When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible

by Lisa Tessman

Suppose that in an emergency evacuation of a hospital after a flood, not all of the patients can make it out alive. You are the doctor faced with the choice between abandoning these patients to die alone and in pain, or injecting them with a lethal dose of drugs, without consent, so that they die peacefully. Perhaps no one will be able to blame you whatever you decide, but, whichever action you choose, you will remain burdened by guilt. What happens, in cases like this, when, no matter what you do, you are destined for moral failure? What happens when there is no available means of doing the right thing? Human life is filled with such impossible moral decisions. These choices and case studies that demonstrate them form the focus of Lisa Tessman's arresting and provocative work. Many philosophers believe that there are simply no situations in which what you morally ought to do is something that you can't do, because they think that you can't be required to do something unless it's actually in your power to do it. Despite this, real life presents us daily with situations in which we feel that we have failed morally even when no right action would have been possible. Lisa Tessman boldly argues that sometimes we feel this way because we have encountered an 'impossible moral requirement.' Drawing on philosophy, empirical psychology, and evolutionary theory, When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible explores how and why human beings have constructed moral requirements to be binding even when they are impossible to fulfill.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

184 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2017

Reviews

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really interesting concepts here.
For example, the idea of two types of cognition coming into play in questions of morality (automatic response and reasoning), and the idea that we respond to moral questions in three stages (recognition, affective, and action). The latter is illustrated by an excellent and topical example of police brutality toward Black Americans. In the mind of the police this would play out something like “Black men are killers/danger/shoot!”.
Sadly, the writing is overly convoluted at times and very difficult to follow. For example this paragraph:

“In addition to making these kinds of judgments, which
we’ll now call first- order judgments, we sometimes step back from our first- order judgments and make judgments about these judgments. Judgments about judgments can be called second- order
judgments. We can make second- order judgments about our first-order judgments about what’s morally required.”

I know what the author wants to say here but surely there is a better way to explain it. If it were purely an academic text I could understand, but the author uses multiple popular examples of her theories, leaving me feeling like this book was stuck in a kind of academic/mass audience kind of purgatory.
After suffering through tortured paragraphs like this we reach the end and the author blithely concludes:

“So the morality that we’ve got is risky, messy, and hard to live with.”

Seriously?
All this theory and jargon and we end up with “morality is messy”. I’ll be sure to take a note of that for future reference.
Perhaps I’m just not very smart (a distinct possibility) and that’s why I was unable to stay engaged in what the author wanted to convey with this book. Ultimately though, I’ll use the author’s metric when giving my final review: repetitive and convoluted/makes me grumpy/three stars.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific book about a fascinating subject.

[Katie McCullough · Rating 1 out of 5]

TERRIBLE

[Josephine]

Elucidates some thoughts I had myself on whether "ought implies can" is really a valid principle. It was developed out of a few chapters of another work and it kind of feels like it; each chapter sticks very much to a thesis and there's no hazard of getting lost in the weeds of thought the way readers might in many graduate-level philosophy texts. More a collection of approaches than a single thesis argued to completion, but still useful in deepening ethical consideration of very difficult problems.

[Filos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really interesting topic but handled in a way I found unsatisfactory. Her concept of a moral dilemma was great but then when we started delving into the empirical psychology realm, she loses me. Even ignoring the methodological problems these approaches suffer from, she makes jumps not justified by these studies. So we move in a careless manner faster and faster.
Written in an engaging style I quite enjoyed.

[Sufia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and fascinating book about moral dilemmas and conflict. It's quite loaded and use a lot of technical terms but you can still understand the main points that the author is trying to bring across. Examples are used to illustrate points clearly. I would recommend this book for people who are interested in philosophy and issues of morality.

[Mills College Library]

170 T341 2017

[Tyler Cowart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inspired some good discussion. Gave me some new insight. Dry read.

[Zoe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting argument, but not convincing.

[Wako Soma · Rating 1 out of 5]

hmmm the intro and con is all I needed to really read to understand the gist of things.