Faculty Colloquia Series - Ravi Thakral Ph.D Presents "Minor Wrongs and the Logical Form of Moral Principles"

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Can a pattern of behavior be wrong even when every individual act within it is perfectly permissible?

This question poses a surprisingly deep problem about how morality works. We judge people based on isolated actions. But we also judge people based on the patterns their actions form. The focus in moral theory tends to be on explaining the status of particular actions. If the individual actions are morally wrong, then there's no puzzle about why the resulting pattern might be morally objectionable. But if each action is permissible, then it seems hard to explain how the pattern itself could be morally prohibited.

I argue that the puzzle arises because of an overlooked ambiguity in the logical form of moral principles. A prohibition may take individual actions as its objects, or take a plurality of actions as its object non-distributively; standard formulations run these two together. I show that this explains a range of intuitive moral judgments and provides the theoretical basis for the possibility of non-distributive moral prohibitions, yielding a new way to think about the structure of moral requirements.