What are the fundamental divisions in ethics? Which divisions capture the most important and basic options in moral theorizing? In this article, I reject the ‘Textbook View’ which takes the tripartite division between consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics to be fundamental. Instead, I suggest that moral theories are fundamentally divided into three independent divisions, which I call the neutral/relative division, the normative priority division, and the maximizing division. I argue that this account of the fundamental divisions of ethics better captures (...) the main concerns that normative ethicists have when assessing moral theories. It also helps us make progress in comparative ethics and makes visible theoretical possibilities obscured by the Textbook View. (shrink)

What are the fundamental divisions in ethics? Which divisions capture the most important and basic options in moral theorizing? In this article, I reject the ‘Textbook View’ which takes the tripartite division between consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics to be fundamental. Instead, I suggest that moral theories are fundamentally divided into three independent divisions, which I call the neutral/relative division, the normative priority division, and the maximizing division. I argue that this account of the fundamental divisions of ethics better captures (...) the main concerns that normative ethicists have when assessing moral theories. It also helps us make progress in comparative ethics and makes visible theoretical possibilities obscured by the Textbook View. (shrink)

Outcomes tyrannize over prevailing accounts of ethics, actions, reasons, attitudes, and social practices. The right action promotes the best outcome, the end of every action is an outcome to be promoted, reasons to act are reasons to promote outcomes, and preferences and desires rationalize actions that aim at the outcome of realizing their contents—making their contents true. The case for this tyranny turns on a related set of counterintuitive outcome-centered interpretations of deeply intuitive claims that it is always right to (...) do what’s best, that every action brings about an outcome, and that the good is prior to the right. The ethical case for consequentialism elides the distinction between these claims in each case, allowing the counter-intuitive interpretations to hijack the plausibility of the intuitively plausible counterparts. This ethical hijacking has succeeded in large part because a conflation between two different senses of bringing about, and an assumption that all non-deontic value rationales for action are outcome-centered, are thoroughly entrenched at the non-ethical level as well. The “neutral” framework of reasons, actions, and attitudes within which we frame the ethical debate begs the question in favor of a consequentialist resolution of the debate, providing a non-ethical argument for outcome-centered ethics. To expose this conflation and this unwarranted assumption, then, is to undermine the case for these default outcome-centered accounts of reasons, actions, and attitudes as well, and in doing so to expose a subtle but pernicious shift from looking directly at oneself, one’s reasons, the values they reflect, one’s actions, and the practices in which one is involved, to looking at these same things as if in a fun house mirror—the recognizable features are there, but subtly, profoundly distorted, often beyond recognition. (shrink)