Much of Michael Moore's awe-inspiring book Causation and Responsibility Footnote ¹ is concerned with the questions of what causation is and how it figures in morality and morally defensible law. To the questions of whether and why causation figures in morality and morally defensible law Moore devotes just one early chapter.Footnote ² This is understandable. Moore has written about these “whether” and “why” questions in some detail before, notably in a well-known essay included in his earlier book Placing Blame.Footnote ³ With this detailed work behind him, he is fully entitled to take a more robust attitude in Causation and Responsibility. Nowadays, he shows limited patience with the view that morality and morally defensible law have no place for causal attributions. He draws attention to only a couple of sample defences of that view and dispatches them quite briskly. He does, however, advance, or reiterate, one positive argument for the opposite view. He says that it is his favorite argument, the one that carries most weight for him in his thinking about the subject. That argument is the main subject of this brief and friendly comment.

I say “friendly” because Moore and I agree about a great deal in this neighbourhood. We agree, in particular, that:

1. (a) The results and consequencesFootnote ⁴ of our actions are often relevant to their moral assessment. Good moral judgment depends very extensively on good causal judgment.

2. (b) The primary moral assessment to which the results of actions are relevant is the assessment of their wrongfulness. Moral wrongs are often part-constituted by their results, and different moral wrongs are often differentiated, at least in part, by their part-constitutive results.

3. (c) The consequences of wrongs as well as their part-constitutive results may be relevant to their moral assessment, but this is a secondary relevance, a relevance mainly to their justification.Footnote ⁵

4. (d) When the results or consequences of our wrongs are relevant to the assessment of our blameworthiness in performing those wrongs, this is because of (b) or (c) or both. But the assessment of our blameworthiness is not the same as the assessment of the wrongfulness of our actions under (b) or the assessment of their justification under (c). Blameworthiness also depends on other factors, notably excuses.

5. (e) Those who deny that the results or consequences of our actions are ever relevant to their moral assessment, a revolutionary brigade who form the main opposition to (a), are vulnerable to a reductio argument.

6. (f) Those who express their opposition to (a) by denying the existence of “moral luck” are conceptualizing the problem in an unhelpful way that clouds judgment, thereby often giving their view a false allure.

Moore and I are drawn to different reductio arguments against the revolutionary brigade mentioned in (e). In Placing Blame, Moore restates and sharpens an argument most famously associated with Tom Nagel.Footnote ⁶ He points out that the revolutionary brigade, often aided by their judgment-clouding talk of “moral luck,” insinuate into the conditions of moral agency an extreme and probably incoherent requirement of absolute control by the agent. This requirement is admittedly inconsistent with counting the results or consequences of our actions as morally salient features of them. But if applied across the board, as Nagel and Moore both note, the absolute-control requirement is inconsistent with counting any features of our actions as morally salient features of them. In Nagel's famous words, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point.”Footnote ⁷

Elsewhere, I have embraced a slightly different reductio, one first hinted at by Tony Honoré. Honoré writes that “outcome allocation is essential to our identity as persons.” Without it, “having decided nothing and done nothing [we] would hardly be people.”Footnote ⁸ Elaborating, I suggested that anyone who denies the existence of moral reasons to bring about results or consequences also denies the existence of (normal) moral reasons to try to bring about results or consequences. So if one will not assess actions morally according to their results or consequences, one should not assess them according to their intentions either. If our successes do not count, then neither do our endeavors. With no inputs or outputs, there is nothing left of us as moral agents.Footnote ⁹

This small (you may think vanishingly small) difference of approach between Moore and me will not, however, occupy our thoughts here. For the reductio argument that he shares with Nagel is not Moore's favorite, and not the one that he rehearses in Causation and Responsibility. Rather, he says with emphasis: “The argument that has convinced me in the past, and convinces me still, is an experiential argument.”Footnote ¹⁰ We may be reminded here of the discussion between Nagel and Bernard Williams that famously gave birth to the “moral luck” debate. Because their agreed conceptualization of the problem as one of “moral luck” lent disastrously false allure to the opposite view, it is often forgotten that both authors rejected attempts to deny moral attention to the way that our actions turn out.Footnote ¹¹ While Nagel advanced his reductio sketched above, Williams instead encouraged us to reflect on our emotional reactions to our own decisions and actions, and in particular to give credence to the variations in emotional register that accompany differences in the way our actions turn out—even, added Williams, when we are admittedly not blameworthy for performing them.Footnote ¹² Moore thinks that both Nagel and Williams succeeded in their arguments against the revolutionaries whom, by their talk of “moral luck,” they unwittinglyFootnote ¹³ helped to recruit. But he is moved more by the Williams argument than by the Nagel one.

True, Moore is less interested than Williams in blameless actions that turn out badly, and therefore less interested than Williams in the distinct emotional reaction to such actions on the part of their agents that Williams dubbed “agent-regret.” Moore is more interested in full-blooded guilt, a reaction that in spite of the self-blaming thoughts that figure in it, he finds no less sensitive to the way that our actions turn out. There are those—Moore mentions Susan WolfFootnote ¹⁴—who are prepared to accept Williams's point about agent-regret but resist any extension of the same point to guilt. They say that the apparently amplified guilt that we experience in cases in which our actions turn out badly can best be explained away as a mingling of guilt for our endeavors (which are indeed capable of being blameworthy) with agent-regret for the way they turn out (this having, thinks Wolf, no possible bearing upon blameworthiness). Moore denies, I think rightly, that we are particularly prone to get agent-regret confused with guilt in interpreting our emotions. Yet he finds common cause with Wolf (and through Wolf with Williams) on the question of argumentative strategy. Wolf's, he says, is “the right kind of attack on my inference from differential guilt feelings. It takes the phenomenology seriously.”Footnote ¹⁵

So what does it mean to “take the phenomenology seriously”? What counts as an “experiential argument” for the moral relevance of the way our actions turn out? Here are (what I take to be) the essentials of Moore's own “experiential argument”:

One oddity of these remarks I will disregard. They entail that when comparing two situations, I can be “equally culpable” in both of them but “more blameworthy” in one than in the other. Most people, including me, think that culpability is the same as blameworthiness and so would not be able to make sense of this contrast. Moore may not share this view,Footnote ¹⁷ but for present purposes that is an irrelevant wrinkle. We can replace the words “been equally culpable” with the more neutral “done the same trying or risking,” and preserve Moore's main point.

Two other oddities, however, go to the heart of Moore's main point and cannot so easily be ignored. First, it is hard to work out what is supposed to be the premise and what is supposed to be the conclusion of his argument. To judge solely by the last sentence of the remarks that I quote just above from Causation and Responsibility, the argument runs like this:

Argument 1

• We are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

• So we feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

But the rest of the passage suggests the opposite:

• Argument 2

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

Clearly, it is the second inference that Moore needs, because it is the second conclusion that Moore is trying to defend. So where is the first inference, Argument 1, supposed to fit in?

The other unignorable oddity is that on either reading of the inference, there must be a suppressed premise. There must be something that links feeling guilty, inferentially, to being guilty. What exactly is that something? It is easy enough to supply a single extra premise that makes both inferences valid:

• Argument 1a

• We are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

• If and only if we are guiltier (more blameworthy), we feel guiltier.

• So we feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• Argument 2a

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• If and only if we are guiltier (more blameworthy), we feel guiltier.

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

But this is clearly not the extra premise we are looking for.Footnote ¹⁸ This proposed premise only restates the puzzle that we are trying to solve. It spells out the thought that is in need of an explanation, but it does not steer us towards an explanation. Why, we still want to know, should feeling this way make it so (or vice versa)?

These two oddities are closely connected. So far as I can see, the inverted inference in Argument 1 is supposed to supply the missing premise in Argument 2. Look again at the final quoted sentence: “The reason we feel so guilty in such cases is because we are so guilty.” Moore is not stating his own (as we might call it, “philosophical”) inference here. This is not a summary statement of what he means by his “experiential argument.” In this sentence, rather, Moore is reporting the rational position of those of us who feel guiltier when we cause an evil. Our reason for feeling guiltier is that, as we see it, we are guiltier. Our extra guilty feeling is, to our guilt-laden eyes, appropriate. Moore's own inference, his “experiential argument,” depends on his granting that we guilt-feelers are right about the appropriateness of our extra guilty feeling. We have the reason to feel guiltier that we see ourselves as having. Granting this much supplies the extra premise that Moore needs to complete his argument:

• Argument 2b

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• That feeling is appropriate: we feel guiltier because we are guiltier (more blameworthy) [cf Argument 1].

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

This is valid, and it runs in the right direction. It also adds some explanation of how its first premise is meant to support its conclusion, namely through an assessment of the appropriateness of the guilty feeling. But does the argument indeed support the conclusion? Surely not. The truth of the conclusion is already assumed in its second premise. By granting to us that our guiltier feeling when we are more blameworthy is an appropriate one, the argument already assumes that we are more blameworthy when we feel guiltier. So the premises entail but do not in the process lend any support to the conclusion.

The objection would be more obvious, perhaps, if Moore were relying on what people believe rather than what they feel. Imagine an argument along the following lines:

• Argument 3

• We believe that we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

• That belief is truth-warranted: we believe that we are guiltier (more blameworthy) because we are.

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

This is a valid argument, in the sense that its conclusion follows from its premises. But it is not an argument in the sense that Moore needs, because it does not lend any support to its conclusion. And that is because the truth of its conclusion is patently assumed in the second premise.Footnote ¹⁹ It is true that if we had an independent argument for the truth of the second premise, the conclusion would be supported. But that support would owe nothing to Argument 3. Argument 3 is not argument so much as assertion. It says: we are more blameworthy because we are.

Variations on Argument 3 are very common in moral philosophy. Some philosophers do not regard them as supporting their conclusions but only as exposing aspects of our thinking, moral hypotheses, that are fit for argumentative testing. Others, however, treat variations on Argument 3 as if they were conclusion-supporting, even without any independent argument for the second premise. We commonly believe it, they say, so it must be true(ish). Can one imagine Moore falling into this trap? No. He clearly does not think the truth of our moral beliefs can be taken for granted, even prima facie, in moral philosophy. He thinks that we are capable of systematic moral error and that moral philosophers need to remember this.Footnote ²⁰ It is hard to imagine him trying to run Argument 3. So why does he take a different view about Argument 2b? Can our emotions, in his view, be trusted more than our beliefs? Does the second premise of Argument 2b have more independent appeal, for him, than that of Argument 3? Presumably it does, but it is not clear why.

Here is one possible explanation. Our emotions are less susceptible to modification by rational reflection than our beliefs. Of course, emotions do have a cognitive component, but it may fall short of a belief. Seeing two men in a romantic embrace in the street, or even in a movie, I might entertain the fleeting thought (I was brought up in the pre-Enlightenment Glasgow of the 1970s) that there is something unnatural or unsuitable about this behavior, even though I do not believe that to be the case. So I might experience a certain unease, including a glimmer of negative affect and some negative inclinations (e.g., to look away) in spite of my regarding these negativities as unwarranted. This shows that I can reflect enough on my own thoughts to excise them from my beliefs without always being able, in the process, to excise them from my emotional life.Footnote ²¹ According to a familiar therapeutic worldview, my emotions somehow make up a more honest, less self-deceptive picture of myself than my beliefs. The “real me” (we can imagine some therapist saying) is insecure in my own sexuality, covering up my insecurity with a rationalizing veneer of civilized (nonheterosexist) opinion.

But the philosophical basis of this worldview is obscure. Why is the “real me” thought to be the “me” of my emotions and their constituent thoughts rather than the “me” of my beliefs?Footnote ²² It is true that the process of rational exposure by which my thoughts are tested for their beliefworthiness adds extra room for me to fall into rational error. Sometimes one does better, epistemically as well as practically, by sticking with one's gut reactions. (“Don't get in that car; something's not quite right about this guy!”) But only sometimes. The example of the misguided thought (and hence inappropriate unease) that I might have about a gay couple's kiss just goes to show that the opportunity for rational scrutiny that belief brings to thought is not only a potential source of new error but also our main daily weapon against the familiar old errors of superstition, gullibility, and prejudice, traces of which we all sometimes find in our emotional lives.

Our lives as rational beings proceed on the assumption that by responding to reasons, we excise error more often or more effectively than we perpetuate or introduce it. We take it for granted most of the time that following (trying to conform to) reasons is a good way to conform to those same reasons. It is not always true. Sometimes we may be disappointed in ourselves or others and have to suspend the assumption. Some people may even be so poorly equipped in their rational faculties that their beliefs, perhaps a fortiori their considered beliefs, are typically even more deranged than their unchecked thoughts and hence their emotions. But if so, that is a contingent feature of certain benighted people. It gives us no reason to think that people generally are more prone to error in their beliefs than they are in their emotions. So there is no reason here to distinguish Argument 2b from the parallel Argument 3.

Moore's own remarks on the moral importance of our emotions suggest that he would draw a very different contrast between Argument 2b and Argument 3. Roughly, he would deny the analogy that I draw between the appropriateness of emotions and what I called the “truth-warrant” of beliefs. Consider the following summary of his views about the moral importance of emotions that Moore offers in Placing Blame:

Of course, I have just accepted Moore's point (1) above. Anyone who denies it is a long way hors-jeu and need not detain us here. But that reflects the fact that it is a very modest point. Thanks to the “sometimes” and thanks to the fact that it openly draws no distinction between beliefs (“judgements”) and emotions, it gets us nowhere in helping to distinguish Argument 2b from Argument 3 and hence in helping to find the special attraction that Argument 2b is supposed to hold. But what about Moore's point (2)? That seems to introduce a new and more promising line of inquiry. It suggests that the question of the appropriateness of an emotion resolves, for Moore, into a question of the virtue or, perhaps more broadly, the value of experiencing it.

If that view were right, then emotional appropriateness would not be analogous to what I call the truth-warrant of belief. Even a valueless belief can be truth-warranted. Right now I believe that the wall in my office is painted in an off-white shade just a fraction less pink than Dulux 08B15 Magnolia. I also believe that rail service 1M46 operated by Cross Country Trains was scheduled to leave Oxford for Manchester Piccadilly just over four minutes ago (as of the moment at which I typed “ago”). These beliefs are truth-warranted but there is no value that I can think of in my holding them.Footnote ²⁴ Does Moore take the view that something similar can never be said of appropriate emotions? Does he think that they can never be valueless and, more specifically, that there must be some virtue in our having them? If so, his version of Argument 2b may go a bit more like this:

• Argument 2c

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• That feeling is appropriate; it is virtuous to feel that way.

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

This is clearly incomplete as it stands. To make it run there must be at least one further premise. To judge by the last sentence in the passage just quoted from Placing Blame, Moore would want to add a further premise along the following lines:

• Argument 2cʹ

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• That feeling is appropriate; it is virtuous to feel that way.

• Virtuous feelings yield true moral verdicts.

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

Now we clearly have a valid argument with a conclusion that follows. But once again the truth of conclusion seems to be assumed. Or—to put it another way—the appeal of the second and third premises, taken together, is not independent enough of the conclusion to which they are supposed to lead.

To see why, consider Moore's suggestion that “it would be an extraordinary morality that considered an emotion like compassion to be virtuous to feel and at the same time considered the judgement of distributive justice to which such compassionate feelings lead to be false.” I agree. Extraordinary to say the least. But Moore's formulation fails to reveal how deep the extraordinariness goes. Moore's formulation suggests that when one's moral emotion is virtuous, one notices the morally salient feature of a situation thanks to one's moral emotion. The emotion “leads” one to the moral truth. In reality it is the other way round. One has the moral emotion, when it is virtuous to have it, because one already notices the moral feature. Emotions, as I put it before, all have constituent thoughts. True, the fact that a given thought is emotion-constituting may lead us to focus or dwell more on the content of that thought so that it may crystallize into belief. The fact of a thought's emotion-constitutingness may also increase that thought's motivating force, its power as a spur to action. So there is certainly a possiblity of an emotion “leading” to a belief, and there can certainly be a question of the emotion's moral value.

Yet clearly the fact that an emotion rests on a true moral thought is not sufficient to give it that moral value. Even when one has something to be angry about, it is possible to be too angry, and not only too angry relative to the object of one's anger, but also too angry for one's own or anyone else's good, moral or otherwise.Footnote ²⁵ Nevertheless, the fact that the emotion rests on a true moral thought is always necessary to give it moral value and thus to make it virtuous. If one has nothing to be angry about, no rightful object of anger, then there is no moral virtue in getting angry, or in acting in anger, or in expressing anger, and so on. (There can still be nonmoral value such as the therapeutic value of letting off steam, having a good rant, etc.)

In another rendition of his point, elsewhere in Placing Blame, Moore says that it is “the virtuous nature of an emotion that tells us whether it has epistemic import,” that is, whether we should trust it as a source of moral insight.Footnote ²⁶ The reverse, I am claiming, is true. We need to know whether we should trust an emotion as a source of moral insight—we need to know whether its thought-basis is true—in order to work out whether it is a virtuous emotion. That being so, whether an emotion is “appropriate” in the value-bearing sense relevant to Argument 2c′(I will say “appropriate_V”) depends on whether the emotion is “appropriate” in the different truth-tracking sense (I will say “appropriate_T”) that I had in mind in formulating Argument 2b.Footnote ²⁷ And in that case Argument 2cʹ is really just Argument 2b, but with a big digression in the middle. Here it is, showing the digression (indented):

• Argument 2cʹʹ

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• That feeling is appropriate_V; it is virtuous to feel that way.

• Feelings are virtuous only when they proceed from (I would say: are part-constituted by) true moral verdicts.

• So our feeling guiltier when we cause an evil is appropriate_V only because that feeling is appropriate_T.

• So . . .

• That feeling is appropriate_T; we feel guiltier when we cause an evil because we are guiltier (more blameworthy).

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

The indented premises can be dispensed with straightforwardly to leave us with the simpler argument:

• Argument 2b

• We feel guiltier when we cause an evil.

• That feeling is appropriate_T; we feel guiltier because we are guiltier (more blameworthy).

• So we are guiltier (more blameworthy) when we cause an evil.

The subscripted “T” is the only addition here to our earlier formulation of Argument 2b, and it appears only to disambiguate. We need to remind ourselves that the kind of appropriateness we have in mind here is the one that is analogous to truth-warrant. And when Argument 2b relies on this kind of appropriateness, as we already know, it assumes the truth of its own conclusion. No “taxonomy of the virtues”Footnote ²⁸ nor any other call upon the theory of value makes the slightest difference to this.

Moore has heard all this before. If he has not heard it from others, he has certainly heard it from himself. Moore is his own most exacting critic, and many pages of the earlier Placing Blame are taken up with anxious reflections on the possible “circularity” of what he now calls the experiential argument.Footnote ²⁹ Although he believes that he “dealt with” the circularity problem back then, the attendant anxiety has not entirely gone away. The passage I quote above from Causation and Responsibility, summarizing the experiential argument, continues in this vein:

But the problem with Moore's experiential argument is not in the shortness of its inference chain. In fact the inference chain in Argument 2c″ is of rococo elaborateness. Yet if I am right, the problem remains that it is not, in the sense that Moore needs it to be, an argument. It lends no support to its conclusion. So if the experiential argument were the only one in his armory—if he did not also have the Nagelian reductio up his sleeve—Moore would already be trading “unsupported views.” My friendly advice, as one who shares those views and wants to see them supported, is: stick to the Nagelian reductio, which is decisive.

Moore's slightly anxious reflections on the experiential argument do not end there. He continues:

I am not among those “Nietzcheans and others” who have a special sniffiness reserved for the backward-looking emotions. On the contrary, I have worked hard to defend their central role in rationality in general and morality in particular.Footnote ³² And that is probably because I have, indeed, “felt [their] compelling power” in my own life. Still less am I inclined to “put aside the emotions” more generally in moral argument. In my view, they deserve the same measure of rational scrutiny and criticism deserved by actions and beliefs and desires and so on. That certainly includes moral scrutiny and criticism. Like Moore, I bemoan the silence of much moral philosophy on the subject of emotional propriety, and I do not think that the soft-focused nostalgia of self-styled “virtue ethicists” has so far helped much to put this right. Plainly I would, however, differ from Moore in rejecting the emotions as a basis for moral argument. And that is precisely because I want the emotions to be central to moral philosophy. Emotions, as I say above, deserve the same rational scrutiny and criticism as do actions and beliefs and desires and so on.

By contrast, Moore's earlier responses to the “circularity” challenge in Placing Blame all seem to rest on the privileging of our emotional life, not, of course, as unamenable to rational scrutiny and criticism, but as somehow less amenable.Footnote ³³ In spite of many years of revisiting them, I have not got to the bottom of these responses. It seems to me that it is one thing for us as agents to rely on our emotions to a greater or lesser extent in charting the morally rocky waters of our own lives. Such reliance makes us more vulnerable to some errors and less vulnerable to others. Trust in our emotions gives us a potentially decent course through life, depending—of course—on how decent our emotions turn out to have been. In living that way, we, like everyone else, take our moral chances. But it strikes me as quite another thing, and quite a mistake, for a moral philosopher to take the same moral chances: to trust our emotions—meaning the emotions of human beings generally—as a privileged source of moral insight. When he or she does so, it seems to me, he or she ignores the key point just made: that whether it is decent for us as agents to rely on our emotions in the daily conduct of our lives depends on how decent our emotions turn out to have been. And to that question the emotions themselves can provide no answer. That is the main point that I have tried, no doubt too laboriously, to reaffirm in this comment.