Prologue

There exists a contested distinction within the philosophy of action which entails that the correct evaluation of what one does or creates may part ways with that of one's act of doing or creating it.Footnote ¹ Drawn correctly, this distinction is of utmost importance to questions in ethical theory, and how we generally evaluate our actions and lives. Or so I shall be arguing.

Attempts to relate philosophy of action to ethics have tended to focus on agency, responsibility, free will, and other questions in moral psychology, the latter now treated as a separate and increasingly empirical branch of ethics. This is not that project. There are additional ethical questions which the philosophy of action is in a position to address, not least debates in normative and practical ethics about the nature of right action.Footnote ² A particular case in point is the interminable debate between consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue-theorists on the potential relevance of person's motives and intentions to the rightness or wrongness of her acts.

The questions of action, intention, and motive I shall focus on are usually identified as belonging to moral psychology. To this extent, it is regrettable that the latter has branched off in a way that has encouraged philosophers to think that such questions do not belong in normative ethics. This is one of two unintended and unforeseen consequences of Anscombe's revolutionary paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, published in this journal almost sixty years ago.Footnote ³ The second involves the creation of normative virtue ethics as a separate position within moral theory, one to be adopted by all and only those who think that questions of character matter to right action.Footnote ⁴

In what follows I resist both trends by relating conceptual and ontological questions about action to normative ethics. We may characterise this method as applied philosophy of action, so long as such a thing leaves space for a kind of analytic deconstruction of moral theory.

1. Ambiguity in Action

Someone interested in action might wish to explore a number of distinct things such as how the word ‘action’ is used, our concept(s) of action, different conceptions of action, and empirical findings about actions themselves. In each case there are numerous distinctions to be made and different ways of carving things up. I shall focus on just one of these, namely the conceptual distinction between what one does and one's doing (of) it. There are radically different ways of understanding this distinction. Indeed, those who appeal to it, myself included, express such a wide range of competing conceptions of each of the two things distinguished that it is legitimate to wonder whether they are really all making the same distinction. I begin by quoting from three influential approaches, in chronological order.

John Macmurray writes the following in an Aristotelian Society exchange with A.C. Ewing on the nature of actions:

Leaving aside the final claim about ordinary language, the idea here is that the word ‘action’ is not in any way special for being ambiguous in this regard. Macmurray's distinction is presented as a formal one that may presumably also be extended to additional psychological phenomena such as those of belief, desire, fear, suspicion, thought, etc. In effect, it is a basic logical distinction between a kind of process or activity on the one hand, and its product, content, or object on the other (things which should themselves resist conflation). We don't do our own doings anymore than we fear our own fearings or suspect our own suspectings.Footnote ⁶

Paul Ricœur extends this scope of interest to speech and writing:

In the case of writing, the distinction comes closer to that between a process and its resulting product. Ricœur is suggesting that we might, by extension, hold the same to be true of the speaking and the thing said and, a forteriori, the doing and the thing done.Footnote ⁸ He is aware that his suggestion contains the difficulty that, when all is said and done, these things do not remain in the world in the literal way that things written might; they are not carved in stone, or even paper. And yet, Ricœur reminds us, our events of acting – a subset of which are speech-act events – may nonetheless leave imprints or traces of a biographical, psychological, historical, cultural, or empirical nature.Footnote ⁹

This thought of actions as events connects with Jennifer Hornsby's way of framing the distinction as one between (i) the spatio-temporally located events of our doing things and (ii) the things we do, the second admitting to being done by different agents across more than one location or occasion, including the possible future as in Lenin's What is to be Done?:

Like Macmurray, Hornsby takes our ordinary talk of action to typically denote things done. My own view is that in everyday language the term ‘thing done’ is itself multiply ambiguous, much as we might use the expression ‘soup’ in any of the following assertions: ‘the soup is always great at Gino's’; tonight's soup is very good’; and ‘your soup looks nicer than mine (even though they presumably come from the same kitchen batch)’. Such ambiguities account for much conflation in the philosophy of action, if not that of Donald Davidson who, misled by the Quinean dream of desert landscapes, provides a systematic argument for why all action statements quantify over events.Footnote ¹¹ The trouble is that there exists conceptual space for a distinction that is only partially mirrored in our ordinary use of the terms ‘doing’ and ‘thing done’, the latter frequently being used rather liberally, as in ‘the hardest thing I ever did’.

All analogies sooner or later come to an end, of course. What I do is neither the product nor the content of my doing. Nor is it an object in the way that the things I perceive, such as the records on the table, are. Deeds are not entities of any kind, be they type or token. Accordingly, we must take my soup comparisons with a pinch of salt: what I do is not the same sort of thing as what I ate or hope to eatFootnote ¹² , not even in the Proustian sense in which I might lament that the rusty bicycle in the garden shed is not as bright or green as the one in my memory.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, it is at best contentious to assume that the ‘of’ in ‘the event of my doing x’ is one of identity (as in ‘the county of Hertfordshire’) as opposed to, say, relation (as in ‘the University of Hertfordshire’).Footnote ¹⁴

Unsurprisingly, we find competing ontologies of doings and things done in the literature, with little consensus on whether the former are particulars, events, processes, instances of relations etc., and the latter universals, types, results, products, and so on.Footnote ¹⁵ For now, however, I merely wish to highlight a more general agreement on the basic distinction between particular doings and repeatable things that you and I might both do.Footnote ¹⁶ We might, for example, both listen to Leonard Cohen's You Want it Darker again and again, with each of our singular, spatio-temporally located, acts of doing so differing in their properties: you play the MP3 as background on your iPod during your morning jogs and in the afternoons as you drive home from work; I listen to the LP attentively in the evenings by my fireplace at home, a glass of burgundy in hand.Footnote ¹⁷

2. Right and Wrong Action

Despite the relative prevalence of the above distinction in the philosophy of action, it is all but completely ignored in normative theories concerned with right action. These are typically in the business of offering necessary and sufficient conditions of the form ‘an action is right if (and only if) it…’ where the blanks may be filled by statements such as ‘promotes the greatest good’, ‘maximises pleasure’, ‘stems from a good will’, ‘is what the virtuous agent would (advise you to) do’, ‘is prescribed by divine command’, and so on.Footnote ¹⁸ But moral theorists rarely stop to ask conceptual questions about action, sticking to the bare minimum needed to deal with the act/omission distinction and the doctrine of double effect.Footnote ¹⁹ The unvoiced assumption is that one can simply plug in one's favoured account of action, the dominating consensus having largely been that actions are events. I maintain that this assumption lies at the core of what renders debates within normative ethics irresolvable.

To illustrate, I present some concise claims about right action, chosen randomly from across the normative spectrum. The first comes from Jesse Prinz's defence of sentimentalism about moral rightness and wrongness:

Notice how actions are here understood as the sorts of things that can have moral properties, but there is no mention (and you will have to trust me that this is so throughout his book) about whether he is here thinking of a doing or a thing done. The sentence gives us some clues: it is the sort of thing that may be observed and ‘cause feelings’; to this extent sound more like a doing than a thing done. Either way, the view is meant to be in competition with other accounts of right action which also fail to disambiguate.

Writing about moral obligation, H.A. Prichard claims that:

So long as I do the action in question, I have fulfilled my obligation, whatever my motive. This is why W.D. Ross, following Prichard, will ultimately claim that moral rightness should be distinguished from moral goodness.Footnote ²² The question remains, however, whether I can be said to be acting wrongly merely by virtue of doing the wrong thing. Jonathan Bennett seems to not only think that this is so but that it is a basic semantic truth:

Yet acting wrongly is at best itself ambiguous between doing the wrong thing and doing some thing (right or wrong) for the wrong reasons or out of a wrong motive.Footnote ²⁴ One might think that killing, lying, cheating, or murder are all wrong. Such thoughts seem to be about act-types to the extent that it entails that all particular acts of killing etc. are wrong. If Eevee kills Jolene and we think that what she did was wrong in the sense of ‘thing done’ delineated in §1 (viz. kill someone) then the wrong thing done is something that Ceddy could have also done. Indeed, Ceddy could have even killed the very same person (Jolene), though it is too late now that Eevee has done so.

If this is so, then it cannot matter what Eevee or Ceddy's motives are for it cannot be the case that ‘kill someone’ is a wrong thing done when Eevee does it but not when Ceddy does it, at least not systematically so according to any of the normative theories on offer.Footnote ²⁵ By contrast, Eevee's killing of Jolene on Monday morning may be a vicious act motivated by jealousy, whereas Ceddy's possible killing of her on Monday evening (say after Simon's botched attempt) would have been an act of mercy.

Similarly, for right actions: Eevee and Ceddy may both give the same amount of money and/or the percentage of their income (two different things which may coincide to the British Hen Welfare Trust). But suppose that Eevee's doing so just is her trying to impress Simon, whereas Ceddy does so in order to help rescue battery hens. In such a case. Eevee and Ceddy each do two things, only one of which is the same (give money to the British Hen Welfare Trust). Eevee's doing this one thing just is her showing off and, similarly, Ceddy's doing it is identical to his trying to help rescue battery hens. Whilst the thing done may or may not be the right thing to do, it would seem that Ceddy is acting rightly (or at least well)Footnote ²⁶ whereas Eevee is not.

There seems, then, to be a huge difference between claims concerning a person's doing something, and claims about the rightness or wrongness of what they did. Once we become attuned to this, certain disputes within normative theory begin to dissolve. Recall the debate over whether or not intention matters to right action. If two or more people can do the same thing with different intentions, it is unclear how intention could possibly matter to the rightness or wrongness of the thing that they both do.Footnote ²⁷ Conversely, it is highly implausible that intention doesn't matter to the moral evaluation of each individual's doing of this thing. It is hard not to conclude from this that the notion of right action most amenable to virtue ethics is different from that which is of interest to consequentialists.

While I have chiefly been focusing on motive and intention, the moral appraisal of our doings will also depend upon biographical information relating to upbringing, ability, education, circumstance, and more. Such facts may individually or collectively reveal that a person was acting rightly or (at least justifiably)Footnote ²⁸ when they did the wrong thing, and wrongly (or unjustifiably) when they did the right thing.

None of this is to say that there is no connection between descriptions of our doings and the things that we do. On the contrary, one can act with the best of intentions and still be acting wrongly even if the action is not intentional under the negative description. An act intending to pay tribute to another culture, for example, may nonetheless be an instance of cultural appropriation. For everything one does unintentionally, there will be a relevant description of their doing it. But there are no hard and fast rules by which we can decide which doings remain praiseworthy, permissible, or excusable, and which do not.

Often, it can take years or centuries before we are in a position to fully understand what had been done. In such cases, we must be lenient on the doing without becoming relativists about the thing done. Consider the well-trodden debates on whether or not it would be anachronistic to judge 19^th century racism and slavery from a 21^st century standpoint. The answer, I contend, is that while things done centuries ago were as wrong then as they would be if done now, past doings may be more forgivable, and at times even justified (precise judgements of past doings would need to be formed on a case by case basis).Footnote ²⁹

3. Inner and Outer Lives

I have been arguing that there is an important but neglected difference between what it is for a thing one does to be right or wrong and for one's doing it to be right or wrong. This lends itself to the response, alluded to in my Prologue, that those interested in the doing, motive, intention, etc. subscribe to virtue theory, thereby embracing just one normative position among many, and that other views – in competition with it – simply deny the importance of such things to right action, if not to morality altogether.Footnote ³⁰ Such points are sometimes put forward as criticisms of virtue ethics being agent-centred (as opposed to action-centred) and thereby either failing to provide a theory of right action or offering one whose focus is misplaced. Thus, even someone as sympathetic to the concerns of virtue ethics as Martha Nussbaum criticises Iris Murdoch for being too obsessed with the agent's psychology to care about action:

Nussbaum is here completely separating action from intention, thereby implicitly running with a ‘thing done’ notion of action. The move is akin to thinking that since Eevee gave 20% of her salary to the British Hen Welfare Trust, we should not be morally distracted by the fact that she only did it to show off in front of Simon. What matters, on this outlook, is what she did. In the case at hand, the thing that Eevee did was right since, unlike her inner motives, it made a good difference in the world. Nussbaum's worry is that concerns with another's inner world are overly precious and, in the case of one's own actions, narcissistic. Virtue ethicists such as Christine Swanton have responded to such criticisms with the following sort of reasoning:

This response is on the right track, but unless we can enrich it with a suitable version of the doing/thing done distinction it shall remain as question-begging as Nussbaum's original objection. The correct thing to say, I believe, is that while what the vicious agent is doing can be no more (or less) uncaring than what the virtuous agent does, her doing it may well be. Indeed, things done are, in this technical sense the wrong sorts of thing to be caring or uncaring, rash or prudent, and so on for only an individual person's doings may be described adverbially.

There is, of course, an ordinary sense of ‘what she did’ in which we might say that she did a kind or unkind thing, but all this amounts to is that her doing of x was unkind, or that she was unkind to do it.Footnote ³³ If we ignore the conceptual space for this distinction and simply talk of things done as if they themselves are re-describable as virtuous or vicious, we will have saved the truth of virtue ethics at the cost of masking the truth of consequence-based views and deontologies (such as some forms of divine-command theory) which appeal to the intrinsic goodness of act-types (as opposed to motives). The truth of these views is that the rightness of what is done does not (indeed cannot) depend on the psychology of the agent.

4. Ontologies of Action

At this juncture it might help to delve a little into some of the ontological questions I remained neutral upon earlier. Is there any sense in which an event can itself be deemed to be morally right or wrong? And what, if anything, would it be for a universal to be right?

One answer to the first question appeals to Donald Davidson's notion that an action is an event that is intentional under some description. I shall not critique this here, save to say that while it is innocuous to say that the event of someone's doing one thing (e.g. playing music) intentionally may be identical to the event of their doing something else (waking up the neighbours) unintentionally, this does not reduce to the far more baffling claim that it is the event itself that is intentional under some description(s).

In a rare paper attempting to relate action theory to normative ethics Matthew Hanser resists Davidsonian simplicity as follows:

Hanser's metaphysics seem implausible to me for a number of related reasons: the things we do are not types of action but actions that fall under types. The relation between doings and things done is thus not one between types and tokens. A doing is not an instance of a thing done anymore than a believing is an instance of a thing believed, and there are type and token doings (just as there are type and token events and processesFootnote ³⁵ ) as well as type and token things done. If A kills B this may or may not fall under the type ‘killing an adolescent’ or ‘killing an innocent human’.

A different way of resisting Hanser's approach is to deny that there is any morally relevant distinction to be made between doings and things done. An explicit defence of it has been made by Jonathan Dancy, who writes:

On Dancy's account, we so conduct all the theoretical work we need to do with one notion of action, coupled with a narrative about the agent's reasons. While there is much to agree with in the above passage, it won't do to say that the person who does the right thing for the wrong reason(s) is acting rightly. After all, she isn't acting virtuously, for it is merely by chance that she is doing the right thing at all. This point is brought out well in the following passage by Rosalind Hursthouse:

Hursthouse makes her point without appealing to any form of the doing/thing done distinction and, pari passu, concludes that what the vicious agent is doing is wrong. And indeed, one of the things that she has done is wrong (namely showing off), but she has also done something quite right (donating to the the British Hen Welfare Trust), albeit for the wrong reason, as Dancy puts it. Yet the idea that the agent has done anything right has all but disappeared from Hursthouse's narrative. Assuming that two people can do the same thing for different reasons, it can be true that the person acting wrongly is still doing the right thing. When two or more people do the same thing for different reasons, there will be huge discrepancies in our evaluation of their doings. We need look no further than the 69,456,897 people voted for Obama in 2008, and the plurality of reasons in the offing.

5. Moral Appraisal

Consider the following claim by Thomas Nagel, which forms a crucial assumption behind his understanding of moral luck:

Implicit in this remark is the identification of all action with the things we do, as made explicit by Swann in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a novel fixated with the relation of fleeting particulars to repeatable universals:

Here we encounter, once more, the idea that we judge others simply by being provided with a list of the things they did. We might call this the obituary view of moral appraisal. It is no wonder that actions so conceived – without mention of the doings that reveal our reasons, motives, and intentions – are so readily susceptible to moral luck.Footnote ⁴⁰ But it would be pretty extreme to deny that we are not to judge them for this. Perhaps this is not Nagel's view and he thinks, with Anscombe, that action descriptions reveal intention. If so, he is conflating the things we do with our doings of them.Footnote ⁴¹

Moving further back into the history of deontology, we find the following pronouncement in Kant's second Critique:

It is no surprise that all law, be it divine, social, or moral should primarily focus on things done rather than doings, for it is the fact that one did something that we can provide evidence for in any kind of court.Footnote ⁴³ So it is that in Romans 2:6 of the the New International Version of the Bible, we are told in God ‘will repay each person according to what they have done’ (see also Matthew 16:27 and Corinthians 11:15).Footnote ⁴⁴ Kant's insight is that one could do the right thing and yet one's action might still lack moral worth, if done from the wrong motive. Suppose we knew for certain that heaven and hell existed: many of us might then make sure that we did all the right (morally lawful) things, but we would do them from an unethical motive (fear or hope, but never duty).Footnote ⁴⁵ This appreciation of the fact that the moral worth of actions is completely separable from the rightness or wrongness of the things they do, a view shared by his most famous opponent in moral philosophy, John Stuart Mill:

Kant and Mill form a sharp contrast to the view from Nagel, according to which we are to appraise people for what they do, and nothing else.Footnote ⁴⁷ The clash cannot be resolved in either party's favour, for it stems from muddled conceptions of action. In the above passages, Kant and Mill separate the worthiness of actions from their rightness and wrongness, whereas Nagel wishes to align the two.Footnote ⁴⁸ A third solution, proposed by Robert Audi, is that we ‘should distinguish the moral worth of an act from its creditworthiness’.Footnote ⁴⁹ But this just digs deeper into the same conceptual pit. The way out is not to pile on further distinctions but to understand that between the things we do and our acts of doing them.Footnote ⁵⁰

A neat way of proceeding is to attempt to map the distinction onto that between evaluative and deontic concepts and norms, the former being concerned with praise or blame (good and bad), the latter with duty and obligation (right and wrong).Footnote ⁵¹ So conceived, the doing would be the bearer of moral worth and the things done that of rightness and wrongness.Footnote ⁵² While not an altogether unhelpful move, it leaves one wondering why our doings cannot be morally right or wrong and, conversely, whether there might be things done that are in themselves good or bad (e.g. acts of kindness of charity).Footnote ⁵³

No discussion of the distinction between the right and good would be complete without mention of the pluralistic deontology of Ross, who brings out the extremely paradoxical nature of maintaining, alongside Kant, that the right action may be morally worthless:

This is all well and good, but the paradox of the first line occurs precisely because the evaluative and deontic properties are being applied to one kind of thing called ‘action’. The same holds true of the added claim that ‘what is morally good is never right’. How could it possibly be true that the right and the good can never coincide? Ross holds that motives belong in the world of evaluation and actions in that of obligation. But this distinction is ill equipped to do the work required from it. Ross’ aims would have been better served by one between the doing and the thing done.

As noted earlier, the doing/thing done distinction is in some respects analogous to many others, including that between what one believes and one's believing it. Suppose I believe something that's true and which I ought to believe, but I do so for very bad reasons. You may wish to criticise my believing it without criticising the belief I have (which you and I might, after all, share). Conversely, I may be perfectly justified in having a belief that turns out to be false. Hence the initial divide of intuitions about whether Edmund Gettier's famous examples were indeed ones of justified true belief, for what was justified was the thing believed, not the believing. Clayton Littlejohn's diagnosis of the situation offers the following trifecta of ascriptions:

Gilbert Harman makes a parallel disambiguation in relation to action:

This is the idea that what a person did was right but it was wrong of them to do it or, conversely, that what they did was wrong but it was right of them to do it. But what is it for something to be right or wrong of someone? Nothing that is worryingly relativistic or subjective. It is simply the thought that a person may be right or wrong to do something given all the evidence available in some further specifiable sense. Helpful as Harman's distinction is, it doesn't get us all the way. The problem, to return to the charity example, is not that it was wrong of me to make a donation to the British Hen Welfare Trust in the case where my doing so is vicious. The difficulty is not that some people ought to give to the British Hen Welfare Trust, but not me, it is that my giving to them was unethical despite the fact that it would have been right of me to make a donation.Footnote ⁵⁷ This should not be confused with those of blameless wrongdoing as understood by either Bernard Williams or Derek Parfit, both of whom fail to distinguish between doing and thing done, thereby rendering their examples hostage to unnecessary paradoxes concerning luck and belief, respectively.Footnote ⁵⁸

Acting rightly does not amount to doing the right thing, nor vice versa. Philosophers who stop shy of making this distinction find themselves having to make up for it by concocting new distinctions elsewhere. And yet these never seem quite capable of doing the work required. Without losing track of the fact that even Oedipus’ tragic deeds are imputable to him,Footnote ⁵⁹ we should not praise or blame people solely on the ground of what they did or didn't do.

In an obituary what one typically finds is a list of achievements and failures. The sorts of things listed here are things done e.g. she founded a charity, fought in the second world war, directed two Oscar-winning films, or wrote an influential book. Indeed, the very chronology of peoples’ life is typically offered as a sort of list of things done: she went to school A. studied subject x at university B, took a job as y at firm C, and so on. What is much rarer is an attempt to reveal the person's acts of doing these things, as a serious biography might. Without this crucial feature any attempt at praise and blame will be half-blind and paradoxical. This holds true across moral theory as a whole. Normative ethics must leave space for both our deeds and doings.

Epilogue

John Macmurray, whose distinction between doing and deed we began with, would some decades later complain that art ‘is treated not as a form of reflective activity, but as a set of “works” to be apprehended and appreciated’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Around the same time, art critic Harold Rosenberg baptised a non-cohesive group of artists, the most famous of which was Jackson Pollock, as ‘action painters’. Rosenberg's central idea – later taken up by David DaviesFootnote ⁶¹ – was that the real work of art is not the the painting or building (noun) but the act of painting or building (verb). We might equally, if not entirely analogously, distinguish between the dancing and the dance, the composing of a song, and the song composed, the photographing and the photograph taken and subsequently developed. Thus, Bob Dylan's ‘Girl from the North Country’ may be a superior song to ‘Scarborough Fair’, even if the composition of the former involved stealing both melody and line from the latter.

Rosenberg's theory is coupled with the additional thought that the painting on the canvas represents the act of painting it, not the way in which one might draw a self-portrait of the artist at work but by being a residue of the act of painting which bears the gesture traces of the brush strokes that produced it:

This echoes Ricœur's metaphor of acting as the thing done as a kind of trace (of the event of acting) left in the world; a mark in history or memory. The mark or imprint is a reminder or at best a kind of souvenir of the artistic event of painting (verb). Hence the famous videos of Pollock painting his massive canvasses; this was not intended to just be a portrayal of the artist at work but a document of the art itself unfolding, with or without performance. What is subsequently hung on the wall being nothing but the marks which have been left behind; the ashes of an event long-gone.Footnote ⁶³

Rosenberg undoubtedly took his own metaphor too seriously, thus prompting Mary McCarthy to quip ‘you can't hang an event on the wall, only a picture’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But while it may be nonsense to say that a painting is an action or that it represents itself, the movement teaches us that art presents us with two objects of aesthetic evaluation: the creating and the thing created. As with right action, I have no interest in offering any theory of art here (let alone one which highlights one of these things over the other). I merely wish to point out that it is the act of creating which expresses the author's motives or intentions. After all, the thing created could have been made by a different person with a different aim.Footnote ⁶⁵

We are now in a position to appreciate Nietzsche's intriguing conception of life as art:

Nietzsche does not have the life of an artist in mind here. Rather, the task of any life is the creating of the life lived. The art in question, here, is not the life ones creates for oneself, but the life-long activity of creating it: the living of the life and not the life lived. In his magisterial work Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas parses Nietzsche's motto in terms of things done instead of doings:

This is no misinterpretation of Nietzsche but a reflection of the fact that our ordinary term ‘thing done’ is itself ambiguous in ways that can be philosophically troubling. A case in point is Sartre's existentialist retelling of Nietzsche's tale:

If this view is to capture the roundedness of human life, the sum of our actions had better include the totality of both our deeds and doings. It is in this spirit that Ronald Dworkin writes:

Dworkin models his distinction between having a good life and living well to that between art products and artistic acts of creation. The argument runs parallel to that of Rosenberg and Davies who claim that artistic value is adverbial though, like myself, Dworkin is not committed to any views about what art is. For my own part, I have merely sought to show that there is value to be found in both the living and the life lived, the doing and the thing done, the creating and the thing created.Footnote ⁷⁰ In sum, we should be dualists about the objects of both moral and aesthetic evaluation.Footnote ⁷¹

There is much that normative ethics can learn from the the once fashionable ‘death of the author’ view of art. Its insight is not that the author has no say tout court but only that, pace intentionalism about art products, our aesthetic evaluation of their creation must, unlike that of their creative acts, ultimately carry on without them.Footnote ⁷² As with creations, our deeds are but the ashes of our acts in time. To evaluate our lives solely by these would be a grave mistake.Footnote ⁷³