The Ethics of Moral Criticism

This dissertation starts from the common experience that moral reprobation and moral disagreement are often upsetting. Although I am sympathetic to this as a common experience, I argue that we should resist the impulse to which this common experience gives rise—to restrict reprobation and disagreement—is misguided. Rather than restricting expressions of reprobative moral disagreement, I argue we should pursue a two-pronged approach: cultivating milder forms of expression and more measured responses. To that end, I articulate a novel form of reprobative moral disagreement I call ameliorative moral criticism, which addresses a target by identifying a reason they failed to appreciate. The goal isn't to tell someone what to do going forward, but to draw their attention to something they overlooked or misunderstood, in the hope that they'll be more sensitive to that kind of reason in the future. Ameliorative moral criticism is morally valuable for two reasons. First, understanding the moral world as well as we can is itself a good thing, and ameliorative moral criticism helps us do that by surfacing reasons we might otherwise have missed. Second, the range of morally relevant reasons bearing on any situation will always exceed what any one person can fully appreciate — but the more of those reasons we can see, the better we can be as moral agents. By giving us a chance to expand our moral awareness, ameliorative moral criticism can help us become genuinely better people.