Alan Tapper
Australian Ethics
Winter, 2024
Are there some things we should never do? Ordinary folk and some philosophers think there are. What are they? The list seems at first quite short. A typical answer is that we should not commit murder, assault, rape, theft and fraud. These things are “wrong in themselves”, or, more colloquially, “just plain wrong”.
Some philosophers, so-called “consequentialists”, argue that nothing is just plain wrong. They invent ways in which murder might be sometimes justified by imagining a case in which the consequences of a murder are so good that it would be justified “all things considered”. This is a debate I’m not discussing here.
My interest is in whether the list of things that are commonly thought of as “just plain wrong” is a short or a long list. I think it is longer than you might guess. In fact I think we are surprisingly inventive in coming up with “wrongs”.
Start with the list of traditional wrongs. In addition to the four above, we can add these: manslaughter; affray; adultery; treason; sedition; treachery; kidnap; extortion; larceny; negligence; slander; libel; defamation; chicanery; malfeasance; embezzlement; perjury; demagoguery; racketeering; trespass; profiteering; and bestiality.
The fact that these behaviours are often legal offences does not detract from their being morally wrong. They are often made illegal just because of their moral wrongness. And the moral wrongness is not completely covered by the fact that they are deemed wrong in law.
Coming to more contemporary kinds of wrongness, we can list the “isms” that are wrong in themselves. These include racism, sexism, antisemitism, elitism, speciesism, heterosexism, ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and white supremacism. Some old isms are cronyism, sectarianism, jingoism and fanaticism. Bigotry is the general term for these kinds of wrong.
Special mention should be given to “wowserism”. Wikipedia tells us that is not just an Australian invention; Kiwis also invented it. (So it is like the pavlova, I guess.) The great poet, C.J. Dennis, defined a wowser as “an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder”.
In regard to sexual orientation, the wrongness is usually deemed a kind of phobia –– homophobia; transphobia, etc –– even though “phobia” strictly speaking denotes a fear of something, such as arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, rather than a hatred of something. “Fatphobia” is a recent inclusion in this type of list.
We also have “miso” words: misogyny, misandry, misanthropy. Apparently the “miso” bit comes from ancient Greek.
Then there are various kinds of bad character or bad motive. For example, vindictiveness, spitefulness, hatefulness, smugness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, insincerity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, prudishness, and so on.
Modern life creates new kinds of wrong behaviour. For example, hooning, scamming, spamming, rorting, gouging, grifting, stalking, sexual harassment, groping, phishing, joy-riding, carjacking, fleecing, influence-peddling. To white-washing, we have lately added green-washing. Bootlegging is an old practice, but it has acquired a modern variant. Blame-shifting is a new name for an old wrong. Carpet-bagging is an old American term that is now recognised worldwide.
The philosopher who discussed these sorts of words (and from whom I learned to look out for them) is Julius Kovesi. He called them “complete moral concepts”. A wrong being “complete” means that it is deemed wrong as part of its definition.
(Kovesi introduced this terminology in his 1967 book Moral Notions. There is a short biography of him at https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/quartet-biographies/. See also Australian Ethics for 2012: http://aapae.org.au/australian-ethics/julius-kovesi-on-concepts-and-moral-philosophy)
Kovesi was clear that “completeness” is not an indicator of the magnitude of a wrong. A thing can be completely wrong but only a minor wrong, as is obvious from the examples given. There may be “incomplete” wrongs that are as bad as the worst complete wrongs.
Talking about “complete” wrongness will probably trigger some worries about religious influence on our moral outlook, which for many people aspires to be quite secular. The religious moral concepts include sin, blasphemy, sacrilege, and profanity.
These may seem to be complete moral concepts, but they should not bother non-believers. Only a believer can blaspheme. A non-believer may use words which would be blasphemy if spoken by a believer, but he or she is not blaspheming. One might be especially offensive to another person by using terms one knows he will find offensive, but that is not at all the same as being blasphemous.
My main point is that we have always had ideas of things that are “just plain wrong”, and we continue to produce new such ideas. It seems that we can’t do without them. Why?
Maybe they function like survey markers. Perhaps by reference to these markers we can figure out where a given situation is located on “the moral landscape”. Faced with a moral problem, perhaps we should look around for the nearest “survey markers”. Maybe that is a helpful way of shedding light on our problems.
On Kovesi’s view, when we make a moral judgment, we either bring an action or character under a complete moral concept or we reason analogically from such a concept to a certain case that is not itself fully described by any such concept. This is somewhat like the survey marker view.
Kovesi had sophisticated views on these matters. I will end by quoting him at length.
“An intuitionist is able to intuit an obligation in a situation only if the situation is described by a moral term which is complete; a deductive system can have major premisses only if the crucial term in the major premiss is a complete moral term; a utilitarian can have a highest good only if that highest good is described by a complete term; a positivist can claim that words like ‘wrong’ add nothing significant to our judgment if what we judge to be wrong is described by a complete moral term, and the existentialist can claim that principles are no help in one’s moral decisions only if the situation is such that it cannot be described by the help of a complete moral term.
The logic of complete moral notions also explains how these systems succeed in their various ways in distilling all value from our ordinary life and language, leaving them empty of value, concentrating it into a ‘purely evaluative element’. For an intuitionist like [HA] Prichard the consideration of facts is not a moral activity but is like any other empirical consideration: the moral act is the act of intuition. The positivists only substitute an expression of attitude towards, in place of an intuition about, something which they think can be empirically ascertained.
In other systems the ‘purely descriptive’ statement of our acts takes either the form of a minor premiss with which our obligation is deductively connected via a major premiss, or the form of a causal statement with which our obligation is causally connected via a highest good. The existentialists are no exception and provide another variation of this pattern. Their world is without values and the purely evaluative element is there in the claim that we create values by our decisions. We have seen that what is created in these situations is that formal element in the absence of which there could not be a complete moral term.”