An ‘Ought’ Not Acted Upon Sample Clauses

An ‘Ought’ Not Acted Upon. The first condition follows from the account of moral conflict sketched out earlier in this chapter. In short, dirt arises when a moral imperative is not acted upon. This ought is double- countable in that it lingers as an evaluative metric independently of its role in determining what should be done. This condition is necessary, yet not sufficient, for generating moral dirt. I present these oughts as being of a morally important character: not necessarily moral themselves, but if they are non-moral oughts, such as political efficacy, it should still be possible to evaluate their moral importance.12 What is the substance of an ‘ought’ not acted upon? I believe that these are best viewed as resulting from conflicts between competing values, which we can call the value-conflict (VC) framework. The primary alternative to this view in DH debates is to view these conflicts as instead arising between competing moral frameworks when incommensurable kinds of imperative clash. The right thing to do according to one of these frameworks might well be the wrong thing to do according to another. There are two prominent ‘competing-framework’ views: consequentialism-versus-deontology and public-versus-private. The first is to argue that the competing demands of consequentialism and deontology (hereafter the consequentialism-versus-deontology, or CvD, view) generate uncancelled and potentially dirtying demands. This is how Xxxxxx (1973: 161) presented DH: an act “may be exactly the right thing to do in utilitarian terms”, yet still entail committing a moral wrong and running afoul of “absolutist” moral prohibitions. Xxxxxx regards both deontological (usually absolutist) and consequentialist (usually utilitarian) schools of thought as “important but potentially irreconcilable strands in our moral thinking” (Xxxxx, 2008: 79). The Walzerian politician, then, is “torn between [her] deontological and consequentialist commitments” (Xxxx, 2019a: 2-3).13 The second approach is to say that these conflicts result from a clash between the requirements of public and private morality (hereafter PvP). Dirt arises from doing something that is “right” by the standards of public morality (such as fulfilling the obligations of one’s role), yet “wrong” by the standards of private morality (such as integrity). Different roles purportedly demand allegiance to different moral theories, hence the conflict. This view assumes that DH are exclusive to politics, or at least to politics and only a f...