Moral Risk

This chapter examines the connections between thought and harm from an ex ante perspective. It asks whether the antecedent risk that a given belief, attitude, or fantasy will have a harmful impact on another is ever high enough to render that thought impermissible. The kinds of harms that are discussed include the frustration of others’ private desires, the infliction of offense and hurt feelings, and various forms of economic and physical damage. The chapter’s conclusion is that while the risks that are posed by some thoughts approach the permissibility threshold, none actually crosses the line.

Vicious Thoughts

According to many virtue ethicists, a wrong act is one that a virtuous person would not perform. Because most virtues involve dispositions to feel and think as well as act, a natural extension of this claim may appear to support the conclusion that it is morally wrong to have vicious thoughts. However, because moral reasons are widely thought to be very strong if not overriding, any such argument must be backed by an explanation of how a thought’s viciousness can give us a suitably strong reason not to have it. This chapter examines the two most promising theories of virtue and vice, eudaemonism and Platonism, and concludes that neither provides the needed explanation.

Harmful Thoughts

Private thoughts can lead to public harms in a variety of ways. They can do so by motivating those who harbor them to perform harmful acts, by motivating their own hurtful or destructive communication, and by being unintentionally disclosed by persons who don’t mean to communicate them. In addition, although mind-reading is presently impossible, that may change in the future, and if it does, it will be a further source of mischief. The questions that this chapter addresses are, first, whether a thought’s actually causing harm in one of these ways can make its previous occurrence morally wrong, and, second, whether a thought’s posing the risk of causing harm in one of these ways can make having it now morally wrong. Of these questions, the current chapter answers all versions of the first, and some versions of the second, in the negative. The remaining versions of the second question are carried over to the following chapter.

Encomium

This chapter discusses the value of the freedom of mind that we would lose if our thoughts were subject to moral restrictions. By internalizing restrictions on thought, we not only lose access to various forms of knowledge but also relinquish authorship of our beliefs and cut ourselves off from important aspects of our personalities. More important yet, we flatten out our experience in ways that make us far less interesting both to ourselves and others. The subjective realm is both a retreat in a hostile world and an endlessly expansive playground, and we needlessly surrender both advantages by letting morality in.

Like Dye in Water

The argument of this chapter is that whenever we internalize moral restrictions on what we may feel or think or fantasize about, our freedom of thought is curtailed in a number of important ways. Although the details vary, the unifying idea is that because each thought is associatively and inferentially connected to indefinitely many others, any moral prohibition against any single thought is bound to extend to many of the other thoughts that would lead to it. Satisfying these derivative obligations would often mean preventing our thoughts and feelings from following their natural course and avoiding inquiries or inferences that would lead to forbidden beliefs. Because he must constantly be aware of these restrictions, the moralist cannot operate with a free mind.

Don’t Even Think of It

This chapter examines the claim that there are certain beliefs, attitudes, and fantasies that are impermissible simply in virtue of their content. Although this claim has a recognizably deontological flavor, it has not received much sustained attention from deontologists. However, interesting arguments for it can be extracted from Thomas Scanlon’s contractualism and from Kant’s own theory, and the chapter examines these in some detail. Where Kant’s theory is concerned, the doctrines discussed include the universalizability test, the idea that each rational agent is an end in himself, the idea that all rational agency commands our respect, and the idea that we all have duties of self-perfection. Although there is obviously room for further discussion, the chapter’s conclusion is that no convincing deontological argument for putting any thoughts off limits is yet in sight.

Nasty as I Wanna Be

This chapter introduces the book’s guiding question: Is thought ever subject to moral regulation? Some examples of the sorts of beliefs, attitudes, and fantasies that many regard as morally impermissible are provided, and the conception of morality that will inform the discussion is specified. The chapter advances a number of reasons for asking whether thoughts can be morally wrong, some theoretical and some practical, and anticipates its later argument that internalized restrictions on thought would have a significant adverse effect on mental freedom. Some bad arguments, both for and against moralism about the mental, are mentioned in order to be set aside, and the chapter ends with brief summaries of the chapters to come.