When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People by Steven Nadler & Lawrence Shapiro

Author:Steven Nadler & Lawrence Shapiro [Nadler, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691212760
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

When Bad Thinking Becomes Bad Behavior

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus, in a parable popularized by the philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin, said “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”1 Before the academic professionalization of philosophy in the nineteenth century, philosophers tended to be foxes. Rather than specializing in one area or another—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics—thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, among so many others, took on all the big questions.

Among those quintessential philosophical topics—What is reality? What is knowledge? What is a good life?—there is the one about human nature itself: What is it to be a human being? Plato, ignorant of kangaroos, suggested that we are essentially featherless bipedal animals.2 Aristotle, on the other hand, located our essence in the capacity to reason. He said that to be human is to be a rational animal, although he also famously claimed that “man is by nature a political animal,” moved instinctively to organize with others into society.3

Putting this metaphysical debate about “essence” aside, we can say with certainty that human beings are moral animals—or, to put it better, “moral agents.” We are, by our nature—and barring any relevant disabilities—endowed with the capacity of deliberation over action in the light of principles and values. When we choose to do something because, after thoughtful reflection, we believe it to be the right thing to do (or avoid it because we believe it to be the wrong thing to do), we are behaving as moral agents. But we are also exercising that fundamental human capacity when we choose to do something despite our seeing that it is the wrong thing to do, and even when we do it because we see that it is the wrong thing to do. As long as our action is deliberately chosen and informed, for better or for worse, by beliefs about principles and values that we understand and acknowledge—regardless of what those principles and values happen to be—we are acting as moral agents. The Nazi is no less a moral agent than the Good Samaritan.

Unfortunately, there are many ways for this process of thoughtful, informed practical reasoning to break down or go awry. As the Nazi example shows, exercising our moral agency to the fullest does not imply that we act well or do the right thing, or even that we intend to act well or do the right thing. But, more to the point, neither do we always exercise our moral capacities to the fullest. Even with the best of intentions, we can end up doing what, were we thinking properly and thinking well, we would not—and perhaps should not—do. We now know that good people, because of bad thinking, can be epistemically at fault; they often believe things without adequate justification. But good people, because of a different sort of bad thinking, can also do bad things. Perhaps more often, good people, because of bad thinking, simply fail to do a good thing.

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