Piracy and moral duties

I had a thought the other day. We have legal duties to our government who are established as qualified legal authorities by us voting them in. When it comes to piracy it seems many people apply the following premise to make themselves feel better:
  1. If I can’t see why a certain law exists or don’t agree with a certain law, then it is fine for me to ignore the duties established by that law.
Now it clearly seems that we would disagree with this in cases like murder or rape, so why the restricted application?
One possible answer is that legal duties like murder and rape have moral duty counterparts, and so we have additional reason to obey those duties. But if one doesn’t think that there are any objective moral duties, such a move isn’t available.

We could, however, look to some objective fact for a differentiator, such as those duties that lead to the flourishing of human life or the survival of the fittest. But in the absence of objective moral duties why choose that fact over any other? What’s to stop one from picking the duties that lead to the most pain for others?

Is there an alternative to (1) that I’m unaware of, or a better reason for the restricted application of it?

Outrage, praise and empathy

I often defend the following formulation of the moral argument (taken from William Lane Craig):

1. If God doesn’t exist, then objective moral duties don’t exist
2. Objective moral duties do exist
3. Therefore, God exists

In defence of premise (2) I usually offer the following three points:

2.1. If objective moral duties don’t exist, then everything is permissible. But some things are not permissible.
2.2. If objective moral duties don’t exist, then moral outrage and praise is irrational. But they aren’t irrational.
2.3. We are rationally compelled to trust our perceptions until we are given a defeater for them. Since we perceive an objective moral realm and no defeater has been given, we are rationally compelled to trust our perceptions and so believe the existence of objective moral duties.

Now I’m not going to spend this post trying to defend all of this. I’ve tried in a previous post to defend 1, 2.1 and 2.3, so I thought I’d spend some time on 2.2 here.

So, what do I mean by the term “moral outrage”? In all honesty I don’t have a reductive analysis of it, but I think we all have an intuition for what I mean. Consider the following examples of moral outrage and praise:

  1. The daughter of two parents is raped and killed, and so they are outraged at the rapist when they come face to face with him.
  2. A gay pride stand is maliciously burnt to the ground as an act of homophobia, and onlookers are outraged at the people who did it.
  3. A group of people risk their lives to stop the oppression of women in a country, and they are praised because of it.
  4. A man stops another man from being shot by jumping in the way of the bullet and is praised for saving him at the cost of his own life.

These kind of situations are commonplace in normal life. They might not always be as extreme (sometimes we’re outraged at people because they are insensitive, arrogant or insulting and sometimes we praise people when they are selfless even when it doesn’t burden them all that much) but I think we can distinguish this outrage/praise from other forms. For example, with moral outrage we aren’t outraged at the effectiveness of the action. If I’m working with someone who is incompetent, I am outraged at their inefficiency. This outrage, I think, is better understood as irritation anyway. I can’t think of other kinds of outrage, but I’m sure there are others. I think if we keep a clear idea of the outrage and praise seen in the examples above we should be fine 🙂

Of Pens and Pain

Now, I hope most people would agree that the people in examples 1-4 are rational in their outrage or praise. But why? For the person who affirms the existence of objective moral duties we can quite easily see why: we are outraged at people who do what they ought not do and we praise those people who go beyond their duties[1]. So, the rapist in example 1 ought not have raped that girl and in doing so he has primarily wronged her and secondarily wronged the people who loved her dearly (such as her parents). It is wrong that he raped her and we are rationally compelled to be outraged at his actions because of it.

But suppose we deny the existence of objective moral duties.Read More »