Jacqueline recently summarized her moral views as follows:
(J1) Knowingly harming someone or their property through force or fraud is immoral. Aiding in this harm is immoral. The exception to this is necessary force for self defense.
(J2) Harming someone accidentally (without knowledge that your actions would cause harm), allowing someone to come to harm through your inaction, and actions that have nothing to do with helping or hurting anyone other than one’s self are amoral.
(J3) Intentionally acting in such a way as to prevent harm to others, or actively helping them, is moral.
(Above, I’ve inserted "(J1)," etc., for ease of reference.)
Jacqueline seems to take "moral" to mean "worthy of praise," and "immoral" to mean "worthy of condemnation." So for Jacqueline, "moral" is probably not equivalent to "morally permissible," since some morally permissible actions (e.g. chewing gum) are not worthy of praise. Perhaps Jacqueline’s "moral" isn’t equivalent to "morally obligatory," either, since many morally obligatory actions are not worthy of praise. (For instance: We do not normally pat one another on the back for not-raping.)
I think Jacqueline’s view is interesting, and in this post I’ll try to say what I think is interesting about it. But before beginning it’s worth noting that Jacqueline’s view seems clearly false. For instance, it seems that "allowing someone to come to harm through inaction" can be immoral, at least sometimes, despite (J2)’s implication to the contrary. To illustrate: Suppose I am a paramedic, and have performed the Heimlich maneuver many times. I am eating lunch with my mother when she begins to choke. Undoubtedly, it would be immoral — i.e., "worthy of condemnation" — if I were to sit quietly in my chair and watch while my mother is suffocated by a piece of ham. Given this susceptibility of Jacqueline’s view to such obvious counterexamples, it is interesting to ask the question: What considerations could possibly motivate this view?
Politically, Jacqueline is a libertarian, and some parts of Jacqueline’s moral view sound like certain typical formulations of libertarianism. For instance, if you substitute "ought to be illegal" for "immoral" in (J1), you get:
(L1) Knowingly harming someone or their property through force or fraud [ought to be illegal]. Aiding in this harm [ought to be illegal]. The exception to this is necessary force for self defense.
(L1) is the sort of thing that libertarians are usually inclined to say, so let’s assume that (L1) is a consequence of libertarianism. Now, it is usually worthy of moral condemnation to do something which ought to be illegal. (There are exceptions to this, but they are uninteresting for our purposes). From this it follows that if (L1) is true, then (J1) is probably true, as well. Therefore: Since we have assumed that (L1) is a consequence of libertarianism, (J1) seems to be a consequence of libertarianism, as well.
The fact that (J1) seems to follow from libertarianism might lead us to believe that (J2) and (J3) could also be derived from libertarianism. If so, then perhaps what motivates Jacqueline’s moral view is simply Jacqueline’s libertarianism. But this turns out not to be the case. For though (J1) does seem to follow from libertarianism, I do not think the other components of Jacqueline’s moral view can be similarly derived. Consider two action-types:
(a) Allowing someone to come to harm through inaction
(b) Intentionally acting in such a way as to prevent harm to others
According to libertarianism, I take it, both of these kinds of actions have precisely the same status: Neither of them ought to be illegal; the state "should stay out of" them. But according to Jacqueline, the first action is "amoral" (given (J2)), while the second is "moral" (given (J3)). Since libertarianism fails to distinguish between (a) and (b), while Jacqueline’s moral view does distinguish between them, it should follow that Jacqueline’s moral view cannot be motivated solely by libertarianism.
In fact, it would be perfectly consistent with libertarianism to say that actions of type (a) are immoral, as most of us will want to say, and as Jacqueline, apparently, does not want to say. Libertarians think that actions of type (a) ought not be illegal, of course — but this does not commit them to say that actions of type (a) are not immoral. After all, intuitively, there seem to be many things which are immoral even though they ought not be illegal (e.g. cheating on one’s partner). So the libertarian is able to consistently condemn actions of type (a). Yet Jacqueline’s view holds back from doing this.
I do not see any easy way to explain this aspect of Jacqueline’s moral code. I suspect that parts of Jacqueline’s views (e.g. (J1)) are inspired by libertarianism, but I do not understand the other parts. Perhaps the best way to understand Jacqueline’s view is as an attempt to graft the categories of legality onto the categories of morality. One should expect such attempts to be made, since in the popular media, discussions about morality and legality often intertwine and flow into one another, and pundits from both the left and the right often seem to see no important difference between these two types of categories. I suspect that this tendency to conflate legality and morality has led many people to believe that to say that something is immoral is the same as to say that it ought to be illegal. As a consequence, many people seem to exhibit two different, though logically related, tendencies:
(i) If you think that something is immoral, you will tend to believe that it ought to be illegal;
(ii) If you think that something ought not be illegal, you will tend to believe that it is not immoral.
Possibly, Jacqueline’s (J2) can be explained as a consequence of tendency (ii). Jacqueline clearly believes that allowing someone to come to harm through inaction ought not be illegal. Perhaps she infers from this that allowing someone to come to harm through inaction is therefore not immoral. If so, I think this would be an invalid inference.
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