The moral problem of worse actors

Abstract

Individuals and institutions sometimes have morally stringent reasons to not do a given action. For example, an oil company might have morally stringent reasons to refrain from providing revenue to a genocidal regime, or an engineer might have morally stringent reasons to refrain from providing her expertise in the development of weapons of mass destruction. But in some cases, if the agent does not do the action, another actor will do it with much worse consequences. For example, the oil company might know their assets will be bought by a company with worse environmental and labor practices. Or the engineer might know her position will be filled by a more ambitious and amoral engineer. I call this the moral problem of worse actors (MPWA). MPWA gives reason, at least some of the time, to consider otherwise morally impermissible actions permissible or even obligatory. On my account, doing the action in the circumstances of MPWA remains morally objectionable even if permissible or obligatory, and this brings additional moral responsibilities and obligations to the actor. Similarly, not doing the action in the circumstances of MPWA may also bring additional (but different) moral responsibilities and obligations. Acknowledging MPWA creates considerable challenges, as many bad actors may appeal to it to justify morally objectionable action. In this paper, I develop a set of strategies for individuals and institutions to handle MPWA. This includes appeals to integrity and the proper attribution of expressive responsibility, regulatory responsibility, and compensatory responsibility. I also address a set of related concerns, including worries about incentivizing would-be bad actors, concerns about epistemic uncertainty, and the problem of mala in se exceptions.

• normative theory
• non-ideal theory
• applied ethics
• global justice
• dirty hands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Holly Lawford-Smith, Eamon Aloyo, Luara Ferracioli, and several anonymous reviewers for very helpful written comments. Audiences at Oregon State University and Australian National University provided excellent feedback as well. All mistakes remain my own.

Notes

1 I concur with Michael Stocker who argues that the moral structure of dirty hands problems, in which conflicts between what one normally ought not do and what would bring about much better consequences, are a regular feature of moral conflict. See Michael Stocker, ‘Dirty Hands and Ordinary Life’, in Cruelty and Deception: The Controversy over Dirty Hands in Politics, ed. Paul Rynard and David P. Shugarman (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 32–3.

2 As a Holly Lawford-Smith suggested to me, dirty hands problems do not have clean solutions. If they did, they would not be dirty hands problems at all.

3 Bernard Williams, ‘Integrity’, in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge, 1973), 97–8. It is of course striking in this passage how deeply unjust gender norms informs Williams design of the case (that the mother working places great strain on the family, that the father should be the primary breadwinner, and so on). Nonetheless, the general structure of the case, considering undertaking harmful actions that would be done with greater fervor by another, remains useful for our purposes.

4 I believe it makes sense to talk of institutional moral agents, and that the duties these agents bear are not reducible to the duties of their individual members, and that this position is important for conducting foreign policy. However, nothing in this article relies on this belief. For a plausible defense of this view, see Toni Erskine, ‘Kicking Bodies and Damning Souls: The Danger of Harming “Innocent” Individuals While Punishing “Delinquent” States’. Ethics & International Affairs 24, no. 3 (2010): 261–85. For a dissenting view, see Seumas Miller, The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

5 And before revenues were coming in, one expects Sudan's creditors provided finance in anticipation of future payment from oil revenues. On the role of oil in Sudan, and the changes from western to non-western oil companies, see Luke Patey, ‘State Rules: Oil Companies and Armed Conflict in Sudan’. Third World Quarterly, 28 (2007): 997–1016.

6 In 2010, 44% of all arms trade agreements in developing countries were signed with the United States, followed by 24% with Russia, and 5% with China. The following year, the US increased its sales to an astonishing 79% of all agreements with developing countries. Thom Shanker, ‘US Arms Sales Make up Most of Global Market’, New York Times, August 26, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/26/world/middleeast/united-states-arms-sales-rise.html?ref=middleeast (accessed May 15, 2014).

7 This example is perhaps the weakest of the four. It is difficult to assess the degree to which arms sellers have influence over rights abusers. Arguably, because they are in an intimate and influential relationship, such influence exists. But in many cases it may not. Furthermore, even if the influence exists, it is not clear how much harm can be prevented by the arms seller in preventing human rights abuses. Nonetheless, most commentators believe that the sale of arms confers political influence. Consider, for example, the relationships between Russia and Syria, or China and Sudan. In both cases analysts suspect that Russia and China provide international protection to pariah regimes, in part, to maintain favorable economic ties including arms sales.

8 To a lesser extent the multi-polarity of potential actors is also present in some individual cases. For example, if George is only one of five potential people with the skills to work at the chemical manufacturer, and only he and one other person are highly skilled such that they could advance the company's projects, then he might reasonably hope to dissuade at least one more, or more optimistically four more, potential employees from working at the plant. But if there are many dozens of equally qualified applicants, and many are hard to contact or unlikely to be persuaded by George's moral argument, then he faces MPWA.

9 At the end of the campaign, nearly 200 American companies had left South Africa and over $1 billion in capital had left the country.

10 I concur with Altman and Wellman, who argue, ‘If one accepts the benefits of seriously unjust social arrangements, then one is required to contribute to efforts to eliminate (or, at least, ameliorate) those arrangements and, if feasible, one's contribution must be such that it does more to weaken the arrangements than one's acceptance of the benefits does to perpetuate them … One does have a duty to neither support nor profit from institutions that wrongly harm others, but it is a duty that does not demand moral purity. Rather, it demands a course of action that, on balance and over time, is reasonably calculated to do more to undermine the injustices with which one is complicit than to perpetuate them’. Andrew Altman and Christopher Heath Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 145.

11 If one finds this statement unfair, because the consequentialist might not think that broken fingers meet the threshold of counting in the consequential calculation, then just adjust the example to some case that exceeds this threshold. For example, ‘A is morally required to commit genocide to prevent one additional death’.

12 I am thankful to Gerhard Overland for raising this issue with me.

13 It is a conceptual possibility that a good person always does the bad action to prevent worse actors from doing it. Throughout their life as a moral agent, they consistently prevent bad actors from entering, but express remorse, condemn the action, psychologically regret that they must do it, internally and externally regulate conduct, and make compensation. But in the real world where people are constituted as most normal people are, there is good reason that, from the outside, we should doubt that people who consistently do the bad action are in fact giving due weight to deontological reasons and, from the inside, are constituted in such a way that they are not morally corrupted by their persistent involvement in these bad actions.

14 Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan, ‘Is there a Duty to Vote?’ Social Philosophy and Policy 17, no. 1 (2000): 80.

15 Robert Goodin discusses what I have termed expressive responsibility in the context of norm violation. He argues that, ‘When honouring social norms in the breach, therefore, you must engage in the more florid and rhetorical displays associated with civil disobedience. You acknowledge the rule that you are breaking, and … you openly acknowledge that you are indeed breaking it. You engage in lots of hand wringing … You promise faithfully to comply with the norm under other circumstances in the future, and you entreat others to do likewise. You emphasize that your action should not be taken as precedent by others’. Robert Goodin, ‘Norms Honoured in the Breach’, in Norms and Values, ed. Michael Baurmann, Geoffrey Brennan, Robert E. Goodin and Nicholas Southwood (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2010), 296.

16 This is my term, not his, for the general model in which a group of countries adopt a policy and undertake coercive measures to see that the policy is adopted in non-compliant countries. Another prominent ‘club and sanction’ proposal is Joseph Stiglitz's model for climate change reform. Stiglitz argues that countries can agree to a set of emissions targets, and countries which fail to meet those targets can be sanctioned in proportion to the degree to which they fail to meet their obligations. Such sanctions in effect impose a carbon tax on the non-compliant country (though the full tax is at least initially borne by exporting industries), thus incentivizing countries to comply, and compensating both industries who are compliant (by ensuring they are competing on a more level playing field, at least with regards to climate emissions) and generating needed finance for climate adaptation and compensation. See Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 161–86.

17 See Leif Wenar, ‘Property Rights and the Resource Curse’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008): 2–32.

18 Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Petit, The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

19 OECD Guidelines for multinational companies, the United Nations Global Compact, company specific codes of ethics, and other efforts may be representative of this approach to norm development.

20 We need some principled reason to determine who counts as in the group of potential actors that bears regulatory responsibility. For example, if an oil company has no track record of operating in conflict affected countries, do they bear regulatory responsibility for oil extraction in those countries? I am inclined to follow Iris Marion Young's ‘social connection’ model of responsibility. For Young, even if I do not directly cause a harm, if I participate in a system in which harm is foreseeable, and share some social connection to the harmed, I bear responsibility for adjusting that system or compensating the harmed. In this case, even though the oil company does not work in conflict-affected countries, it nonetheless participates in and benefits from the overall system of international trade in oil, of which trade from bad countries is a central component. See Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 95–123.

21 Companies appear to implicitly accept this point, as they are at pains to highlight community development and outreach projects in countries that are plagued by human rights abuses.

22 On the relevance of the determinacy of an agent to those whom might claim compensation or assistance, see Violetta Igneski ‘Perfect and Imperfect Duties to Aid’ Social Theory and Practice 32, no. 3 (2006): 439–66.

23 Thomas Nagel, ‘War and Massacre’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 2 (1972): 123–44.

24 Egregiously, opponents of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain argued that such a halt in the trade by the British would result in other nations increasing their trade. Perhaps interestingly, part of the response by then Prime Minister William Pitt to this argument was to note that other countries would not in fact replace the British trade, as the French were busy putting down rebellion in St. Dominique and other countries did not have the capital to increase their presence in the trade. But, this was quickly followed by this exclamation: ‘How, Sir! Is this enormous evil ever to be eradicated if every nation is thus to prudentially to wait till the concurrence of all the world shall have been obtained?’ Quoted in Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in Fight to Free and Empire's Slaves (New York: First Mariner Books, 2006), 233.