ABSTRACT
It is a universally acknowledged truth that some wrongful acts are more wrongful than others. Why is this? That is, why the universal acknowledgment, and (before that) why the ‘truth’ itself? These are the first questions I address, since comparisons among specific instances of wrongdoing presuppose responses to these more general issues. How, after all, could we distinguish even wrongful from rightful acts without assurance from moral history (not the history of ethical theory, but the history of ethical practice) of a means and not only the fact of moral discrimination? Ideally, such assurance would establish not only the possibility but the necessity of moral judgment through gradations of value (or, inverting the order, gradations of disvalue) – and we do indeed find this in that history. What are the specific steps in the gradation of wrongful acts, and how are the distinctions among them made? This second, in many ways more dramatic, set of issues bears on specific comparisons through the measurement of ‘evil’ – for example, by counting the numbers of victims or by distinguishing degrees of particular intentions. The difficulties of managing such specific comparisons are greater than those raised by the prior question of the status of those comparisons in principle – but this is due, I would argue, more to our excessive demands on the process of measurement than to the process itself. Aristotle’s stipulation that we may require of a subject or a science only the degree of precision of which it is capable can, of course, be used in a self-serving way – but in this instance, that view seems a cogent response to the common objection that because moral comparisons may in the end be inconclusive or at least imprecise, the very attempt to make such comparisons is valueless if not altogether impossible. Quite the contrary, in fact: because comparison is at the very heart of moral judgment and assessment – no right without a wrong, no justice without injustice – the intrinsic vagueness of specific comparisons pales beside the case for the necessity of such comparison. (To be sure,
such comparisons may always seem, and be, invidious – even when they conclude – without finding for one side over (or below) another.)
Thus, to begin: some words about my claim for the universal acknowledgment of the principle of discrimination among degrees or kinds of wrongdoing. This principle, put more concretely, holds that wrongs come in – certainly are known by – degrees of ‘wrong-ness’ (that is, of what makes them wrong); and that the moral differences thus found are at least in principle so clear and so significant that the principle is generally (even, I suggest, universally) recognized.
