Why do so many people commit so many and such serious wrongdoings as mass murder, rape, torture, lethal neglect? Indeed, why do so many people commit so many and comparatively less serious wrongdoings such as callously treating their friends and lovers by lying and cheating, exploiting their colleagues and neighbours’ goodwill, laughing at insulting jokes?
Well, because they are insane, we often say. Or because they are selfish. Or immoral. Or a combination of these. And yet, as Hugh LaFollette claims in his piece ‘The Greatest Vice?’, these first-call explanations cannot bear the full weight of accounting for ‘man’s humanity to man’ on such a large-scale—both geographically and temporally. Instead, we need to look closer to home, or rather, closer within: ‘the greatest vice is our failure to engage in frequent, honest and rigourous self-reflection’, LaFollette argues.
Let me put my cards on the table: I am gonfiabili hugely sympathetic to his claim that, to the extent that failure to engage in self-reflection leads us to do wrong, it is a moral failure—and one to which we are not sufficiently attentive. In this short reply, however, I raise some questions about the task itself of identifying the greatest vice (s. I), before drawing out some of the implications of LaFollette’s account of moral ignorance. (s.II). I should say at the outset that my aim is to explore LaFollette’s points in a friendly, not critical spirit.
I. IDENTIFYING THE GREATEST VICE
There is comparatively little discussion of vices in contemporary ethics—as opposed to discussions of criteria for wrongness and rightness or, for that matter, discussions of virtues. Judith Shklar’s book Ordinary Vices is a notable exception (Shklar 1984). According to Shklar, cruelty is the greatest vice. Not so for LaFollette, who claims that neither cruelty nor, for that matter, the other obvious candidates mentioned in the introduction meet the desiderata for the greatest vice. The greatest vice, on his view, or at least (more cautiously) the most serious of vices, is one which:
- we all have it in us to display;
- ‘is frequently overlooked in ethical debates’
- ‘produces, permits, or sustains mountains of moral wrongs’;
- ‘is amenable to some control’.