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Mere moral failure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Julie Tannenbaum
Julie Tannenbaum*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Pomona College, 333 North College Way, Claremont, CA91711, USA
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

When, in spite of our good intentions, we fail to meet our obligations to others, it is important that we have the correct theoretical description of what has happened so that mutual understanding and the right sort of social repair can occur. Consider an agent who promises to help pick a friend up from the airport. She takes the freeway, forgetting that it is under construction. After a long wait, the friend takes an expensive taxi ride home. Most theorists and non-theorists react to such cases by either judging the agent’s action as a violation of her obligation to help or as having satisfied the only obligation she really had, namely to try to help. However, as I show, there are serious difficulties that arise from categorizing this agent’s action as satisfying or violating her obligation – difficulties that are avoided if we instead add “mere moral failures”; to the basic categories for moral evaluation. An agent merely fails when she neither satisfies nor violates her obligation. She is responsible for what she has done, yet without thereby having done wrong. Moreover, there is a recognizable (though nameless) reactive attitude reflecting the agent’s responsibility that falls between blame and mere regret, and is also importantly different from agent-regret. What I show is that we need not reach for blame as our only way of registering that an agent has morally failed another. While thus far overlooked, mere moral failure is by no means a rare occurrence, but rather a regular part of life among friends, family, investors and clients, police and citizens, doctors and patients, and many others.

Keywords

moral obligationviolation, wrongdoingblamefailureagent-regret
Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 58 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2015

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