1,720,976 research outputs found
Consequentialism and permissibility
No full textScalar consequentialism, recently championed by Alastair Norcross, holds that the value of an action varies according to the goodness of its consequences, but eschews all judgements of moral permissibility and impermissibility. I show that the strongest version of scalar consequentialism is not vulnerable to the objection that it is insufficiently action-guiding. Instead, the principle objection to the scalar view is simply that it leaves out important and interesting ethical judgements. In demonstrating this, I counter Rob Lawlor's contention that consequentialists cannot consistently care about permissibility and impermissibility
The appeal of self-ownership
No full textIn this paper, I argue that the appeal of a principle of self-ownership is grounded in the specially intimate relationship that each of us has with our body. I argue that once we appreciate the source of the appeal of a claim of self-ownership, we can see how a differently shaped set of strong rights over our body can do justice to the considerations that ground this appeal, without committing us to the most controversial implications of a claim of self-ownership
The rights and wrongs of consequentialism
No full textI argue that the strongest form of consequentialism is one which rejects the claim that we are morally obliged to bring about the best available consequences, but which continues to assert that what there is most reason to do is bring about the best available consequences. Such an approach promises to avoid common objections to consequentialism, such as demandingness objections. Nevertheless, the onus is on the defender of this approach either to offer her own account of what moral obligations we do face, or to explain why offering such a theory is ill-advised. I consider, and reject, one attempt at the second sort of strategy, put forward by Alastair Norcross, who defends a ‘scalar’ consequentialism which eschews the moral concepts of right, wrong and obligation, and limits itself to claims about what is better and worse. I go on to raise some considerations which suggest that no systematic consequentialist theory of our moral obligations will be plausible, and propose instead that consequentialism should have a more informal and indirect role in shaping what we take our moral obligations to be
Consequentialism, demandingness and the monism of practical reason
No full textA central challenge facing those attracted to consequentialism, and to other impartialist ethical views, is to do justice to our twin intuitions that our ethical theory should be impartial in some important sense but also that it should not be unrealistically demanding. I consider one seemingly attractive solution, advocated by Roger Crisp, which lies in proposing a dualism of practical reason, within which impartial reasons for action compete with partial reasons grounded in the interests of the moral agent. I argue that this proposal goes wrong in misconstruing the relationship between reasons and requirements, and develop an alternative framework, with a single source of reasons for action, which retains the strengths of Crisp's account, but avoids the counter-intuitive implications
Should we de-moralize philosophical ethics?
No full textSome philosophers, such as Roger Crisp and Alastair Norcross, have recently argued that the traditional moral categories of wrongness, permissibility and obligation should be avoided when doing ethical theory. I argue that even if morality does not itself provide reasons for action, the moral categories nevertheless have a central role to play in ethical theory: they allow us to make crucial judgements about how to feel about, and react to, agents who behave in anti-social ways, and they help motivate us to act altruistically.<br/
Impartial reasons, moral demands
No full textConsequentialism is often charged with demandingness objections which arise in response to the theory's commitment to impartiality. It might be thought that the only way that consequentialists can avoid such demandingness objections is by dropping their commitment to impartialism. However, I outline and defend a framework within which all reasons for action are impartially grounded, yet which can avoid demandingness objections. I defend this framework against what might appear to be a strong objection, namely the claim that anyone who accepts the theory will be practically irrational
The ambitions of consequentialism
No full textConsequentialism is most famously a theory of right action. But many consequentialists assume, and some have explicitly argued, that consequentialism is equally plausible as a direct theory of the right rules, motives, character traits, institutions, and even such things as climates and eye colours. In this paper, I call into question this ‘Global Consequentialist’ extension of consequentialist evaluation beyond the domain of action. Consequentialist treatments of evaluands other than action are most plausible when they are interpreted as claims about reasons for action; other key ethical concepts involve claims about what there is reason to feel, which makes a consequentialist treatment of them implausible
The value of the virtues
No full textI argue that debates about virtue are best settled by clearly distinguishing two questions:(a)What sort of character trait is there reason to cultivate?(b)What sort of character trait is there reason (morally) to admire?With this distinction in mind, I focus on recent accounts of what consequentialists ought to say about virtue, arguing that:(1)The instrumentalist view of virtue accepted by many prominent consequentialists should not be accepted as the default view for consequentialists to hold.(2)The main rival view, the appropriate response account, not only avoids the major objection facing the instrumental view, but gives the correct diagnosis of where it goes wrong.(3)Two objections that seem to face the appropriate response account can in fact be convincingly met in ways which leave it looking stronger.(4)The appropriate response account is also to be preferred to a disjunctive view or a mixed view
Demandingness objections in ethics
No full textIt is common for moral philosophers to reject a moral theory on the basis that its verdicts are unreasonably demanding—it requires too much of us to be a correct account of our moral obligations. Even though such objections frequently strike us as convincing, they give rise to two challenges: Are demandingness objections really independent of other objections to moral theories? Do standard demandingness objections not presuppose that costs borne by the comfortably off are more important than costs borne by the poor? These challenges have led some writers to question whether there really can be convincing demandingness objections, notwithstanding their strong initial appeal. David Sobel has argued that standard demandingness objections are ‘impotent’, Liam Murphy that they can be ‘dissolved’. In this paper, I aim to vindicate the possibility of demandingness objections by addressing these two challenges
- …
