The Accidentally Moral Incident and the Need to More Rigorously Account for Positive Moral Worth

Kant left us with a counterintuitive and less-than-savory criterion for the positive moral worth of actions. Phillipa Foot took on the challenge of untangling and making better sense of the mechanisms underlying Kant’s notion. An example raised by Portmore suggests that Foot’s criteria may not be sufficient. I will continue this conversation as follows. In section one, I will briefly relate the relevant elements of Kant’s and Foot’s accounts of positive moral worth. In section two, I will outline Portmore’s example and address why we might or might not ascribe positive moral worth to that case. In section three, I will detail why this is a problem for Foot’s account and address why two potential explanations fall short. Ultimately, I will conclude that Foot’s notion of positive moral worth does not fully distinguish whether actions have moral worth because it does not account for actions impacted by accidents of circumstance.

I. Foot’s More Thorough Account

Foot (2002)[1] addresses Kant’s notion of “positive moral worth,” noting its counterintuitive conclusion and history of scholarly redress (pp. 12-3). As Foot relates, Kant argues that an action only has moral worth if it is motivated by a sense of duty. To demonstrate this, she cites Kant’s well-trodden example of the case of two philanthropists: one who receives pleasure from his philanthropic endeavors, whom I call Willing Phil, and another who is more loathsome of the work but performs it anyway out of a sense of duty, whom I call Duteous Phil. He concludes that “the actions of the latter but not the former have moral worth” (Foot, 2002, p. 12).

To make better sense of Kant’s conclusion, Foot (2002) elaborates on what she takes to be the underlying mechanisms of positive moral worth, distinguishing whether an act is in accordance with virtue and whether virtue is displayed in the performance of the act. She links these factors to obtain the following definition: an act has positive moral worth if (1) it is in accordance with virtue and (2) it displays a virtue. Instead of identifying Duteous Phil’s actions as containing moral worth and Willing Phil’s actions as lacking moral worth, Foot finds that by separating the above factors, we can understand the actions of both as instantiating positive moral worth in different ways. For example, we might ascribe a strong degree of positive moral worth to Willing Phil if we recognize that (1) his actions are in accordance with virtue and (2) the ease with which he acts charitably demonstrates that he possesses a strong degree of sympathy—itself “part of the virtue,”—toward the objects of his charity (Foot, 2002, p. 14).

The actions of Duteous Phil may be more complex, according to Foot’s (2002) definition. Duteous Phil’s actions seem to be in accordance with virtue, satisfying (1) above. However, while he displays virtue by compelling himself to act, thus satisfying (2) above, the virtue displayed functions in a corrective manner: it is correcting for Duteous Phil’s lack of the abovementioned sympathy (Foot, 2002). Foot is willing to grant that this corrective instance is a display of virtue but holds that it is one of lesser value. On the other hand, Foot notes that if Duteous Phil’s lack of sympathy is caused by sorrowful afflictions clouding and guiding his mind, as Kant suggests, then his display of virtue overcoming those afflictions evinces much greater moral worth than in the corrective case. As I understand it, she partly attributes this difference in worth to whether the obstacle to moral action is intrinsic or extrinsic; for example, whether the obstacle is an intrinsic deficit of moral motivation or an extrinsic factor compelling moral indifference. Foot’s example of this is the difference between the individual whose decision not to steal overcomes a temptation rooted in character versus a temptation rooted in circumstance—viz., the circumstance that the individual is poor. For Foot, the latter demonstrates a greater sum of moral worth (Foot, 2002).

To the focal question of whether Foot’s more complex and conditional account correctly identifies which actions have positive moral worth, I can first conclude that it resolves the unsavory counterintuition of Kant’s philanthropist conclusion. As a result, Foot’s account of positive moral worth is more conservative and palatable than Kant’s while addressing the same apparent differences in the types of actions addressed. Additionally, compared to Kant’s sweeping and simplified argument from duty, Foot’s argument more thoroughly outlines the conditional factors that seem to affect moral worth. In those two senses, I find that Foot’s account succeeds better than Kant’s in picking out instances of positive moral worth with greater accuracy and precision. Still, I have one reservation causing me to question whether her definition is sufficient.

II. The Accident in Question: The Murder–Inclined Dog Lover

It is unclear whether Foot’s definition of positive moral worth accounts for accident or happenstance. By accident, I do not mean cases in which the consequence of a person’s action is counter to their intention at the outset of the action. An example of this kind of accident might be a bank employee who accesses a charity’s bank account without authorization to steal $10,000 but mistakenly processes the transfer in reverse, donating $10,000 instead. The charity lauds him for his contribution, which he does not attempt to recover for fear of being found out. I am not curious about this type of accident because the action does not seem to be in accordance with virtue and, therefore, does not satisfy the first criterion of Foot’s definition of positive moral worth, as outlined above. Even if it resulted in a net positive in a consequentialist sense, both the attempted act of theft and the decision to let the charity keep the money are iniquitously motivated.

The type of accident I will address is more compelling because it is less clear whether Foot’s criteria account for it. Portmore (2022) addresses this type of accident in his example of the dog lover who “protects a poodle from a boy’s kick by blocking his blow with her own leg…out of a concern for the dog’s welfare” (p. 278). The dog lover’s action, selflessly putting herself in harm’s way to defend the dog, appears to fit Foot’s criteria for positive moral worth: (1) protecting helpless animals from harm is an act of beneficence and is thereby in accordance with virtue; (2) asserting her leg to capture the boy’s kick is a display of beneficence and perhaps courage as well. Considering only this, by Foot’s definition (and, prima facie, perhaps by our own lights), we seem compelled to conclude that the action contains positive moral worth.

Portmore (2022) then invites us to suppose that the dog lover entirely lacked concern for the boy and, instead of blocking with her leg, would have killed him without hesitation to prevent the kick if only the means for the boy’s demise—perhaps a loaded gun—had been available to her. I reason that most of us, Foot included, would agree that the outsized reaction of killing the boy would not be considered in accordance with virtue. Granted, the dog lover did not kill the boy in our example, but only as a feature of circumstance—not of intent or desire. Perhaps she left her gun at home that day. In effect, the resulting action that we outlined above as meeting Foot’s criteria for positive moral worth only came about due to accident or happenstance. Had the dog lover remembered to carry her gun, the outcome and our judgment would have been otherwise.

III. The Need for a Non-Accidental Notion

I raise this example because it appears to bring into question whether Foot’s account correctly identifies those actions that have positive moral worth and, more to the point, those that do not. Had the dog lover carried her gun that day and, in the moment, overcome the temptation to use it, electing instead to block the boy’s kick, we could comfortably ascribe positive moral worth to her action. We might assign a lesser degree of value due to the corrective nature of the virtue employed, but we would have no reason to question the general attribution. However, our dog lover did not overcome the temptation to protect the poodle by taking the boy’s life; instead, an accident of circumstance voided her of the option. Throughout the incident, the dog lover’s willingness to kill the boy as an alternative and ideal course of action remained intact.

One possible reaction is to bite the bullet and accept that, unsavory though it may be, the attribution of positive moral worth stands: the murder-inclined dog lover was restricted from acting murderously and, facing that restriction, employed a virtuous act toward virtuous ends. However, biting that bullet requires accepting a notion of positive moral worth that captures the actions of morally unhinged individuals intent on committing incidentally unrealizable morally iniquitous actions. Not only does that seem like a particularly destructive bullet, but it is one that I perceive Foot would be reluctant to put to tooth after stating that “a man’s virtue may be judged by his innermost desires as well as by his intentions” and that differences in moral success and failure may be informed by “the disposition of the heart” (Foot, 2002, p. 4–5). If we focus only on the dog lover’s intentions toward the dog, we have no reason to question the moral status of her actions. However, taking into account her coinciding but incidentally unrealizable desire to kill the boy to arrive at the same end reveals a moral cavity in the disposition of her heart that is unaccounted for by Foot’s criteria for positive moral worth.

Another reaction might be to deny that the dog lover example met the second criterion set forth by Foot. When accounting for the sum of the dog lover’s desires, intentions, and actions, perhaps Foot might deny that the dog lover displayed a virtue by settling for the only action readily available to her at the moment, even though that action happened to present as a virtue. This is the reaction with which I am most sympathetic. However, it is not addressed in the source material. If Foot wants to assert as much, she does not do so in this source. Any argument favoring the above interpretation must rest only on an assumption about what Foot might have said because neither the immediate issue nor an underlying principle or framework for confidently inferring the answer is addressed. That is not to say that I fault her for not addressing something that may not have been brought to her attention. Foot seemed intent on more accurately and satisfyingly picking out instances of positive moral worth than those identified by Kant’s bequest, and this appears to be one way in which her account could be made that much more accurate.

Foot’s account of positive moral worth brings remarkable clarity to a question left unsatisfyingly and counterintuitively addressed by Kant. By considering separately the moral means and moral ends of individuals’ actions and requiring positive values in both for a notion of positive moral worth, Foot offers an account that is more intuitive and more precise. Still, there remains at least one clouded area left unexplored by Foot’s account: actions deemed to contain moral worth that seems begot of circumstance rather than by election of the moral agent. Without considering those accidentally moral incidents, Foot’s account does not completely and accurately distinguish actions that have moral worth from actions that lack moral worth.

Foot, P. (2002). Virtues and vices. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199252866.001.0001

Portmore, D. W. (2022). Moral worth and our ultimate moral concerns. In Oxford University Press eBooks (pp. 276–298). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192868886.003.0014

[1] Where beneficial to the flow of this paper, narrative references following an initial in-text citation will omit the publication year per section 8.16 of the APA 7^th Ed. Publication Manual.