What I Learned From: Mog The Forgetful Cat (by Judith Kerr)
Can we be praiseworthy for what we do accidentally? What does Mog teach us about the nature of moral responsibility?
The overall aim of this series of posts is show what philosophers, and others, can learn from children’s stories. In this way, I aspire to be as sophisticated as philosophers like Bernard Williams who regularly use examples drawn from high-brow literature, Ancient Greek tragedies, opera, and theatre.
Philosophers of moral responsibility often say that we cannot be morally responsible, and so cannot be correctly praised, for what we do by accident. But is this true? I don’t think so and the story Mog the Forgetful Cat (by Judith Kerr) helped me to see this.
Mog is praised — she is said to be a remarkable cat, she gets a medal, an egg every day for breakfast afterwards — because she stops a burglar by meowing at him, causing him to drop the items he was trying to steal and alerting everyone in the house to his presence. Of course, as the reader knows, Mog just wanted to be let back into the house but had forgotten she had a cat flap — the cat from that connected the garden to the kitchen; her own little door — so she wanted to signal her presence to the person she saw in the kitchen, who she did not recognise was a burglar.
A lot of philosophers of moral responsibility hold that this praise is incorrect. First, Mog is a cat so she cannot really be morally responsible, and so she cannot really be praiseworthy, for what anything she does. Second, Mog achieved something accidentally: she was neither intending and nor did she foresee that she would stop her house being burgled.
Let’s set aside the fact that Mog is a cat, though I’ll come back to that point later. Let’s first focus on whether it is possible to be morally responsible for things that we accidentally do.
Just as Mog is praised, we also regularly praise people for good acts that they do by accident. Suppose I accidentally knock into you and that moves you out of the way of an oncoming speeding cyclist. You might immediately thank me — a way of praising me — for stopping you from getting injured. A traditional philosopher of moral responsibility might say: “yes, we do praise people even when they do things accidentally. However, this is because we assume that they aren’t actually just lucky.”
This traditional philosopher of moral responsibility will likely go onto say that when we discover that someone does something by accident, we will no longer find them to be praiseworthy: our praise of them will now seem incorrect given the facts of the situation that only now have been brought to light. The idea is that you would withdraw your praise of me if you found out that I was looking at my phone, stumbled, and then accidentally knocked into you.
It seems correct that we sometimes will revise an instance of praise, including an implicit attribution of praiseworthiness, for an achievement when we discover that the achievement was the result of luck. If I am praised for creating a beautiful artwork, one which results in a number of awards, I will likely have that praise withdrawn if it is discovered that I tripped and fell over several buckets of paint and it just so happened to create something that a group of people find beautiful enough to praise me and give me awards.
But we can accept that we revise our attributions of praiseworthiness in such cases without holding that we completely deny that I am praiseworthy for creating a beautiful artwork. Why not just say that I’m less praiseworthy than an artist who produced a similar kind of work intentionally and knowingly? Likewise, why not just say that I’m less praiseworthy for stopping you from getting injured than someone who thoughtfully stopped you from getting injured by a speeding cyclist? I don’t think we have good reason to rule out this possibility just because it is odds with traditional accounts that hold that we are not praiseworthy for good accidents that we cause.
This alternative would explain why our reactions to Mog are correct: she is praiseworthy for alerting her family to the presence of the burglar. She is just not as praiseworthy as a person who did this knowingly and intentionally.
Of course, Mog is a cat and we might think, as many do, that cats cannot be morally responsible for anything they do, and so all praise of them is incorrect. But Mog may, in fact, be praiseworthy, and she may in fact be morally responsible, for what she does but just not as praiseworthy, and morally responsible, as a human would be for doing something comparable. This makes sense of our reaction to Mog when compared to our reactions of people who stop burglars knowingly and intentionally.
If this is right, then it suggests that a lot of traditional ways of thinking about moral responsibility and praiseworthiness are misguided given that they would say that cats and those who do things by accident are not at all morally responsible and not at all praiseworthy for what they do.
There’s different responses people might have at this point. Let me just mention one (feel free to mention others).
A critic might say that moral responsibility comes apart from praiseworthiness. Perhaps cats can be praiseworthy, but they cannot be morally responsible for what they do. An underlying thought here being that moral responsibility requires some significant kinds of control over what one does. So even if we make the case that cats have a kind of control, we might say that it is not significant enough for them to be morally responsible for what they do. Another underlying thought here is that moral responsibility requires some kind of appreciation of morality and how that can affect what we do. Cats just cannot have that kind of appreciation: they do not appreciate moral reasons to do one thing or another, and so cannot be moved by such reasons. And that’s why they cannot be morally responsible for what they do.
But this response assumes that being morally responsible is distinct from being praiseworthy. Of course, moral responsibility might also underlie blameworthiness. So, this response assumes that being morally responsible is also distinct from being blameworthy. My problem is that I’m just not sure why we should think that’s the case. If we follow the way we analyse the case of Mog, we start by taking her to be an appropriate target of praise — that is, we take praise to be correct on the face of it, i.e., we take her to be praiseworthy. We then work back to figure out that she may then be morally responsible for what she does, assuming that being morally responsible is a necessary condition on being (morally) praiseworthy. So, I take it we figure out what moral responsibility, at least in part, is about through considering cases of praiseworthiness (and the other part through considering cases of blameworthiness). This process isn’t just what happens in this case, but it is what seems to happen in most, if not all, cases we might discuss to try to figure out what the conditions on being morally responsible are.
Mog may be a forgetful cat, but her case can potentially teach us quite a lot about praiseworthiness and the nature of moral responsibility.