‘Who are we to judge?’ – On the Proportionment of Happiness to Virtue

The claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples. . . .an impartial rational spectator can take no delight in seeing the uninterrupted prosperity of a being graced with no feature of a pure and good will, so that a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition even of worthiness to be happy. – Kant1 There is also the figure, rarer perhaps than Callicles supposed, but real, who is horrible enough and not miserable at all but, by any ethological standard of the bright eye and the gleaming coat, dangerously flourishing. – Bernard Williams2 There is a very old thought: that the wicked deserve to suffer, and the virtuous to be happy. There is an equally ancient difficulty: in the world we know those deserts are only partly meted out, if at all. Nearly as old is the injunction, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged’ (Matthew, 7:1). One way out of the resulting perplexities is the myth of a soul that persists after death into a future world, where 1 Groundwork, 4:393, in Practical Philosophy (trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49. 2 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: