Bill B and Objective Consequences

For this post, I’m going to try to show that Bill B didn’t actually do anything wrong. I’m doubtful that it can be done, but I want to try, in part for kicks and in part because I feel that the following argument is strangely strong. Imagine a world in which Bill is the only person. If he gets drunk and decides to drive, presumably we don’t think he’s done anything wrong. If we imagine adding more people to this scenario, Bill does something wrong, according to common sense morality. Bill B is culpable because he irresponsibly runs a high risk of harming someone else. At the risk of sounding trivial, I’ll ask: why is running a high risk of harming someone else bad? It must be because harming someone is intrinsically bad, since high risks aren’t bad in and of themselves. This seems to be a point in Bill B’s favor: he hasn’t done anything intrinsically bad: his fault lies in doing something that tends to lead to something bad. In this case, it didn’t.

Recall the bathtub cases from discussions about killing and letting die? In those cases, I (and at least a few others) thought that both inheritors were equally bad for the reason that both came into the bathroom with the intention to kill the kid. If we are inclined to look at motives and intentions as the foundation to morality, Bill B also seems to come away clean. His motives could have spanned the gamut from horrendous to exemplary, depending on his aim in driving. Bill B’s act of driving drunk is not tied to a particular motive. Thus, on both the action and intention accounts, Bill B seems to come away pretty well.