@CP
I think you've hit on a genuine problem.

It seems to me incomprehensible but that a person would act except in a way he thinks right, good, or justified. He may do something that he thinks wrong in itself, but treat it as a moral mortgage - ie, a price worth paying for some greater good. But the point is that that seems to imply that all agents are aiming for the good - it's just that some (we think) have misidentified it. To deny this would mean admitting that some people act because of - not just despite - their knowledge that they have a reason not to; and that's incomprehensible.

So it looks like we'd have to admit that the Nazi guard - actually, the guard's not the best person to use here: let's say Himmler instead - that Himmler was aiming at a mistaken account of the good. The problem with that is obvious: how could anyone make a mistake that large? That's incomprehensible too.

The point - and I don't like this - is that there are certain extremes of behaviour that exhaust moral laguage. They're simply baffling. I'm not happy at all with this conclusion, because it seems to absolve much too much. But it's one that strikes me as being very hard to avoid.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 29 Oct 2008, 15:34, Reply)