Recently I had a protracted dispute with two philosophers on Twitter over the moral status of prostitution. The conversation settled on this topic after an initial altercation concerning reality television but there's little doubt that the subject of prostitution is of much greater interest than reality television. Essentially my inter-locutors presented two alternative views of prostitution to the conception that it is morally wrong. On the one hand, the argument was ventured that dislike of prostitution is an aesthetic rather than a moral stance and, on the other, the argument was made that it is essentially not different to any other trade. The second of these arguments seems to me more worthy of consideration than the first, not least because it cuts to the core of the disagreement. The first argument can only really be responded to by showing that the reasons for objecting to prostitution are primarily moral rather than aesthetic ones. In this posting I want to list the reasons for considering prostitution morally objectionable at greater length than can be done in a set of tweets but should add that it is only as a moral question it is here being treated, not as a jurisprudential one though there are certainly important questions in the latter area. But there is here, as elsewhere, no simple move from moral to jurisprudential considerations. Finally, I should make clear that in presenting arguments concerning the wrongness of prostitution it is the trade as a whole that is being so considered, not simply, or even primarily, the acts of the prostitute alone. Acts of clients are just as much viewed here as wrong, perhaps, though I'll leave this open for the sake of the argument here, it is the clients who are engaging in acts that are much more wrong than the prostitutes themselves. Finally, gender matters are recognised in the discussion in the sense that the feminine article is preferred for the reference to the prostitute, not to deny that there are male prostitutes but they are rather less numerous.
As I brought out in a posting sometime ago Kant's arguments in the area of sexuality have a great deal in common with those of some contemporary feminists. This is particularly true with regard to his views of "objectification" and this matters here since one of the central arguments concerning prostitution is the view that what makes it "wrong" is that it involves objectification. In order to begin with an assessment of this claim it is first necessary to specify what the notion of "objectification" involves. In the Stanford Encyclopedia article on feminism and objectification a number of features are listed as involving objectification, seven from a study of Martha Nussbaum's and a further three from Rae Langton. They are:
1. A purely instrumental relation to the person is involved which treats the person in question as merely a "tool" for the other's use.
2. Denial of autonomy: a person who is objectified is treated in a way that denies their autonomy and self-determination.
3. The objectified person is treated as inert: meaning by this that their agency is denied.
4. They are viewed as fungible: that is, as inter-changeable with objects.
5. They are viewed as violable: meaning by this, that their person has no integral boundaries that cannot be crossed.
6. The person is treated as something that can be owned by another.
7. The person in question has no feelings that need be taken into account so we deny their subjectivity (correlate of viewing them as an object).
8. They are reduced to their body and identified only with their body.
9. They are reduced to their appearance so they are treated only in terms of how they look.
10. They are treated as if they had no capacity of speech (silenced).
Now it is clear from just looking at this list that not all of these characteristics apply to how the prostitute is related to and that some of them apply to wider relations than the one the prostitute is specially part of. This particularly applies to the last 3 characteristics listed (all taken from Rae Langton). Reduction to appearance, for example, applies to fashion models, film stars, body-builders, athletes and others. Reduction to body is a more subtle notion but surely the person of the athlete is, again, largely conflated with their body parts. Finally, silencing, whilst perhaps not applicable as a wide characteristic is not specific to prostitution and need not apply to it. So I think none of these three characteristics can be regarded as either necessary or sufficient ways of marking wrong-making aspects of prostitution.
Others that are listed apply to only certain types of prostitution. Denial of autonomy is often part of prostitution and is part of the reason why prostitution is thought to involve exploitation frequently. In such cases it likely features alongside inertness but it could be argued the presence of these features are contingent elements of prostitution that relate to it being a trade engaged in by poor people often without their real consent being part of the transaction. Given that this is so the wrong-making characteristics here are part of a general pattern of injustice that need not apply to the prostitute's trade in principle.
So the real challenge of showing the wrongness of prostitution occurs with regard to the view that it is only contingent elements of the relationship that mark it as possessing wrong-making characteristics but that ideally it need possess no such elements. This would be the case, for example, if the prostitute operates without being coerced or exploited in the above indicated ways. In such an ideal case, which can be said to happen with what are euphemistically termed "high-class" prostitutes, the characteristics that are contingent appear not to be present.
So which characteristics remain and how do they suffice to render prostitution a trade unlike others in being wrong in principle? Again, they cannot include "ownership" if what is meant by that is that the prostitute can, as a whole, be sold (slavery). This is ruled out in such an ideal case and, in any case is wrong for its own reasons which are not specific to prostitution and would apply just as much to other cases.
What we are left with from our original list are instrumentality, fungibility, violability and denial of subjectivity, four characteristics of "objectification" that can be said to be wrong-making characteristics that, whilst perhaps not only applicable to prostitution could be said to be essential to it and its wrongness. Let's look at these criteria a bit more closely. Denial of subjectivity might be thought not to be essential in the sense that the ideal case being considered has assumed consent on the prostitute's part to a relationship that is not inherently exploitative. However what we can see by removing the characteristics that make the prostitutive relation exploitative is that it is not these exploitative elements that are conclusive in making prostitution deny the subjectivity of the prostitute.
The reason I make this claim is that the denial of the feelings of the prostitute, during the time of the transaction, is part of the point of the contract. The prostitute does not, during the period the contract defines, have lea-way to determine that at this point their feelings count. Should their feelings count at any stage of the relationship, count, that is, in such a way that they could, of themselves, determine what can and cannot happen now, then the prostitute will only have engaged in a partial transaction and the client would have grounds, if this is to be regarded simply as trade, to claim that they had not been delivered the product offered. And on those grounds they could sue for compensation. So it doesn't seem to me that denial of the subjectivity of the prostitute, at least during the period covered by the contract, can be removed from the relationship in question, even should we be speaking of an ideal transaction.
It is possible that the presence of denial of subjectivity is taken not to be essential to prostitution to some though I would require arguments for how the contract in question could possibly incorporate recognition, during the transaction, of subjectivity without violating delivery of service. The next element would be violability which is likely to be controversial in the same kind of way as denial of subjectivity and in this case I can concede part of the critic's case. The boundary of the prostitute is leaky in the sense that very different kinds of access to their body can be incorporated into distinct contracts such that it is not obvious how the prostitute can defend any part of their body from being included in the transaction. However it is the case that the prostitute in question could set guide-lines here such that certain types of act would never be regarded by her or him as permissible. In this sense violability is not necessarily an absolute characteristic of prostitution but perhaps only a relative one. I remain unconvinced, however, that this concession matters much since I am unclear as to how violability applies to other trades.
However the key characteristics that make prostitution wrong do nonetheless appear to reside in the first and fourth levels of objectification, namely, in viewing the person only instrumentally and purely fungibly. The instrumental characteristic alters the sexual relationship so that it involves nothing that requires reference, during the time of the transaction, to purposes that are those of the prostitute herself. So, during the time specified by the contract, the prostitute is put at the disposal of the client. This instrumental relation might be thought, however, not to be distinctive to the trade of prostitution. It might be argued that such instrumental relation is part of trade in general. However, if we look at other trades I don't find that this is so. So, to take an arbitrary example, it is true that a builder has purposes set for them by their client in the sense that they don't get to build things simply by virtue of their own wish to do so. They respond instead to the directives of their clients. However, whilst this is true, the manner and way the contract can be executed has a number of ways of being interpreted. The prostitute has no such lee-way of interpretation. What this suggests is that instrumentality is here understood in a relatively narrow sense in the prostitute's case and it is this which distinguishes her case from those of others.
Fungibility is, however, almost certainly the most serious problem with prostitution. The prostitute is treated as inter-changeable with things (such as sexual toys or inanimate objects). She is treated as on a par with these things in a relationship that would otherwise be expected to be intimate. This characterisation is quite different from what occurs in other trades since, whilst labour can often be replaced by operation of things, it is nonetheless not true that such fungibility is usually part of an intimate relationship between individuals.
These characterisations emerge from general consideration of the prostitute's trade. However, the fungible aspect with which I concluded also move us someway towards Kant's comments on sexual matters indicating the ways in which sexuality brings in matters of specific concern. Sexual relations are characterised, as Kant puts it, as involving someone becoming an object of appetite for someone else. In this respect there is something specific about sexuality that invites objectified relations. Kant thinks there is only a contractual solution to this problem in the form of monogamous marriage but that involves matters of jurisprudence that I've deliberately prescinded from here.
The point about fungibility in Kant's view is that the sexual relationship involves merely treating the person as a thing that can be related to for the purposes of satisfaction of an appetite. This is what specifically and clearly occurs in the prostitute relationship and is the point of the reference to the absence of intimacy (which reinforces my suggestion that the denial of subjectivity is not a separable part of the prostitution relation). For Kant the key question is one of respect for humanity and what is meant by respect for humanity is respect for rational capacity to set one's ends.
The defenders of the prostitute contract as effectively being no different to other trades assert in response that the prostitute has adopted the rational choice of an end in choosing her trade. However the question is not whether the trade has been freely chosen, which we can grant in the ideal case, but whether such choice is a rational one. This is how Kant's universalisation test for the categorical imperative works by suggesting that there is a contradiction in a maxim that cannot be universalised and that this shows the wrongness of the activity in question. In relation to prostitution the question is best framed with regard to the notion of respect for humanity.
Respect for humanity is expressed in conduct that either preserves or enhances rational capacities. Does prostitution at least "preserve" such capacities? Not on the view I have suggested simply because it enshrines the contractual commitment of one of the parties to subordinate her rational capacities to the appetites of the other. Viewed in this way it cannot be universalised and is thus marked as wrong. So Kant's argument, as suggested above, focuses on instrumentality viewed in terms of fungibility.
Widening the points above out, many feminists whilst generally agreeing with the Kantian analysis add the point that social subordination is an essential part of the prostitute's relation and that this again is distinct from other trades. So the prostitute is subordinate to the client, not least because the work in question cannot be reciprocated. This is effectively a combination of the point about fungibility with one about denial of subjectivity as the point about subordination is really part of a complaint about the lack of intimacy in a relation where we have a right to expect such intimacy.
Perhaps, in conclusion, the argument concerning prostitution does demonstrate a general problem with moral arguments since it might be thought that there is something intuitive at work here that is not shared between disputants and that this generally affects moral disputes. I suspect something of this sort might be true but that nonetheless listing of considerations might lead to clarity of argument in a general sense and at least make clearer which characteristics are properly disputed as having serious wrong-making force.
Showing posts with label wrongness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wrongness. Show all posts
Friday, 26 August 2011
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Parfit on Moral Concepts
Chapter 7 of On What Matters concludes the first part of the book and is a counterpart of the first chapter which concerned 'normative concepts', concerning as it does 'moral concepts'. This chapter is lengthy and dense and is one that requires summary primarily since it promises to be important for the discussions that will begin in Part 2 of the work.
Parfit opens the chapter by promising to disambiguate the varied senses in which something can be "morally wrong". The peculiarity of the way this discussion is framed is that it indicates an understanding of "facts" albeit ones that are "morally relevant". The 'ordinary' sense of "moral wrong" apparently refers to thinking about acts in the same sense as each other. However the first complication and reason for analysis concerns the apparent ignorance we often suffer when evaluating actions, ignorance with regard to some or all of the "morally relevant" facts. When faced with such ignorance (or with "false beliefs") we find the problem arises that we use "morally wrong" in different ways. Three such differences are distinguished by Parfit.
The first sense we use "morally wrong" in situations of partial ignorance or "false belief" or what we might term 'non-ideal' forms of moral evaluation is to term something 'wrong' in a "fact-relative" sense. Something is 'wrong' in this sense just when it would be wrong in the ordinary sense if all the facts were known. This contrasts with thinking of something as 'wrong' in a belief-relative sense which concerns something being 'wrong' if our beliefs about the acts in question are true. Finally, something is 'wrong' in an 'evidence-relative' sense when we would term it 'wrong' in the ordinary sense if we believe what the available evidence gives us 'decisive reasons' to believe and these beliefs are true.
Parfit's point in making these distinctions is to suggest that none of them overlap with the 'ordinary' use of 'wrong' and that no one of these senses of 'wrong' is sufficient to exhaust what is meant by it. In illustrating the differences between these senses of 'wrong' Parfit discusses the case of a doctor who has various unjustified beliefs about the effects of treatments and possesses the wish to kill someone. In the first example of this the doctor prescribes something in the belief it will save the life of the patient but which kills them as it was sure to do given its properties (hence in which the doctor acts with good intentions but imperfect knowledge).
By contrast, in the second example, the doctor prescribes a treatment in the belief it will kill a patient but which saves their life given its properties (in which the doctor thus acts with a bad intention but imperfect knowledge). Many would simply assimilate both these cases to wrong in the 'belief-relative' senses thus declaring the first conduct 'right' and the second 'wrong' despite the outcomes in question. By contrast Parfit claims the doctor in the first of these cases acted wrongly in two different senses, one in a fact-relative sense and one in an evidence-relative sense since it would have been possible to derive evidence here that would have informed me about what the consequences of the action I was performing would have been.
By contrast, in the second case, the doctor acted rightly in fact-relative and evidence-relative senses despite possessing a bad intention. Now, to complete the basis for his distinctions, Parfit next mentions some further variations on the case in question. In these variations the doctor firstly (Case 3) gives treatment that is almost certain to kill the patient but which saves their life as they unjustifiably believed it would. In Case 4, by contrast, they give treatment that is almost certain to save the patient's life but which kills them, as they hoped it would.
In cases 3 and 4 it would be common to assimilate them to the sense of 'right' and 'wrong' in an evidence-relative sense so that the doctor in case 4 can be declared to be acting rightly whilst that in case 3 is acting 'wrongly'. Again, the point is to get past such a view. In Case 4, on Parfit's view, we should not say that the doctor acted 'rightly' as, when we bring in belief-relative and fact-relative senses, we can say that the doctor in question had murder in mind and succeeded in murdering the patient in question. By contrast, in Case 3, it isn't enough to refer to the evidence-relative sense that would say the doctor in question acted 'wrongly'. We should also refer to fact and belief-relative senses of 'wrong' as these show that the doctor acted in these respects 'rightly'.
The peculiar characteristic of these four examples concerns what is meant by declaring them wrong in 'fact-relative' sense since the usage Parfit gives does not seem to be based on 'morally relevant' facts but rather on actual facts and hence the 'fact-relative' sense does not appear to pick out a specific characteristic of the actions but to collapse into the 'evidence-relative' sense. In Cases 5 and 6 he aims to indicate why we should not say that things are only 'wrong' in a fact-relative sense. In Case 5 the example is that the doctor gives treatment that is almost certain to save life, as he justifiably believes but which, unfortunately in fact kills you. Here we shouldn't claim the doctor acted 'wrongly' since the sense of 'fact-relative' is here plainly distinguished from 'evidence-relative' but not in a moral manner so different (there is here a difference between 'fact' and 'evidence' but it is an epistemic difference not a moral one).
Finally, in Case 6, the doctor gives treatment that is almost certain to kill the patient as he justifiably believes but which, in fact, saves the patient's life. Again,the doctor did not act rightly since they saved the patient's life but, again, the difference between 'fact' and 'evidence' is only epistemic and not something morally salient. So none of the six examples show that Parfit does have a specific moral sense for his notion of 'fact-relative'.
In listing the senses Parfit's intention was to identify different questions concerning wrongness. If we think of something as 'wrong' in terms of being blame-worthy, then we include questions about remorse and indignation and focus primarily on belief-relative senses of wrongness. Here we can isolate the non-moral beliefs of the agent and declare that if these beliefs had been accurate and they acted on them in the way indicated by them that this is sufficient for blame to be assigned. So in cases 2, 4 and 6 we can identify wrong action in the blame-worthy sense given the belief-relative notion of 'wrongness'.
After making this point Parfit further undermines the moral standing of the fact-relative notion of 'wrongness' by showing that it produces the conclusion that whether an act was 'wrong' is purely a matter of luck (how things happen, contingently, to turn out). There are alternatives to this view which effectively confirm the undercutting of the notion of 'fact-relative' wrong. The alternatives are two forms of Kantian view. The basic Kantian view mentioned by Parfit is that an act's blameworthiness doesn't depend on luck. A semi-Kantian view, by contrast, would say it doesn't depend entirely on luck but an act that doesn't depend on it would be more blameworthy than one that did.
As Parfit indicates the so-called 'semi-Kantian' view is much less plausible than the Kantian one since it concedes something to the 'fact-relative' view. Going back to the cases already mentioned, cases 2 and 4 are equally blameworthy for the Kantian but not for the 'semi-Kantian' who takes the success of the attempt to kill the patient in Case 4 as indicative of a greater wrongness in this case than in Case 2. In rejecting this view Parfit underscores the point that epistemic justification of beliefs is not the cardinal point in the blameworthiness of actions which seems thus to indicate that the fact-relative sense of 'wrongness' does not involve moral characteristics at all.
Further, Parfit endorses the Kantian view and this seems sufficient to me to undermine any plausible independent moral status for the 'fact-relative' notion of 'wrongness'. This does not mean that the 'outcome' is not bad when something is, as Parfit put it, fact-relatively wrong. But its badness does not reside in an independent moral quality which is why it can be assimilated to 'luck'.
Parfit next introduces a different sense of 'wrong' to indicate that something is 'wrong' in a 'moral-belief relative' sense when an agent acts in a way that 'they believe' to be wrong, which, as Parfit puts it, is equivalent to saying that if someone does what they think wrong then this is wrong even if no other consideration would lead one to take it to be wrong. However, this is also an asymmetric case since there is not 'rightness' in a correlative sense as simply believing something to be right is not sufficient for us to reach the conclusion that acting in accordance with this belief makes it right.
This 'moral-belief-relative' sense is, again, insufficient to describe an independent moral characteristic since it assumes that the belief of the person in question can itself make something wrong that no other characteristic of the action would be sufficient to produce the view that it was wrong and this seems false. However, it is often taken, all the same, to be the case that something is 'blameworthy' by being wrong in this 'moral-belief-relative' sense. This may only rest on a confusion since in taking something to be wrong in this way it is possible that the agent is being blamed or blaming themselves only by standards of a belief that itself has no salient force. (It does, however, appear that often when 'conscience' is at issue it is this kind of belief that is being invoked though 'conscience', it seems to be, has quite a different force to this.)
Now, returning to the 'fact-relative' notion it appears that much of its force concerns what will make things turn out right and hence on consequentialist reasoning. However if this notion is interpreted to mean acting in the way that can produce the best outcomes overall then, as Parfit indicates with his consideration of a case involving trapped miners, this may not be an action we can perform under some cases. Hence Parfit follows the intuition I have been indicating throughout this posting of effectively rejecting the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness and replacing it by what he calls 'expectabilism' which defines the rightness of an act in terms of outcomes that are 'expectably-best' (and which may thus not be ones that have the best outcomes overall). Thus we should replace the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness with that of expectable-wrongness where an action is understood to be one that cannot (or is very unlikely) to have the best results that the situation supports (and hence is not being assessed in terms of best overall outcomes possible). Parfit completes the rout of the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness by pointing out that there is, in any case, no way of acting that would be fact-relatively rightly since we can only act rightly in a belief-relative sense.
So fact-relative effectively gets assimilated to belief-relative in terms of decisions about what we ought to do. Decisive reasons, to use the vocabulary of normative concepts, provide us with the sense of what we would do under ideal conditions. Under conditions that are non-ideal then we should adjust our beliefs to what the evidence points to.
Parfit next turns to further refinements in the discussion of the 'ordinary' sense of 'wrong' pointing out, for example, that we take something to be 'right' if it is permitted (hence not 'wrong") but to be our duty if it would be 'wrong' not to do it. There are, in the context that these points are made, also some additional points raised about what really does and does not belong to the 'moral' point of view. Thus, unlike Sidgwick, Parfit does not take rational egoism to be a 'method of ethics' but to be an external rival to ethics. The reason for this is that rational egoists operate with a normative conception of 'decisive reasons' that does not take account of moral considerations since the only decisive reasons are ones that refer to personal effects (advantages and disadvantages to the self) without broader consideration of the rightness or wrongness of the acts they point to.
Similarly, consequentialism in the general sense that was rejected when the 'fact-relative' notion of 'wrongness' was undermined is also taken to be an external rival to the moral point of view by Parfit (again, in apparent contrast to the view of Sidgwick). Although adopting wholly impartial reasons for actions involves acceptance of sacrifice in relation to ourselves and thus appears to indicate that we have a moral consideration here in issue Parfit points out that adopting this standard as such (which is equivalent to crude act-consequentialism) involves subordination of all normal moral concerns. Hence someone who adopts this view is led to scepticism concerning duties, blame, remorse and indignation and thus is "an external critic" concerning morality. In making this point Parfit appears to have conceded much of the case against act-consequentialism made by such writers as Bernard Williams.
Parfit opens the chapter by promising to disambiguate the varied senses in which something can be "morally wrong". The peculiarity of the way this discussion is framed is that it indicates an understanding of "facts" albeit ones that are "morally relevant". The 'ordinary' sense of "moral wrong" apparently refers to thinking about acts in the same sense as each other. However the first complication and reason for analysis concerns the apparent ignorance we often suffer when evaluating actions, ignorance with regard to some or all of the "morally relevant" facts. When faced with such ignorance (or with "false beliefs") we find the problem arises that we use "morally wrong" in different ways. Three such differences are distinguished by Parfit.
The first sense we use "morally wrong" in situations of partial ignorance or "false belief" or what we might term 'non-ideal' forms of moral evaluation is to term something 'wrong' in a "fact-relative" sense. Something is 'wrong' in this sense just when it would be wrong in the ordinary sense if all the facts were known. This contrasts with thinking of something as 'wrong' in a belief-relative sense which concerns something being 'wrong' if our beliefs about the acts in question are true. Finally, something is 'wrong' in an 'evidence-relative' sense when we would term it 'wrong' in the ordinary sense if we believe what the available evidence gives us 'decisive reasons' to believe and these beliefs are true.
Parfit's point in making these distinctions is to suggest that none of them overlap with the 'ordinary' use of 'wrong' and that no one of these senses of 'wrong' is sufficient to exhaust what is meant by it. In illustrating the differences between these senses of 'wrong' Parfit discusses the case of a doctor who has various unjustified beliefs about the effects of treatments and possesses the wish to kill someone. In the first example of this the doctor prescribes something in the belief it will save the life of the patient but which kills them as it was sure to do given its properties (hence in which the doctor acts with good intentions but imperfect knowledge).
By contrast, in the second example, the doctor prescribes a treatment in the belief it will kill a patient but which saves their life given its properties (in which the doctor thus acts with a bad intention but imperfect knowledge). Many would simply assimilate both these cases to wrong in the 'belief-relative' senses thus declaring the first conduct 'right' and the second 'wrong' despite the outcomes in question. By contrast Parfit claims the doctor in the first of these cases acted wrongly in two different senses, one in a fact-relative sense and one in an evidence-relative sense since it would have been possible to derive evidence here that would have informed me about what the consequences of the action I was performing would have been.
By contrast, in the second case, the doctor acted rightly in fact-relative and evidence-relative senses despite possessing a bad intention. Now, to complete the basis for his distinctions, Parfit next mentions some further variations on the case in question. In these variations the doctor firstly (Case 3) gives treatment that is almost certain to kill the patient but which saves their life as they unjustifiably believed it would. In Case 4, by contrast, they give treatment that is almost certain to save the patient's life but which kills them, as they hoped it would.
In cases 3 and 4 it would be common to assimilate them to the sense of 'right' and 'wrong' in an evidence-relative sense so that the doctor in case 4 can be declared to be acting rightly whilst that in case 3 is acting 'wrongly'. Again, the point is to get past such a view. In Case 4, on Parfit's view, we should not say that the doctor acted 'rightly' as, when we bring in belief-relative and fact-relative senses, we can say that the doctor in question had murder in mind and succeeded in murdering the patient in question. By contrast, in Case 3, it isn't enough to refer to the evidence-relative sense that would say the doctor in question acted 'wrongly'. We should also refer to fact and belief-relative senses of 'wrong' as these show that the doctor acted in these respects 'rightly'.
The peculiar characteristic of these four examples concerns what is meant by declaring them wrong in 'fact-relative' sense since the usage Parfit gives does not seem to be based on 'morally relevant' facts but rather on actual facts and hence the 'fact-relative' sense does not appear to pick out a specific characteristic of the actions but to collapse into the 'evidence-relative' sense. In Cases 5 and 6 he aims to indicate why we should not say that things are only 'wrong' in a fact-relative sense. In Case 5 the example is that the doctor gives treatment that is almost certain to save life, as he justifiably believes but which, unfortunately in fact kills you. Here we shouldn't claim the doctor acted 'wrongly' since the sense of 'fact-relative' is here plainly distinguished from 'evidence-relative' but not in a moral manner so different (there is here a difference between 'fact' and 'evidence' but it is an epistemic difference not a moral one).
Finally, in Case 6, the doctor gives treatment that is almost certain to kill the patient as he justifiably believes but which, in fact, saves the patient's life. Again,the doctor did not act rightly since they saved the patient's life but, again, the difference between 'fact' and 'evidence' is only epistemic and not something morally salient. So none of the six examples show that Parfit does have a specific moral sense for his notion of 'fact-relative'.
In listing the senses Parfit's intention was to identify different questions concerning wrongness. If we think of something as 'wrong' in terms of being blame-worthy, then we include questions about remorse and indignation and focus primarily on belief-relative senses of wrongness. Here we can isolate the non-moral beliefs of the agent and declare that if these beliefs had been accurate and they acted on them in the way indicated by them that this is sufficient for blame to be assigned. So in cases 2, 4 and 6 we can identify wrong action in the blame-worthy sense given the belief-relative notion of 'wrongness'.
After making this point Parfit further undermines the moral standing of the fact-relative notion of 'wrongness' by showing that it produces the conclusion that whether an act was 'wrong' is purely a matter of luck (how things happen, contingently, to turn out). There are alternatives to this view which effectively confirm the undercutting of the notion of 'fact-relative' wrong. The alternatives are two forms of Kantian view. The basic Kantian view mentioned by Parfit is that an act's blameworthiness doesn't depend on luck. A semi-Kantian view, by contrast, would say it doesn't depend entirely on luck but an act that doesn't depend on it would be more blameworthy than one that did.
As Parfit indicates the so-called 'semi-Kantian' view is much less plausible than the Kantian one since it concedes something to the 'fact-relative' view. Going back to the cases already mentioned, cases 2 and 4 are equally blameworthy for the Kantian but not for the 'semi-Kantian' who takes the success of the attempt to kill the patient in Case 4 as indicative of a greater wrongness in this case than in Case 2. In rejecting this view Parfit underscores the point that epistemic justification of beliefs is not the cardinal point in the blameworthiness of actions which seems thus to indicate that the fact-relative sense of 'wrongness' does not involve moral characteristics at all.
Further, Parfit endorses the Kantian view and this seems sufficient to me to undermine any plausible independent moral status for the 'fact-relative' notion of 'wrongness'. This does not mean that the 'outcome' is not bad when something is, as Parfit put it, fact-relatively wrong. But its badness does not reside in an independent moral quality which is why it can be assimilated to 'luck'.
Parfit next introduces a different sense of 'wrong' to indicate that something is 'wrong' in a 'moral-belief relative' sense when an agent acts in a way that 'they believe' to be wrong, which, as Parfit puts it, is equivalent to saying that if someone does what they think wrong then this is wrong even if no other consideration would lead one to take it to be wrong. However, this is also an asymmetric case since there is not 'rightness' in a correlative sense as simply believing something to be right is not sufficient for us to reach the conclusion that acting in accordance with this belief makes it right.
This 'moral-belief-relative' sense is, again, insufficient to describe an independent moral characteristic since it assumes that the belief of the person in question can itself make something wrong that no other characteristic of the action would be sufficient to produce the view that it was wrong and this seems false. However, it is often taken, all the same, to be the case that something is 'blameworthy' by being wrong in this 'moral-belief-relative' sense. This may only rest on a confusion since in taking something to be wrong in this way it is possible that the agent is being blamed or blaming themselves only by standards of a belief that itself has no salient force. (It does, however, appear that often when 'conscience' is at issue it is this kind of belief that is being invoked though 'conscience', it seems to be, has quite a different force to this.)
Now, returning to the 'fact-relative' notion it appears that much of its force concerns what will make things turn out right and hence on consequentialist reasoning. However if this notion is interpreted to mean acting in the way that can produce the best outcomes overall then, as Parfit indicates with his consideration of a case involving trapped miners, this may not be an action we can perform under some cases. Hence Parfit follows the intuition I have been indicating throughout this posting of effectively rejecting the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness and replacing it by what he calls 'expectabilism' which defines the rightness of an act in terms of outcomes that are 'expectably-best' (and which may thus not be ones that have the best outcomes overall). Thus we should replace the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness with that of expectable-wrongness where an action is understood to be one that cannot (or is very unlikely) to have the best results that the situation supports (and hence is not being assessed in terms of best overall outcomes possible). Parfit completes the rout of the notion of 'fact-relative' wrongness by pointing out that there is, in any case, no way of acting that would be fact-relatively rightly since we can only act rightly in a belief-relative sense.
So fact-relative effectively gets assimilated to belief-relative in terms of decisions about what we ought to do. Decisive reasons, to use the vocabulary of normative concepts, provide us with the sense of what we would do under ideal conditions. Under conditions that are non-ideal then we should adjust our beliefs to what the evidence points to.
Parfit next turns to further refinements in the discussion of the 'ordinary' sense of 'wrong' pointing out, for example, that we take something to be 'right' if it is permitted (hence not 'wrong") but to be our duty if it would be 'wrong' not to do it. There are, in the context that these points are made, also some additional points raised about what really does and does not belong to the 'moral' point of view. Thus, unlike Sidgwick, Parfit does not take rational egoism to be a 'method of ethics' but to be an external rival to ethics. The reason for this is that rational egoists operate with a normative conception of 'decisive reasons' that does not take account of moral considerations since the only decisive reasons are ones that refer to personal effects (advantages and disadvantages to the self) without broader consideration of the rightness or wrongness of the acts they point to.
Similarly, consequentialism in the general sense that was rejected when the 'fact-relative' notion of 'wrongness' was undermined is also taken to be an external rival to the moral point of view by Parfit (again, in apparent contrast to the view of Sidgwick). Although adopting wholly impartial reasons for actions involves acceptance of sacrifice in relation to ourselves and thus appears to indicate that we have a moral consideration here in issue Parfit points out that adopting this standard as such (which is equivalent to crude act-consequentialism) involves subordination of all normal moral concerns. Hence someone who adopts this view is led to scepticism concerning duties, blame, remorse and indignation and thus is "an external critic" concerning morality. In making this point Parfit appears to have conceded much of the case against act-consequentialism made by such writers as Bernard Williams.
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