Even if no one has sufficiently defended drawing a line between the different types of happiness, it is not obvious that the door has been closed for all future attempts. So one way to look at this argument is load shifting. Those who want to draw a line between different types of moral happiness must provide a deeper justification than has been offered so far. The consequentialist position holds that equal guilt does not necessarily have to deserve the same debt, since guilt should depend on consequences. According to this logic, the happy driver certainly does not deserve as much blame as the unfortunate driver, although his mistakes were identical. As we have seen, it is possible in a very different way of taking on part of the task of describing a coherent picture of morality without happiness by identifying an object of moral evaluation in the case of accidental happiness. For example, Richards suggests that people should be judged on what they would have done in other circumstances. Basically, people should be judged by their characters, of which their actions in various circumstances are manifestations. But such a counterfactual pattern cannot be correct. Consider the following case: Jimmy promised his wife that he would stop eating at the local McDonald`s. But if he walked past while he was open, he would succumb [freely] to temptation and break his promise. He avoids passing McDonald`s so as not to break his promise. Admittedly, Jimmy is not as guilty as he would have been if he had chased McDonald`s out and broken his promise.

Therefore, this counterfactual ploy cannot justify the anti-happiness judgment that one is just as guilty as someone who committed a wrong deed because one would have done so in the circumstances. Aristotle, General Topics: Ethics | Causality: in the law | Character, | moral Compatibility | Determinism: | Causal Egalitarianism | Free will| Incompatibility: (non-deterministic) theories of free will| Moral responsibility| Some philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, have tried to find “happy ways” that strike a balance between the complete rejection of moral happiness and its complete acceptance. Wolf introduced the terms rationalist and irrationalist positions in the context of such reconciliation. The distinction between the different concepts of moral evaluation makes it possible to understand that the principle of control applies to some forms of moral evaluation, but not to others. For example, some argue that there is a perfectly acceptable form of moral happiness that does not contradict the true spirit of the principle of control, namely happiness in what you are responsible for (e.g., Richards 1986, Zimmerman 2002). For example, it will be readily accepted by many that the successful murderer may be responsible for a death, while the one who unsuccessfully attempts to kill is not responsible for a death. At the same time, both could be equally responsible or reprehensible (Zimmerman 2002, 560), or both could have equal moral value (Richards 1986, 171, Greco 1995, 91). For example, if the most important type of moral evaluation is moral worth, then the principle of control may be appropriately limited to the evaluation of moral value. As will be seen, a number of responses to the problem of moral happiness involve the general strategy of distinguishing between different forms of moral evaluation.

Most focus on two families of moral evaluation: (i) the family, which involves responsibility, guilt, and praise for actions and/or qualities or dispositions, and (ii) the family, which includes the notion of an agent`s moral worth and the moral quality of his character. (But see Zimmerman 2006 for a more recent discussion of happiness and deontic judgments.) Constitutive moral happiness concerns the personal character of a moral actor. There is little to argue about the fact that education, education, genes, and other largely uncontrollable influences shape personality to some extent. In addition, personality dictates its actions to some extent. Moral guilt is attributed to an individual because he is extremely selfish, although this selfishness is almost certainly due in part to external environmental influences. Thomas Nagel has been criticized by Dana Nelkin for including causal moral happiness in a separate category, as it seems largely redundant. It does not cover cases that are not already contained in constitutive and cumbersome happiness, and seems to exist only for the purpose of raising the problem of free will. [1] A third strategy is to point out that we mistakenly derive moral happiness from legal happiness. While there may be good reasons for the law to treat people differently, even if what they do depends on factors beyond their control, we (naturally) draw the false conclusion that the law in such cases directly reflects the correct moral assessment. For example, there are a number of reasons why the law could legitimately punish successful crimes more severely than attempted crimes, including the balance between deterrence and privacy (Rosebury 521-24).

If such reasons justify the different treatment of these cases in the law, then it would indeed be wrong to conclude that successful and unsuccessful murderers deserve different moral evaluations. However, the fact that we draw such a false conclusion explains why we often commit ourselves to the existence of moral happiness when reflection can show that it is a mistake. Thomas Nagel (1979) identified four types of moral happiness in his essay. The type most relevant to the above example is the “resulting moral happiness.” According to this approach, it is simply inconsistent to accept or deny the existence of any kind of moral happiness.