What Isn’t Moral Dirt Sample Clauses

What Isn’t Moral Dirt. If a case does not meet these three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, then it is not dirtying. What sort of cases does this definition exclude? As discussed, not every moral choice that involves a morally significant opportunity cost counts as dirtying. To be dirtying, there must be intrinsic costs to the path that is chosen, dirt that persists regardless of whether or not it is part of an ATC-justified whole. This creates a lower boundary of scope, beyond which choices are not dirtying. Illustrating this lower scope is important to defeat the “enthusiasm to detect the sway of dirty hands” (Xxxxx, 2018: 2) found in parts of the literature. Such an enthusiasm leads to the terminology being applied in a way that both mischaracterises other issues and deprives dirt of its distinctiveness. I hope to avoid this challenge by sticking rigidly to the three conditions. This section will look at some of the cases that are excluded by the definition presented in the last section. Firstly, there are cases where agents are faced with painful and perhaps even “horrendous” dilemmas, where obligations and duties clash, yet nothing can rightly be said against either the agent, their decision-making, or their integrity and internal virtues. Moral remainders arise, double-counted costs are incurred, and oughts are not acted upon, but the agent incurs no dirt at the point of decision-making. This category includes cases known as “lifeboat ethics” (Xxxxxx, 1974), wherein limited resources or the natural facts of the world prevent us honouring all our duties or attending to what is owed to each individual. A lifeboat captain deciding who to save, a ship captain jettisoning cargo to keep the ship afloat, and choices about distributing insufficient medical supplies are all such examples (De Wijze, 2007: 13-14). Lifeboat ethics cases are difficult but not for the same reasons as ATC-justified dirt. Provided there is no wrongdoing in the selection process and the agent bears no responsibility for the shortage, no dirt is inflicted (and such dirt would be hard to justify besides). The very act of choosing in these predicaments is not dirtying. There might well be additional factors that make the decision dirtying, but the lifeboat ethics framing itself does not entail dirt. It might be that entering a career where these decisions are to be expected or mandatory might require adopting certain dirtying dispositions or engaging with certain dirtying institutions. However, th...