling away. This hold creates a residue, which remains after we have acted, since on this account,

Li Philosophical Studies 104: 203-225, 2001. ? 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



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we really have failed in some way. One of the most puzzling aspects of Marcus's account is the nature of this residue - is it a moral fact, or merely an emotion? To what extent is it to be identified with guilt?

In this paper, I explore some problems associated with the residue. In section I, I outline Marcus's account of moral dilemmas. In section II, I focus on one residue problem and describe a solution suggested by Patricia Greenspan. In section III, I defend Marcus against some different worries, and outline a broadened account. In section IV, I suggest that, properly understood, such an account might help us understand the nature of moral progress.

SECTION I: MARCUS'S ACCOUNT OF MORAL DILEMMAS

A moral dilemma is a conflict of moral obligations; it arises when I ought to perform act A, and I ought to perform act B, and I cannot perform both A and B. Marcus's discussion of moral dilemmas is not restricted to a particular theory, but rather applies generally to moral theories that are grounded in rules or codes of conduct, rather than those that consider only outcomes and consequences. Oppo- nents of moral dilemmas have two concerns: one, that the existence of moral dilemmas might seem to show that we could not have consistent moral codes, and two, that we may be forced to judge as blameworthy those who did the best they can, since both obligations remain in force. It is this latter consideration that I will be concerned with here.

Marcus's argument is laid out in her two essays, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency"3 and "More about Moral Dilemmas."4 As her first title indicates, she begins by dispensing with the worry about consistency. She notes that even a moral code that has only one rule could land us in dilemmas; for example, the rule to keep your promises could leave us unable to keep two of our promises at the same time. So the reality of dilemmas does not imply there are inconsistencies in the code itself. The lesson Marcus draws is that our understanding of "consistency" as it is applied to moral systems should mimic our understanding of that concept in formal systems, i. e., as she says, "a set of rules is consistent if there are possible circumstances in which no conflict will emerge."5 She offers the analogy of a hypothetical card game: two players deal out all the



MORAL DILEMMAS, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORAL PROGRESS 205

cards; at each play of the game, each player lays down a card; a black card trumps a red card and a higher card trumps a lower card. Now, if one player lays down a red queen and the other a black three, there is a conflict of rules, but there are possible sequences of plays in which no such conflict ever arises, which leads Marcus to call these rules consistent. Likewise, a set of moral rules is consistent if there is a possible arrangement of the world on which no conflict will arise.6

Just as we might "stack the deck" to avoid conflicts in our card game, we can try to bring about states of the real world in which no dilemmas occur. Since it is desirable to meet as many of our obligations as possible, we ought to try to minimize the possibility of conflicts between them. The existence of moral dilemmas acts as a motivating force for us to try to bring about futures in which this possibility is indeed minimized. As long as our moral code is consistent in the way described, this is a reasonable, if not wholly achievable, project. Marcus sums up this "second-order" regulative principle as follows: "as rational agents, with some control of our lives and institutions, we ought to conduct our lives and arrange our institutions so as to minimize predicaments of moral conflict."7 The principle is second-order in that it is a moral obligation that concerns our moral obligations. A simple example of Marcus's principle at work is a situation, as is common, in which a community plans ahead to have enough resources for a rainy day, thereby avoiding the dilemma in which they are obligated to feed two people, but only have enough food for one.

This brings me to the origin and role of the residue in Marcus's account. Recall that one way of denying the existence of moral dilemmas is to stipulate that in cases of differently weighted obligations, the more powerful one becomes the true, or all-things- considered, obligation, and the weaker one ceases to be an obligation at all. On this view, the person who acts in such a way as to satisfy the stronger obligation has acted entirely properly, and has not failed in any duty. In rejecting this view of dilemmas, in arguing for their existence, Marcus is explicitly rejecting this outcome; on her view both of the conflicting obligations remain in force, even after the person has acted. Neither obligation is obliterated, so in any case of dilemma, a person necessarily fails to fulfill some obliga-



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tion. After the person has acted, therefore, the unchosen alternative becomes an unmet duty. This is the origin of the residue.

The nature of the residue is not clear, and this will be the subject of section II. Whatever its nature, however, the fact that it arises from an unmet obligation tells us it is clearly negative and undesirable. Since the residue is negative, we act to try to avoid it; this gives the second-order regulative principle its force. We are motivated by the undesirability of residues to try to make arrangements so that residues do not occur, and to do this is just to try to arrange things so that dilemmas do not occur. On Marcus's account, then, the reality of dilemmas operates, via their residues, to obligate us to try to arrange our world so that dilemmas do not arise.

Marcus's account leads quickly to an objection: since the unmet obligation does not fall away, any person who has encountered a moral dilemma will, in a sense, have morally failed, even when they have done the very best thing they could in the circumstances. We have an intuition that this conclusion is unwarranted, since we feel that anyone who has made the best moral choice possible should not be faulted for his action. I will call this the stringency objection.8 The stringency objection says that on Marcus's account, a person faced with a moral dilemma will, beyond his control, fail to meet at least one of his obligations, and that this doesn't accord with our intuition that agents who do their best should not suffer a charge of failure.9 This concern is the focus of the next section.

SECTION II: THE STRINGENCY OBJECTION

There is a sense in which the existence of a residue fits our intuitions. When someone encounters a very serious dilemma that forces him to choose between two horrible alternatives, we expect that that person will experience a lingering bad effect. For example, if someone faces a dilemma in which they must save two lives, and can only save one, that person is likely to feel awful about the person they couldn't save. Does this feeling reflect a moral reality, or is it just an emotion? In this section I will lay out some arguments given by Bernard Williams and Philippa Foot on this question, and I will suggest a possible resolution of the problem, based on the work of Patricia Greenspan, which addresses the stringency objection.10 Along the




way, I will raise a related problem, which I will attempt to resolve in Section III.

Williams's discussion of moral dilemmas yields a view on which the residue has a strong moral component. His general approach to dilemmas shares much with Marcus's; in particular they agree that in cases of moral dilemma, an unmet obligation continues to exert a force on the agent who failed to meet it.11 Williams imagines an interlocutor who offers a form of the stringency objection: if one has truly acted for the best, isn't it irrational to have to feelings of failure?12 The objector imagines that if it is irrational for the agent to feel regret, then that regret must surely not reflect a moral reality; Williams replies that then an ideal agent wouldn't experience them, which seems wrong, since we usually admire one who does. The objector pushes further, wondering if maybe the moral component of the regret arises from the pain caused, and not the unmet obligation. Williams insists that in certain cases, such as broken promises, the regret must surely "arise via a moral thought."13 I am not sure what this answer amounts to, but I return below to this problem of the proper source of the residue.

Philippa Foot has argued that we should not understand the residue as having a moral component. She starts by pointing out that Williams's argument about moral admirability fails, for we often have irrational but praiseworthy emotions, e.g. when we feel badly about giving away the possessions of someone recently deceased. 14

She goes on to describe a way of understanding fault so that a moral agent should not be faulted for having failed an obligation in a case of dilemma. That there is such a notion of fault opens the way for an account on which we deny the moral component of the residue, and she uses a form of the stringency objection to show that we ought to follow such an account.15 As long as we understand wrongness as counting against moral goodness, she argues, it will be unfair to say that someone is wrong no matter how he acts. We should not blame someone who has done his best, and therefore, we should not interpret the residue as being like the moral stain that attaches to one who has truly failed morally.16

For the residue to play the kind of role it does in Marcus's second- order principle, it must have some kind of moral component; on the other hand, Foot surely has a point here. If I fail to keep an



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appointment because I must stop to save someone's life, then I am not a bad person, and should not be charged with neglecting my duties in the way someone would if they had willfully ignored their obligation.17 Can we understand the residue so that it allows for both of these? Patricia Greenspan has suggested a way to understand guilt and blame so that both these features could be met simultaneously. 18

Greenspan begins by describing what she calls a "perspectival" approach to emotion: emotions have a component that is evalu- ative toward the world, and we can judge to some degree whether that component is appropriate in a given setting, or relative to a given background of information. For example, a feeling of anger or sadness could be said to be more or less appropriate in a certain circumstances, because the emotion should "fit" the world in some appropriate way. Now, we might want to restrict ourselves, in some cases, to considering a particular slice of all the evidence available, when we judge the appropriateness of an emotion. Likewise, if we were convinced that a certain emotion was appropriate in a certain case, we might engender that feeling in ourselves by focussing our attention, by an act of will, on that subsection of the evidence, or that description of it, that helps nurture that feeling in us.

Greenspan uses this account of emotions to argue that moral dilemmas are cases in which we have "appropriate moral guilt without full moral responsibility."19 An agent who has suffered a dilemma will suffer a moral taint, an objective guilt, since there really was a moral law that he transgressed; the agent's reac- tion, then, is to redescribe the events, both to himself and to his community, to try to highlight the particular aspects of the evidence that show that he made the best choice he could have under the circumstances. This redescription might convince us, and we might conclude that there is no justifiable reason to consider this person blameworthy, that is, that it is not appropriate to blame him, or to feel anger. The dilemma leaves a mark on the person, she explains, "unless the wrongness of the deed (from a morally central stand- point) can somehow be 'put into perspective' by rehearsing the explanation for it yet again."20

Greenspan notes the relevance of this for Marcus's account, pointing out that without this amendment, an agent would come out morally blameworthy for doing what he had to do. In the residue




framework I have been using here, the result is that we get an account on which the residue is real, on which it has a moral component, but on which it does not imply that the agent is morally sub-par or worthy of any form of blame. These are precisely the features of the residue that are required if it is to play its role in the second-order regulative principle while still avoiding the stringency objection.

This shows how a Marcusian account of dilemmas can be defended against one serious objection; in section III, I will address some other concerns. Relevant to these, there is one other complaint of Foot's that I want to look at briefly, namely, that in some cases, the idea of a residue just doesn't fit the moral facts at all.21 Foot imagines a case in which I break a promise, and the promissee finds that something wonderful befalls him while I have kept him waiting; she suggests that it seems very odd to say there is an element of moral distress here. I don't see that this is a serious counter-example; consider carelessness as an analogy. If I am careless, and my child wanders off into a pool, and instead of drowning learns to swim, that does not mean that I have no reason to regret my negligence. Likewise, just because sometimes good fortune saves us is no reason not to feel bad about failing in our obligations. If it were strangely systematically true that when I failed an obligation because of a dilemma, good things happened, that would be a reason to call into question my theory of obligations, not to call into question my theory of dilemmas. Just as I feel happy over my child's accom- plishment alongside horror at my letting him wander off, so I can feel joy for my friend alongside experiencing a bad feeling that I did something I oughtn't have done. Toward the end of the next section, I will show that this is an instance of the general point of Williams's interlocutor, who was worried that it's the pain caused, and not the dilemma, that causes any lingering negative leftover. I don't agree, as I will explain, but first I want to turn to a different kind of case, and discuss how a proper reading of it yields a certain account in line with Marcus's.



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SECTION III: AVOIDING FURTHER CRITICISMS

In an earlier work, Greenspan notes some worries over the residue account. She discusses two types of situations in which such an account seems to yield some odd conclusions about the appropriateness of an agent's guilt. As I see it, similar worries will apply to any account on which the residue has a moral component, regardless of whether guilt is the main feature of it. I will explain the kinds of cases she has in mind, and offer an alternative analysis of them, which will bring out a particular interesting feature of residues.22

To explain the first kind of case, Greenspan uses the example of the dilemma faced by Sophie in the novel Sophie's Choice.23 The setting is occupied Poland, and Sophie has been brought to Auschwitz; an SS doctor tells her that she must choose one of her children, and that the other will be taken and killed. If she doesn't choose, both children will die. Sophie faces what Greenspan calls a "dilemma of exhaustive prohibition;" that is, the moral code tells her that it is impermissible for her to cause either child's death,24 as opposed to a "dilemma of exhaustive requirement," in which there are two positive obligations.25 I will return to this second kind of dilemma below, but first I want to explain Sophie's case.

In a way, the dilemmas of exhaustive prohibition fit residue accounts well, as Greenspan stresses, since the residue is partic- ularly appropriate when there has been a real transgression, that is, when we have done something we ought not to have done. In Sophie's case, it fits our intuitions that she would suffer extraordinary guilt and bad feeling, with a moral component. Part of the reason our intuitions support the residue in this case is that Sophie's case was one in which she was explicitly prohibited by the moral code from doing either of two actions, and thus, she had no choice but to do something wrong.

However, Greenspan thinks that understanding this case through Marcus's account leaves us with some problems, and they seem to me to be problems that are not solved by simply detaching guilt from blame. One concern she raises is that the account offers no guidance to Sophie as to how to negotiate her troubles: "The moral code does not yield advice, in this case; and the second-order advice to avoid such conflicts (by having at most one child, perhaps) would hardly seem to patch up its deficiencies."26 Secondly, she notes that



MORAL DILEMMAS, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORAL PROGRESS 21 1

although she thinks feelings of guilt are appropriate for Sophie, if those feelings serve no further purpose, they might best be banished. After all, the same moral code that finds her guilty is the one that failed to provide her with advice at the moment of the choice itself.27 Sophie's feelings of guilt might already be overpowering: mightn't it be better if our theory could offer solace rather than further condem- nation? If the moral code went on to find some relevant role or purpose for her guilt, then we might want to admit it regardless of Sophie's suffering, but it seems that in Sophie's case, the code offers no such reason, since there is nothing Sophie could have done to avoid her situation.

Sophie's case is one of exhaustive prohibition; Greenspan thinks things might be even worse for a Marcusian account in certain cases of exhaustive requirement, since the residue may not seem appropriate at all. She outlines the case of a doctor who has two patients, each of whom needs an organ transplant, with only one organ available. This doctor faces a dilemma of exhaustive requirement, since the moral code tells him there are two things he ought to do - he ought to save each patient's life - and he can't do both. In this case, a residue might seem entirely inappropriate, since the doctor hasn't performed any act that transgresses moral rules.

Consider Sophie's case first. Does it matter whether Sophie is Jewish? Whether she is in trouble with the Gestapo for resistance, or other crimes? In the novel, Sophie is not Jewish, and she considers herself a victim of the general rage and lust for power of the Nazis.28 In telling her story, Sophie implies that she has been taken pris- oner partly for smuggling meat, and partly because she has been, incorrectly, associated with the Resistance.29 Though Sophie's story is rendered enormously complex by the moral difficulties of the Holocaust, I suggest that it matters what role Sophie plays in the large-scale events of her community. After all, the regulative principle advises us to try to arrange our "lives and institutions" to minimize the likelihood of moral dilemmas. Implicit in this idea is that we act as members of a community, and that arranging things such as institutions is an act we undertake together. Insofar as we must cooperate this way, we must understand many of our actions to be partly our shared responsibility. It's not clear exactly what this means for Sophie, but at least it means that Sophie must be seen



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as a member of her community, who therefore bears some of the responsibility for the actions that take place there. I do not mean to claim that the Holocaust was the fault of the citizens of Poland, but I am claiming that the question of what moral responsibility those citizens bore for the events that took place is at least a question that ought to be factored into a discussion of Sophie's moral status.30

Furthermore, we do want to have learned lessons from stories like Sophie's. Part of what makes us so unwilling to add to Sophie's burden of guilt is a problem about knowledge. Did Sophie know there was evil happening around her? Did she know she might be morally implicated in that evil, despite having done nothing to bring it about directly? We are never completely informed of all the doings of our towns, nations, and universities, but we do try to learn from past events which kinds of doings we should pay close attention to. Post-Holocaust, we do take extra care to ferret out and condemn the kind of actions and ideas that we think may have facilitated the Nazi rise to power. We also make special efforts to remember horrific events, because we want the need for condem- nation to seem pressing. Retelling stories of those horrors is partly a way of reminding ourselves of the risks of their recurrence. As a community, we do want to have learned lessons from Sophie's trauma, and we do want to apply that knowledge in our behavior.

The worries were that the moral code fails to guide Sophie, and that having failed to guide her, it fails her again by reinforcing the appropriateness of her guilt feelings, even if her feelings of guilt are already overwhelming. But this results from considering the code as it applies to Sophie as an individual, and from that perspective it does seem strange both to think she could have avoided her dilemma, and to think that she should act in some way as to avoid similar dilemmas in the future. If we think of Sophie in isolation, these do both seem odd. After all, she is powerless at the moment of her dilemma, and as an individual, seems powerless to prevent a similar dilemma from arising. But this is a narrow reading of Marcus's account: the second-order regulative principle itself says that we should try to arrange our lives and institutions to minimize the likelihood of dilemmas arising.

On my interpretation, it is crucial that Marcus's second-order regulative principle applies to us as members of communities. The




first worry was that on Marcus's account, the moral code does little to advise Sophie, and that the second-order regulative principle offers no assistance in this regard. It's true that the moral code cannot tell Sophie that some action of hers is a morally neutral one. It may also be true that in hindsight, we cannot imagine what an individual like Sophie should have done to prevent the rise of Nazi power. But now, I submit that we can imagine what we post- Holocaust citizens should be doing. Even if we disagree on precise action, it is reasonable to say that we now have a moral obligation to try to prevent similar events from happening in our community. The moral code does guide us, since it tells us to try to avoid similar situations from arising. Because we are in a different situation from Sophie, we have different obligations; we hope to learn from her story how to behave in the future, and thus the role of the second- order principle is that it tells us, as members of communities, to try to arrange those communities with care. Thus, while Greenspan is right that the moral code does not advise Sophie the individual, it does offer guidance to the larger community.

The second worry was that having failed to guide her, the moral code advises Sophie that she is guilty. This is thought objection- able because we imagine that a person who has been in Sophie's situation, and has actually chosen one child, will be oppressed by terrible guilt, and that the moral code ought to be able to tell her that she did something right by saving one of her children. Again, when we understand Marcus's account as it applies to our collectivities, and not just to us as individuals, this residue seems entirely appropriate. As a community, of course we suffer a moral taint when we fail to protect Sophie's children. If we understand the residue as applying to us as a group, it seems neither too harsh nor useless; a community suffers a moral residue from having allowed Nazis to get into positions of power. As I said before, this does not have to mean that those people who did allow this to happen must be blamed. Greenspan's interpretation of the residue allows that those individuals can be blameless, while at the same time suffering a moral residue. In this case the residue is not too harsh, since it applies to a large group, and it is not even clear to what extent each person in the group is responsible. But it is useful, since its existence reminds us that we were responsible, and we are responsible for trying to avoid



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having the same thing recur. Thus the residue is entirely appropriate, and Greenspan's worries on this score are addressed.

I hope this shows how Greenspan's criticisms, in Sophie's case, fall away on my reading of Marcus. I claim that this happens as well in the case of a dilemma of exhaustive requirement. Consider Greenspan's example of the doctor, who has one organ, and two patients in need of a transplant. Without the broadened perspective being urged here, there is a concern that the code fails to guide the doctor by recommending a morally correct action, while the second- order regulative principle doesn't help, and most importantly, it saddles the doctor with a residue. Similar arguments about the first two issues apply to those in Sophie's case, but there was an extra problem here: that the existence of any residue at all seems not to fit the facts. Since Sophie faced a dilemma of exhaustive prohibition, she couldn't help but do something wrong, so there is at least this one sense in which the residue's existence seems fitting. The doctor's case, however, is one of exhaustive requirement; he may fail to do all the things he is required to do, but he does not perform a wrong action. Thus Greenspan suggests that in this case, any residue at all might be inappropriate.31

On my reading, however, we interpret this as a dilemma faced by us as community. Understood this way, the moral code offers up the second-order regulative principle, which tells us that we should try to avoid situations in which we have fewer organs than patients, which requires a communal effort. The residue applies to us as members of communities, implying that we are all implicated, somewhat, when we fail to arrange things this way. This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of the moral facts of the case, with the virtue that it gives an account of morality that explains our moral behavior as collective moral agents. It is a moral issue whether there are enough medical resources for everyone, and it is a moral issue that the distribution be fair. A residue account helps explain how these can be moral issues at individual and collective levels. While I agree with Greenspan that for the doctor and Sophie, considered in isolation, a residue account suffers, I think it is clear that the community ought to be included, so that we experience a collective guilt. The guilt tell us that we really ought to arrange our communities so that our obligations to each other can be best met,



MORAL DILEMMAS, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORAL PROGRESS 2 15

and it is a virtue of a residue theory that it includes this feature of our lives as an integral part.

From these considerations emerges a somewhat broadened interpretation of the role of the residue. It need not function merely to motivate a single agent to work in isolation to prevent precisely the same dilemma that he found himself in. It may function more generally, to motivate agents to work collectively to prevent related dilemmas from arising in their community.

At this point, some questions arise.32 First, in my discussion of the residue in this section, I have left open to what extent the residue is identified with a feeling of guilt. Recall that in the previous section, I suggested that Greenspan's "perspectival" approach to emotions opens the door for an account that gives the residue a moral component, while avoiding the stringency objection. If the residue is to be understood along these lines, we need some further discussion to make sense of the analysis I've given so far. For example, what exactly is the agent guilty for? Is the agent's guilt for not meeting his obligation, or for failing to prevent the dilemma from arising? If the former, how, precisely, do consideration about the community factor into the quality of the residue, as I've suggested here? If the latter, it seems that the view I'm describing collapses the reality of dilemmas, since the person is no longer suffering a residue for the particular obligation that he failed to meet.33

I will offer some answers to these, but they may not be completely satisfactory. I do think the agent is guilty for not meeting his obligation, rather than for having failed to prevent the dilemma from arising. But he is not guilty in the same way as one who fails similarly in a non-dilemmatic situation, and a perspectival approach allows that there may be widely varying considerations in particular cases when it comes to spelling out this "not in the same way." The residue arises from the unmet obligation, but its function has to do with future prevention. It is here, in the role of the residue that we place the agent in context. The quality and intensity of the residue is then affected by these surrounding considerations. In the next section I discuss explicity how my view differs from an analogous "no-residue" account.



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Let me now return to the objection raised at the end of the last section. Foot had argued that in cases in which all works out for the best and there is no suffering, it seems wrong for the moral theory to say that there is some residue from the dilemma. I dealt quickly with this, as it applies to those specific cases, but I think that a similar worry could give rise to the broader problem from section I, that Williams raises.34 Some might say that when we are motivated to do things differently, it is the suffering itself that motivates, not a dilemma. In the organ shortage case, maybe we are motivated by the terrible prospect of the deaths of those who are ill, not by residues, and therefore we could understand our moral code as offering this advice directly, with no need for dilemmas.

My reply to this is a generalization of the reply offered earlier. In that reply, I said that we would continue to regret our negligence even if our child wandered into a happy situation. This is because we can't know when the happy situation will happen and when it won't; this is one reason for developing general rules and principles. Similarly, since we can't know when there will be exceptions to the rule that ignoring our principles leads to unfortunate results, it is best to take the rules themselves as important beyond their role in reminding us, say, how to act. So, for example, if we try to reason from the suffering of the ill to the requirement to get enough organs, we are bypassing various moral rules. Just as in the case of the child in the pool, in the absence of perfect knowledge, it is better to take the rules as important on their own. Furthermore, in cases like Sophie's, we find that we want to be motivated to change our reactions in broad, complex ways. Understood collectively, a residue account gives a good explanation of how such a process might happen, whereas accounts on which the weaker obligation falls away make it hard to explain why anything should change at all. In the next section, I will look more closely at how my version of a residue account can help explain this kind of moral change.

SECTION IV: RESIDUE ACCOUNTS AND MORAL PROGRESS

I suggest that a residue account such as this can help us make sense of moral progress. Moral progress has been understood in various ways, and I'll consider in more detail below what form it should take




here. Roughly speaking, by moral progress I mean some change in our sense of our obligations, happening over time, which at least feels to us as though we have become better morally than we were before. One question associated with this notion is how change happens at all; another question is that of how we can feel that we are better than before, without feeling that our predecessors should be blamed for not recognizing these new obligations.35 I'll try to explain how a residue account can shed light on each of these.

First, a residue account gives a natural explanation to our changing moral obligations. We find ourselves, perhaps unexpect- edly, in a dilemma. There is a residue, and we look to the circumstances that gave rise to it - often with special attention to our role in the community life we are involved in - and we are motivated to try to arrange things differently in the future so that more of our obligations are met. Second, the account explains why those acting before might not be blameworthy for their actions at the time, even though we might find fault with someone behaving similarly now.36

Let me discuss some examples. In Sophie's case, while we refrain from blaming her for her act, there is a residue, in this case collective, motivating us to be extra-vigilant in preventing similar horrors. This seems right, in some sense; we expect that with knowledge of the history of the Holocaust, our peers will join us in taking special care to rid our communities of anti-Semitism and hatred. We have a different obligation, knowing what we know now. But this is a complex case, and it may be argued that of the appalling things about the Holocaust, dilemmas are not front and center, so why should they play the starring role this way? I think a more mundane example will make the virtues of the account clearer.

Suppose, then, that a person finds himself with a commitment to a job and a commitment to a child, and no way to satisfy both of these properly. Such a person will find himself in dilemma after dilemma, we imagine: he ought to finish up things at work, and he ought to go to his son's baseball game, and he can't do both. The residue from these dilemmas will motivate him to try to avoid future dilemmas, possibly by not having more children, and thus a change has taken place. We don't want to blame this man for having had one child, since perhaps it wasn't predictable just how much conflict would arise, but we might want to say that he ought not to have



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more children if he can't fulfill their needs. It seems in this case that dilemmas are at the heart of the change, since the conflict of obligations figures centrally.

This is an ordinary situation, but it is a certainly a change in the person's moral obligation, it arises from increased knowledge and understanding, and a residue account offers a view of morality which makes sense of this change. Indeed, on this view, the man is straightforwardly obligated to try to arrange his life so that he can fulfill all of his commitments. This man suffers a residue each time he fails to fulfill his conflicting obligations, and the lesson that the residue is supposed to reinforce is not a lesson about guilt over his present child, but rather a lesson to try to avoid more such troubles, by rearranging his work, or by not having any more children.

In cases of collective responsibility, one difficulty is that while it seems right to say that we have some obligations to each other, it is almost always unclear what form those responsibilities take. This form can change over time, as we change our mutual inter- dependence, and a residue account can help us make sense of this. As an example, consider a public school system: before we have such a system, we might not be sure of the form and extent of our obligations to each others' children, or even if we have any such obligations, but over time, we might decide to organize, and to tax citizens to fund the schools. Having created the system, we are involved in a complicated array of explicit and implicit promises and other obligations. If we examine our system of schools and taxation, we might find that many of those obligations conflict with one another; in fact, this will almost always be the case except in times of extraordinary abundance. We may find ourselves unable to provide adequate funding to some schools, which might create many dilemmas, in which, say, we ought to be funding program A and program B, but can't do both.

Those conflicting obligations leave a residue. Maybe we need to change our taxation system, so there are more resources, or the distribution system, so they are more fairly distributed; we will not always be able to solve these problems, but at least we are obligated to try. I claim that in situations like this, a kind of moral progress is taking place. At first, there may be nothing morally wrong with the system in place, in the sense that it may not flout any of the




obligations we are used to recognizing. Then over time, we come to understand those obligations differently, where, for example, there are limited resources or unequal wealth. Our sense of those obligations then change, as the occurrence of dilemmas forces us to see where we are failing. In the school example, we might come to feel that the system we have created is unfair in ways we hadn't considered when we started. Perhaps our schools have had small classes for years, and then some schools begin to have much larger classes, and we don't have adequate funding to change that. Large classrooms may not have enough resources to go around, which will create dilemmas. On my view, this will create residues that will motivate us to try to arrange things so that adequate funding can be found, which may mean rethinking the distribution of resources. The residue from the dilemmas is real, and creates a standard we must try to meet.

There is a real difference between this view and an analysis we might derive from a perspective that disallows moral dilemmas. On an account of moral dilemmas in which the weaker obligation falls away, we are justified in such cases in finding out which obligations can be met, and then throwing up our hands. If we can only fund a limited number of school programs, and there are resource dilemmas, then on such a view we are merely obligated to find out which are the strongest obligations, and meet those. The weaker obligation disappears and there is no motivation to change things so that future dilemmas do not arise. There is no way, then, to account for the sense that we ought to learn from our mistakes. On my broad reading of Marcus, in which we take seriously our collective responsibility, we are very much expected to learn from our mistakes. We know there are untoward consequences when we are in a dilemma, and we know we ought to try to arrange our institutions differently to avoid such dilemmas. On the alternative view, nothing changes, and we go on as before. Since on my view we try to learn from such experiences and are motivated to make changes, I suggest we may find ourselves able to meet more of our obligations than before. The moral progress I described above is one in which we may incur additional obligations, but this learning is moral progress, since we may find ourselves better able to meet those obligations.



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Here someone may object that the difference isn't so straight- forward. After all, it is open to anyone to add in to their account a first-order obligation to do better. What makes the residue or second- order aspect so important if other views could be easily made to incorporate the same outcomes?37 My response is that a residue account is preferable because it gives us understanding into how those general imperatives to "do better" arise, and thus, gives us specific information regarding the sense in which we ought to do better, something a first-order addition lacks. For instance, in the case of the father, the residue account explains why, and in what sense, he is not doing well enough, and furthermore offers particular directions for him to take. A first-order imperative would be either vague, or would be quietly taking advantage of the considerations of the residue analysis before cloaking them in a first-order account. If that's the case, why not simply embrace a residue account?

A particular sort of "moral progress" is emerging; how does it compare with ways that moral progress has been traditionally understood? Many accounts of moral progress have come to us via a tradition that originated with Marx or Hegel, with an emphasis on comparing cultures across historical eras.38 The kind of progress that emerges here, however, should be understood as occurring within a particular culture or cultural tradition (or on an even smaller scale), over a short span of time. As in the Hegel/Marx tradition, Ruth Macklin's essay "Moral Progress"39 focuses on comparing cultures, but we can make use of her definition here.

Macklin's "principle of humaneness" is as follows:

One culture, society, or historical era exhibits a higher degree of moral progress than another if the first shows more sensitivity to (less tolerance of) the pain and suffering of human beings than does the second, as expressed in the laws, customs, institutions, and practices of the respective societies or eras.40

The principle explicitly defines moral progress partly in terms of our behavior, since it judges our institutions, practices, etc. If we act to avoid dilemmas, we meet more of our duties to kindness, which satisfies Macklin's criterion for progress. Under Macklin's definition, moral progress does not have to include a change in moral principles. By defining progress in terms of our cultural practices, Macklin allows that an increase in our abilities to live up to those principles in a practical way suffices to indicate progress. This




is precisely what I have argued a residue account provides for: a way to understand why and how we are motivated to change our communities so that we can better live up to those principles, by meeting more of our obligations.

There is one further reason one might be troubled by residue accounts; I claim it will seem less troubling in this context. It might be argued that if we take Marcus's second-order principle seriously, we might be apt to judge too harshly those who do get into moral dilemmas. In her essay, Marcus describes her view as it applies to the case of abortion.41 She argues that whether to have an abortion can be a moral dilemma, and in that case avoidance of pregnancy will avoid such a conflict. It is easy to imagine that a person who puts enormous care into not getting pregnant might judge harshly someone who found herself wanting an abortion. In general, someone who uses great care to avoid getting into mutually conflicting obligations might lose patience with someone who did not exercise such care. I think this is a reasonable objection, but I think it is an objection that arises whenever there is moral progress, or even moral change. In any case in which our expectations change over time, as I have argued they do on a generalization of Marcus's views, we run the risk that those who change the slowest will be too strongly condemned for not adapting quickly enough. This is unfortunate, but as an objection, it only carries the weight it would carry as an objection against moral change in general. I think this is not much weight at all. We wouldn't discourage the Humane Society just because they judge too harshly people who don't spay their pets.42

V. CONCLUSION

The residue that lingers after one faces a moral dilemma is an important part of Marcus's general account. I have argued that properly understood, the residue need not function in a way that runs counter to our moral intuitions. We may use Greenspan's perspectival approach to deal with the stringency objection, and we may address other problems with a broadened interpretation of the residue, on which communities and the context of the situation are brought into play. This highlights the wider implications of a



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Marcusian second-order regulative principle: that we are obliged to organize not just our own lives, but also our communal institutions, to try to avoid moral dilemmas. Understood this way, we see that the residues that are left by dilemmas often extend to communities, and so are neither too harsh nor irrelevant.

Furthermore, once the residue is conceived this way, my exten- sion of Marcus's view helps explain why and how we have moral progress. The acknowledgement of the moral features of the residue and the second-order regulative principle explain the intuitively correct moral fact that we should try to arrange things, as much as possible, so as to satisfy as many obligations as we can. In so doing, they explain how and why our obligations change. The view offers an analysis on which all of these are fundamental moral issues, and they reflect fundamental moral facts. This account is especially useful in a world like ours, in which we don't know the extent of our capabilities. The regulative principle obliges us to try for an extraordinary ideal; in so trying, we may find we meet with more success than we had thought possible.

NOTES

* Many thanks to Penelope Maddy and Ruth Marcus for valuable discussion and comments on drafts; also to Patricia Greenspan for helpful comments. Thanks to the audience at the Southern California Philosophy Conference, October 1999, for their interesting questions, and to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord for conversation which improved my understanding of these matters. l To fill this out, we could either insist that one side is always stronger, or we could stipulate that in cases of equality, our all-things-considered obligation is to pick one altemative and fulfill it. See Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Philadelphia: Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 16-25; Alan Donagan, "Consistency in Rationalist Moral Systems," Journal of Philosophy (1984): 291-309; and David Brink, "Moral Conflict and its Structure," Philosophical Review 103 (1994) 215- 247, reprinted in H. E. Mason, ed., Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 102-126). 2 Earl Conee suggests this in his "Against Moral Dilemmas," Philosophical Review 90 (1982), pp. 87-97. Reprinted in C. Gowans, ed., Moral Dilemmas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 239-249. 3 Ruth Barcan Marcus, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency," Journal of Philos- ophy 77 (1980): 121-36. Page numbers refer to the reprinting in Gowans, pp. 188-204.




4 Ruth Barcan Marcus, "More about Moral Dilemmas," in H. E. Mason, ed., Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5 Marcus, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency," p. 195. 6 Marcus, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency," p. 194. 7 Marcus, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency," p. 189. 8 I call it the stringency objection because it suggests that if dilemmas are real, then the agent seems blamed for things beyond his control, and thus the moral requirements involved are too strict, or "stringent." 9 This objection is raised in several of the papers cited in the next section, especially by Philippa Foot. A form of it was also raised by Geoffrey Sayre- McCord, in "A Moral Argument Against Moral Dilemmas," at a colloquium at the University of California, Irvine (January 14, 2000). The formulation given by Sayre-McCord focused specifically on the unfairness of any code that demands the impossible. It then relied on this unfairness as grounds for rejecting a code that allows dilemmas in favor of a modified version of that code that didn't generate dilemmas but otherwise (so far as possible) contained the other moral features of the code. 10 Bemard Williams, "Ethical Consistency," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXIX (1965), reprinted in Gowans, pp. 115-137, page numbers refer to the reprinting in Gowans. See especially pp. 123-124. Foot's views are explained in her two papers, "Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma," Journal of Philosophy LXXX (1983), pp. 379-398, and "Moral Dilemmas Revisited" in Sinott-Armstrong, Raffman, and Asher, eds., Modality, Morality, and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 117-128. Foot and Williams use "remainder" for what I am calling the residue. l l Williams, "Ethical Consistency," p. 129. 12 Williams, "Ethical Consistency," p. 122. 13 Williams, "Ethical Consistency,"' p. 125. This is a simplification of Williams's views. He does end by considering the possibility that while the feelings are irrational, it may sometimes be best to be irrational. 14 Foot, "Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma," p. 382. 15 Foot, "Moral Dilemmas Revisited," p. 126-127 and "Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma," p. 387. 16 Foot, "Moral Dilemmas Revisited," p. 127. 17 Note that on Marcus's view, it is not necessary that there should be any punish- ment or public sanctions, what matters is that the weaker obligation has not fallen away. 18 Patricia Greenspan, "Perspectival Guilt," in Modality, Morality, and Belief (see note IO), pp. 129-151. 19 Greenspan, "Perspectival Guilt," p. 142. 20 Greenspan, "Perspectival Guilt," p. 147. 21 Foot, "Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma," p. 387. 22 These worries are suggested by Greenspan in her "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt," Philosophical Studies 43 (1983): 117-125. She addresses them later, in her book,



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Practical Guilt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and to some extent in "Perspectival Guilt." Because the moral I want to draw diverges from that later discussion, I will explain the issues independently of her proposed resolution. There is some overlap in our discussion; where appropriate I will make note of it. 23 William Styron, Sophie's Choice (New York, Bantam, 1979). The scene is described on pages 480-484. 24 Greenspan, "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt," p. 118. 25 Greenspan, "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt," p. 121. 26 Greenspan, "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt," p. 120. 27 Greenspan, "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt," p. 123. 28 Styron, Sophie's Choice, p. 478. 29 Styron, Sophie's Choice, p. 478. 30 Greenspan discusses collective action in her later "Perspectival Guilt," and in Practical Guilt. One virtue of the perspectival approach to guilt, she says, is that an individual could be part of a group that is guilty, without being personally blamed, if he did nothing wrong. That person could clear himself by focusing on the right perceptual slices (p. 135). She also suggests a distinction between holding someone guilty in a backward-looking sense and holding them responsible in a forward-looking sense (p. 137). Her comments are in the spirit of the analysis I am suggesting here. 31 Greenspan, "Moral Dilemmas and Guilt." See especially page 121. 32 Thanks to Patricia Greenspan for bringing these questions to my attention. 33 One other question might be whether it is true that a feeling of guilt would motivate us in the way described here. Perhaps it would have an opposite effect. For example, the guilt might function the way shame sometimes does, when it causes us to go on as before rather than face unpleasant realities. I don't know, as a matter of psychology, to what extent this might be the case, and the problem raises difficult questions. It seems to me that in a wide enough range of cases, its plausible that the motivation might work roughly the way I've suggested. The relevance of exceptions to this raises complex issues about the proper relationship between real emotional life and moral theory, issues I can't address here. I do discuss some related things in the last two paragraphs of this section. For more on emotions and morality, see Patricia Greenspan, Practical Guilt. 34 When he considers whether the pain is the real motivator. See the beginning of section II, and see Williams, "Ethical Consistency," page 125. He argues that the reason the pain isn't the true motivator is that the residue arises via a "moral thought," but doesn't consider what happens if there is no bad outcome at all. 35 This is an oversimplification of what is a subtle and complex problem, but I think the basic idea can be captured easily in an example. For those of us who think the right of women to vote has a moral component, we might have intuitions that fighting against that right now is reprehensible, while feeling simultaneously that fighting against it years ago is a much milder moral transgression, if it is one at all. 36 Greenspan hints at something like this in her discussion of the appropriateness of guilt. See note 30, above.




37 Again, thanks to Patricia Greenspan for raising this. 38 See, for instance, Howard Selsam, Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World (New York: International Publishers 1965); Donald Hodges, "'Moral Progress' From Philosophy to Technology," Philosophy and Phenomen- ological Research 28, pp. 430-436; Leslie Sklair, "Moral Progress and Social Theory," Ethics 79, pp. 239-234; and Leslie Sklair, "Moral Progress Revisited," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31, pp. 433-439. These works aren't entirely limited to the Marx/Hegel approach, but to the extent that they depart from it, the questions are more abstract than those considered here. 39 Ruth Macklin, "Moral Progress," Ethics 87 (1977): 370-382. 40 Macklin, "Moral Progress," pp. 371-372. This is only a part of Macklin's complete definition. 41 Marcus, "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency," p. 131-132. 42 I am not claiming that abortion is an analogous case. Merely that it would be for someone who already conceived of abortion as a moral dilemma.

Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697 U.S.A.



moral dilemmas, collective responsibility, and moral progress

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