Explaining an act does not dissolve it, and treating explanation as excuse loses what is being explained

The argument

A second argument anticipates the standard objection. Those who deny the category say that every act has causes, so none is pure. Proponents accept the first half and deny what is taken to follow. Everything has causes, including generosity, courage and love, and nobody concludes from this that those descriptions name nothing. If having causes dissolved an act's moral character it would dissolve every act's, and no description of anyone's conduct would survive the discovery that the person had a history. Proponents argue the concept is doing a different job from the causal story. To call an act purely evil is to classify what was intended in doing it, not to deny that the agent had parents, a formation and a brain. The two accounts sit at different levels and are not competitors: the question of what was done remains open after the question of why has been answered as fully as anyone can answer it, and it is the first question that moral language exists to settle. What is lost by abandoning the category, on this view, is the ability to say the plainest thing about the worst cases. A vocabulary that can describe only the agent's formation ends with a full account of how someone came to be as they are and no words at all for what they then did. Proponents hold that this is a real loss, borne mostly by those on the receiving end, and that pure evil names something which survives every causal account: a feature of certain intentions rather than a gap in the explanation of them.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents answer that this misstates their claim. They do not argue that causes abolish moral description; they argue that this particular description adds nothing to it. Acts can be called cruel, gratuitous, monstrous and unforgivable while remaining fully explicable, and each of those terms does work. Pure evil, on their account, asserts in addition that nothing further explains the act, which is a claim about the limits of understanding rather than about the act itself.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Granting that every act has causes concedes what the opposing position needs, and the argument then declines to follow the concession through in the cases where the causes are unflattering to the category. [Rejecting P2] The inference misstates the objection. Nobody holds that causes abolish moral description; the claim is that this description adds an assertion about the absence of further explanation which the others do not make. [Rejecting P3] Levels can be distinguished and still bear on one another. An account of why the agent intended what they did speaks directly to whether the intention was of the kind the category requires. [Rejecting C] Surviving an objection is not the same as being established. The argument defends the category against one line of attack without offering any positive reason to think anything falls under it.