Abstract

People are excused from moral blame for the harm they are said to have caused if they could not have done otherwise. Such excuses rely on causal explanations deriving mostly from social and biological sciences whose paradigms are probabilistic, disjunctive, and combine dispositional and circumstantial factors according to the variance accounted for by each type of factor. The more complete the explanation, the less choice the harm-doer seems to have and therefore the less moral blame is warranted. Thus, the biological bases of people’s behaviour, their earlier socialization, and their prior choices reduce the scope and severity of moral blame — but have no effect on judgments of right and wrong. Fairness also requires a similar analysis of the behaviour of moral judges whose standards vary with their dispositions, social class, and culture. It follows that moral assessments are joint products of both ethics and the social and biological sciences, with neither group able to make fair moral assessments of people’s behaviour without help from the other.