Duties of rectification are a familiar part of practical reasoning. Both as a matter of law and morality, it seems only right and proper that wrongdoers ought to try to set matters straight by providing full and adequate reparation. But what qualifies as full and adequate reparation? Accepting for the sake of argument that there are duties of rectification, what counts as fulfilling them?
One approach to this question appeals to the Counterfactual Test. This holds that the duty of rectification is a duty to establish the situation that would have obtained had the initial wrong not taken place. On this view, if I wrong you with the result that you end up on n units of utility, but you would have ended up on n+1 units of utility had I not wronged you, then I fully discharge my duty of rectification if I bring your utility-level up from n to n+1.
However, this account of what it means to provide “full and adequate reparation” encounters a curious problem in cases where a wrongful injury is followed by an unexpected benefit. Suppose, for example, that I wilfully damage your car, with the result that you miss your flight to America, but it so happens that the flight in question crashes into the Atlantic, with the loss of life of everyone on board. The Counterfactual Test implies that I fully rectify the wrong by bringing about the situation that would have obtained had I not damaged your car, which in this instance involves your dying in a plane crash. But clearly this is absurd: rectifying my wrong can’t involve my killing you.
I therefore wonder whether there is a way of characterizing “full and adequate reparation” which is plausible in its own right and which handles cases of “unexpected benefit” in a satisfactory way. One option, of course, is to insist that, in the plane crash case, no wrong has been committed and no duty of rectification has been incurred. Another option is to tweak the Counterfactual Test so that the relevant point of comparison isn’t the (near) possible world where you die in the plane crash but the (more distant) possible world in which you catch the flight and cross the Atlantic safely. But can either of these options be made to work? Or should we search for a different strategy for thinking about rectification that does away with counterfactual reasoning altogether? What do readers think?
Great post, Jeremy. The Counterfactual Test clearly carries with it some problematic implications, which you address. However, I think I think it would be tremendously difficult to characterize "full and adequate reparation" in terms that don't make at least some reference to counterfactual reasoning. My inclination is to think that what is needed here is not an abandoning of any recourse to counterfactual reasoning but instead the right sort of tweaking of the Counterfactual Test. You suggest here: "Another option is to tweak the Counterfactual Test so that the relevant point of comparison isn’t the (near) possible world where you die in the plane crash but the (more distant) possible world in which you catch the flight and cross the Atlantic safely." I think there might be a more plausible tweaking of the Counterfactual Test that would make the relevant comparison world a different one than you suggest here. My suggestion is that, rather than to require me to (as C.T. says) "establish the situation that would have obtained had the initial wrong not taken place", the C.T. test should instead require me to establish the utility level you attained in the in the nearest world, holding fixed my having wronged you. Holding fixed my having damaged your car, most nearby worlds are ones where you miss the flight AND yet the flight lands safely. (It was, after all, an unlucky event that resulted in the plane's crashing). Given this tweaked C.T. formulation, since the nearest world, given the facts relevant to my wronging you (damaging your car), is a world in which you miss a plane which lands safely, I should owe you whatever you would have gained from having successfully made the flight (for instance, I should repay the rebooking fee for the flight or perhaps the concert tickets that led you to take the flight in the first place). Now, I think there is another amendment that has to be made: the extent to which you receive unintended benefits from my having wronged you should (to some extent) offset the amount I should have to pay in reparations. How much this should be offset seems to me to be quite complicated. But in the case you give: since the unexpected benefit of my having wronged you is your maintaining your life, this plausibly reduces what I owe (i.e. the plane ticket rebooking fee, etc.) to nearly nothing excepting what I owe to fix the car. I would have to think more about how this final amendment would be spelled out.
ReplyDeleteHi Adam,
DeleteMany thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my post. On reflection, I think I agree with you that counterfactual reasoning will prove indispensable in thinking about duties of rectification. However, in response to your other suggestions, I have a couple of quick points:
(1) I don’t think that it is so obvious that the quantum of compensation I should pay to you in respect of wrongfully damaging your car should be offset (as you suggest) by the fact that I have inadvertently benefited you. For example, on the question of who should pay for the cost of the missed flight, my intuition is that it should be me (the wrongdoer) rather than you (the victim). After all, irrespective of the fact that the plane crashes, someone has got to carry the cost of the plane tickets: why should it be the innocent victim rather than the culpable wrongdoer?
(2) I’m not entirely sure that I understand your proposed reformulation of the CT. It is worth stressing that – in the example I provide - I am stipulating that the following counterfactual is true: if I didn’t damage your car, you would have died in a plane crash. I therefore take it to be true that in the nearest possible world where I don’t damage your car, you die in a plane crash. You write: “the C.T. test should instead require me to establish the utility level you attained in the in the nearest world, holding fixed my having wronged you”. But doesn’t this pick out exactly the possible world where you die in the plane crash? In which case, we are back with the original puzzle.
Cheers,
Jeremy
The counterfactual test is inadequate to produce the sort of full and adequate reparation required, because it is incapable of fulfillment. It is not possible to unhappen the accident, and because it did happen the whole of my future life has been changed. I am now starting the rest of my life from a different place and time than would have been the case. I might not now ever meet the girl meant for me. She may have been on the plane. We may have met and died happy and together, with no time ever for an angry word. Instead I am on a cold and wet Northern Ireland roadside, getting soaked by passing trucks, surrounded by broken glass and arguing about fault and duties of rectification with a philosophy lecturer. Forget n+1; I want a big number multiplier in the equation, not just a plus sign.
ReplyDeleteMaurice Campbell