The ethics of social consequences is a means of satisficing non-utilitarian consequentialism that can be used to approach disaster issues. The primary values in the ethics of social consequences are humanity, human dignity and moral rights, and these are developed and realized to achieve positive social consequences. The secondary values found in the ethics of social consequences include justice, responsibility, moral duty and tolerance. Their role and purpose is given by their ability to help achieve and realize moral good. Fair (...) treatment within moral issues stems from applying primary as well as secondary values. The nature of these values cannot be determined exclusively in ordinary circumstances. However, in extraordinary circumstances (disasters), not all the requirements relating to the value structure of the ethics of social consequences need be considered in its entirety. In extraordinary circumstances, values are prioritised and realized. Primary values are realized prior to secondary ones. When prioritizing primary values, the realization of positive social consequences, or at least minimizing the negative social consequences, takes priority over other primary values. In disaster bioethics especially, it is often necessary to find a way to minimize the negative social consequences; thus, actions where positive social consequences are prevalent are preferred. (shrink)

This paper draws on the 'Fitting Attitudes' analysis of value to argue that we should take the concept of fittingness (rather than value) as our normative primitive. I will argue that the fittingness framework enhances the clarity and expressive power of our normative theorising. Along the way, we will see how the fittingness framework illuminates our understanding of various moral theories, and why it casts doubt on the Global Consequentialist idea that acts and (say) eye colours are normatively on a (...) par. We will see why even consequentialists, in taking rightness to be in some sense determined by goodness, should not think that rightness is conceptually reducible to goodness. Finally, I will use the fittingness framework to explicate the distinction between consequentialist and deontological theories, with particular attention to the contentious case of Rule Consequentialism. (shrink)

In some situations a number of agents each have the ability to undertake an initiative that would have significant effects on the others. Suppose that each of these agents is purely motivated by an altruistic concern for the common good. We show that if each agent acts on her own personal judgment as to whether the initiative should be undertaken, then the initiative will be undertaken more often than is optimal. We suggest that this phenomenon, which we call the unilateralist’s (...) curse, arises in many contexts, including some that are important for public policy. To lift the curse, we propose a principle of conformity, which would discourage unilateralist action. We consider three different models for how this principle could be implemented, and respond to an objection that could be raised against it. (shrink)

This article examines Ian McEwan's script for director Richard Eyre's film, The Ploughman's Lunch, the title of which alludes to a deceptive, post-World War II advertising campaign that promulgated a false narrative about British tradition. McEwan's script, and Eyre's film adaptation of it, offer a prescient exposé of Britain's culture of mendacity in the 1980s in ways that draw on rule-consequentialist ethics to maintain that lying on the personal, professional, and political level has a pernicious effect on society. McEwan's work (...) on the film also marks a crucial turning point in the author's career, one in which he first begins to explore complex ethical and moral conundrums that would figure prominently in his major fiction. (shrink)

Money isn’t everything, so what is? Many government leaders, social policy theorists, and members of the general public have a ready answer: happiness. This paper examines an opposing view due to Robert Nozick, which centres on his experience-machine thought experiment. Despite the example's influence among philosophers, the argument behind it is riddled with difficulties. Dropping the example allows us to re-version Nozick's argument in a way that makes it far more forceful - and less dependent on people's often divergent intutions (...) about the experience machine. [DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE at oro.open.ac.uk repository, link below]. (shrink)

Is there a pro tanto moral reason to create a life merely because it would be good for the person living it? Proponents of the procreation asymmetry claim there is not. Defending this controversial no reason claim, some have suggested that it is well in line with other phenomena in the moral realm: there is no reason to give a promise merely because one would keep it, and there is no reason to procreate merely to increase the extent of justice (...) in the world. Allegedly, some analogs extend so far as to support a unified theory of the no reason claim and the nonidentity thesis, that is, the view that of two persons leading lives of positive wellbeing, there is a reason to create the person with higher wellbeing. I dismantle the proposed analogs and show that they fail to meet various desiderata. Moreover, I refute Johann Frick's argument that the no reason claim follows from the assumption that reasons of beneficence are reasons to act for the sake of people. By criticizing attractive defenses for the no reason claim, I weaken its plausibility. (shrink)

Morality is demanding; this is a platitude. It is thus no surprise when we find that moral theories too, when we look into what they require, turn out to be demanding. However, there is at least one moral theory – consequentialism – that is said to be beset by this demandingness problem. This calls for an explanation: Why only consequentialism? This then leads to related questions: What is the demandingness problematic about? What exactly does it claim? Finally, there is the (...) question of what we do if we accept that there is a demandingness problem for consequentialism: How can consequentialists respond? The present chapter sets out to answer these questions (or at least point to how they could be answered). (shrink)

This paper argues that there was considerably more philosophy of action in moral theory before 1958 (when Anscombe complained of its lack under the banner 'philosophy of psychology') than there has been since. This is in part because Anscombe influenced the formation of 'virtue theory' as yet another position within normative ethics, and her work contributed to the fashioning of 'moral psychology' as an altogether distinct (and now increasingly empirical) branch of moral philosophy.

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries (...) that emit most greenhouse gases are responsible for preventing catastrophic climate change. This responsibility might imply that these countries are morally required to take necessary steps individually and jointly to come to an agreement on and implement a workable plan, and to avoid steps that worsen the situation. More trivially, the grading of your student’s essays might be your responsibility, as might making sure there is wine at tomorrow’s picnic, and you might thus be required to see to it that essays are competently graded and suitable wine brought to the picnic. -/- Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care. -/- The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships. (shrink)

I argue that it’s quite comprehensible to get upset about metaethical nihilism, to indulge what I call nihilistic despair. When we lose the objective moral or normative point of view, we lose the promise of luck-immune guidance and categorical importance, things many of us hope for. This is all quite Williams-friendly, but I reject his puzzling but suggestive remarks that nihilistic despair must be a self-pitying muddle. Finally, I argue that internalism about reasons is even more depressing than outright nihilism, (...) in one way at least. (shrink)

This study focused on the influence of American and Chinese cultures on consequentialism orientation in decision-making within the broader context of psychologists’ academic roles and responsibilities. In addition, this study hypothesized that educational level would affect culturally influenced ethical decision making in both cultures. Based on the American Psychological Association Ethics Code, 20 ethical scenarios in 5 domains in psychology were created and used to examine the influence of culturally ethical beliefs on psychologists’ decision making among 181 participants. The results (...) indicated that significant cultural differences in consequentialism orientation differentiated Chinese and American participants and influenced their resolution of ethical issues. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between a telic and a deontic version of Derek Parfit's influential Priority View. Employing the distinction, it shows that the existence of variations in how intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts should be resolved fails to provide a compelling case in favour of relational egalitarianism and against all pure versions of the Priority View. In addition, the article argues that those variations are better understood as providing counterevidence to certain distribution-sensitive versions of consequentialism.

Any complete theory of “what we owe to each other” must be able to adequately accommodate directed or bipolar obligations, that is, those obligations that are owed to a particular individual and in virtue of which another individual stands to be wronged. Bipolar obligations receive their moral importance from their intimate connection to a particular form of recognition respect that we owe to each other: respect of another as a source of valid claims to whom in particular we owe certain (...) treatment and, at the very least, an apology if we fail to accord that treatment. While some of the most prominent accounts of interpersonal morality fail to adequately accommodate bipolar obligations, I here investigate a recent proposal that explicitly seeks to improve on these accounts—Stephen Darwall’s second-personal theory of morality. Ultimately, I object to Darwall’s theory on the grounds that his second-personal theory normatively ties bipolar obligations too closely to non-directed moral obligations or those that we are under, period. The problem for Darwall’s account is that any obligations that at first appear to be bipolar and owed to someone in particular turn out to be instances of non-directed moral obligations period that have their normative source in the representative authority of the moral community. Adequately accommodating bipolar obligations requires taking seriously a novel second-personal approach, according to which we locate the normative sources of our interpersonal obligations in the claims and demands particular persons and deliberate from what I call the pairwise or bipolar standpoint. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of the role of philosophical moral theory in our attempts to resolve the ethical problems that arise in health care, with particular reference to the contention that we need theory to be determinative of our choice of actions. Moral theorizing is distinguished from moral theories and the prospects for determinacy from the latter are examined through a consideration of the most promising candidates: utilitarianism, deontology and the procedures involved in reflective equilibrium. It is argued (...) that the current lack of any generally accepted method of solving moral problems, together with the extreme improbability of philosophy achieving a plausibly determinate theory, should encourage us to approach the problems in a spirit of agnosticism regarding the way in which theoretical material might be of relevance. The practical test for both moral theorizing and moral theories is thus not determinacy but the degree to which they increase our understanding of moral problems by serving, as they do in philosophy, as a means of inquiry into their nature. (shrink)

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...) act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. (shrink)

As an indirect ethical theory, rule consequentialism first evaluates moral codes in terms of how good the consequences of their general adoption are and then individual actions in terms of whether or not the optimific code authorises them. There are three well-known and powerful objections to rule consequentialism’s indirect structure: the ideal world objection, the rule worship objection, and the incoherence objection. These objections are all based on cases in which following the optimific code has suboptimal consequences in the real (...) world. After outlining the traditional objections and the cases used to support them, this paper first constructs a new hybrid version of consequentialism that combines elements of both act and rule consequentialism. It then argues that this novel view has sufficient resources for responding to the previous traditional objections to pure rule consequentialism. (shrink)

Do we have stronger duties to assist in emergencies than in nonemergencies? According to Peter Singer and Peter Unger, we do not. Emergency situations, they suggest, merely serve to make more salient the very extensive duties to assist that we always have. This view, while theoretically simple, appears to imply that we must radically revise common-sense emergency norms. Resisting that implication, theorists like Frances Kamm, Jeremy Waldron, and Larry Temkin suggest that emergencies are indeed normatively exceptional. While their approach is (...) more in line with common-sense, however, it is theoretically less simple, and it is has proven difficult to justify the exception. In this paper we propose a model of emergencies that we call the Informal-Insurance Model, and explain how this can be used to combine theoretical simplicity with common-sense emergency norms. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for a distinct and novel right-based account of risks and I call it the Sophisticated High-risk Thesis. I argue that there is a distinction between rights-infringing risk impositions and no-rights-infringing risk impositions. An action imposing a high risk of harm infringes rights, whereas an act imposing a low risk of harm does not. I also suggest three principles that govern the permissibility of highly risky actions. If a highly risky action meets the conditions specified by (...) any of these three principles, it can be justified. These principles are the consent principle*, the prevent disaster principle* and the reciprocity principle**. I show that the Sophisticated High-risk Thesis is, in general, better than the alternative Risk Thesis defended by McCarthy. (shrink)

The Water Margin is a great Chinese classical novel; Wu Song’s 武松 killing of his sister-in-law, Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮, is one of the most popular episodes of the novel. It depicts Wu as the hero and defender of traditional values, and Pan as the adulterous woman. In contemporary discussion, there has been a dearth of ethical analyses regarding Wu’s killing of Pan. How should we judge the moral status of his action? Does the killing signify Wu Song’s ethical achievement or (...) his ethical failure? What does the killing tell us about Wu’s character or his virtues? Does our appraisal of Wu’s action square with our modern belief regarding the treatment of women? I will examine these questions in the article. (shrink)

The Water Margin is one of the four great classical novels of China. It describes how people from different walks of life were driven to become outlaws as a result of poor governance and widespread corruption. These outlaws have been regarded by some commentators as heroes, despite the fact that they perform wanton killing, over retribution, and cannibalism. Liu Zaifu 劉再復 argues that the novel has contributed to the moral downfall of the Chinese people. In this essay, I put forward (...) various arguments in objection to Liu. I think Liu’s argument is unsound, partly because he fails to address the nature of the cultural confrontation between modern readers and The Water Margin. By conducting an evaluation of Liu, I also consider a range of issues concerning how we may understand The Water Margin, and how the novel may morally relate to us in modern society. (shrink)

In Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong (2003), I argued that the major non‐Marxist “ethically thick” approaches to exploitation were not successful in capturing what we find morally objectionable in paradigmatic cases of exploitation. My argument there focused on the consequentialist account of exploitation defended by Robert Goodin. Here I revisit the question of whether the recent multi‐level act consequentialist account of exploitation defended by Richard Arneson is successful. I raise questions about the nature of the account, and (...) conclude that it is a possibly coherent and ultimately inadequate account of the wrongness of exploitation. (shrink)

Various U.S. laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Food Quality Protection Act, require additional protections for susceptible subpopulations who face greater environmental health risks. The main ethical rationale for providing these protections is to ensure that environmental health risks are distributed fairly. In this article, we (1) consider how several influential theories of justice deal with issues related to the distribution of environmental health risks; (2) show that these theories often fail to provide specific guidance concerning policy (...) choices; and (3) argue that an approach to public decision making known as accountability for reasonableness can complement theories of justice in establishing acceptable environmental health risks for the general population and susceptible subpopulations. Since accountability for reasonableness focuses on the fairness of the decision-making process, not the outcome, it does not guarantee that susceptible subpopulations will receive a maximum level of protection, regardless of costs or other morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

I introduce a new formulation of rule consequentialism, defended as an improvement on traditional formulations. My new formulation cleanly avoids what Parfit calls “ideal world” objections. I suggest that those objections arise because traditional formulations incorporate counterfactual comparisons about how things could go differently. My new formulation eliminates those counterfactual comparisons. Part of the interest of the new formulation is as a model of how to reformulate structurally similar views, including various kinds of contractualism.

This paper defends views like rule consequentialism by distinguishing between two sorts of ideal world objections. It aims to show that one of those sorts of objections is question-begging. Its success would open up a path forward for such views.

On expectation, most wild animals have lives of net suffering due to naturogenic causes. Some have claimed that concern for their well-being gives us reasons to intervene in nature on their behalf. Against this, it has been said that many interventions to assist wild animals would be wrong, even if successful, because they would violate their freedom. According to the Freedom-based Approach I defend in this paper, this view is misguided. Concern for wild animal freedom does indeed gives us reasons (...) to secure these animals against control-undermining interferences, but also to intervene in nature in order to enrich their choices. (shrink)

How should we choose between uncertain prospects in which different possible people might exist at different levels of wellbeing? Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey offer an egalitarian answer to this question. I give some reasons to reject their answer and then sketch an alternative, which I call person-affecting prioritarianism.

The view of business ethics that Christopher McMahon calls the “implicit morality of the market” and Joseph Heath calls the “market failures approach” has received a significant amount of recent attention. The idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the “point” of market activity, and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized. While this view has been much-discussed, it is still not well-understood. (...) This paper seeks to remedy this problem. I begin by showing, against some recent commentators, that McMahon’s view and Heath’s view are fundamentally the same. Second, I clarify the sense of “efficiency” at work in the market failures approach. Finally, I argue that, in its current form, this view has little relevance to the real world of business. I conclude by sketching two ways of modifying it to fit our world. (shrink)

Rule consequentialism holds that an action's moral standing depends on its relation to the moral code whose general adoption would have the best consequences. Heretofore rule consequentialists have understood the notion of a code's being generally adopted in terms of its being generally obeyed or, more commonly, its being generally accepted. I argue that these ways of understanding general adoption lead to unacceptable formulations of the theory. For instance, Brad Hooker, Michael Ridge, and Holly Smith have recently offered different answers (...) to the question of what ‘acceptance rate’ we should build into our formulation of rule consequentialism, and all are unsatisfactory. I argue instead for a novel approach to formulating rule consequentialism, ‘uniform-moral-education’ rule consequentialism, on which what it means for a moral code to be generally adopted is not for it to be generally followed or generally accepted, but instead for it to be generally taught. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these fail objections to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical (...) Value Claim: a dubious claim about the importance of choice relative to other valuable capacities. I argue that this misunderstands what is really valuable in life, and show how it causes libertarianism to generate counterintuitive public policy recommendations. (shrink)

Many philosophers with hedonistic sympathies (e.g., Mill, Sidgwick, Sumner, Feldman, Crisp, Heathwood, and Bradley) have claimed that well-being is necessarily experiential. Kagan once claimed something slightly different, saying that, although unexperienced bodily events can directly impact a person’s well-being, it is nonetheless true that any change in a person’s well-being must involve a change in her (i.e., either in her mind or in her body). Kagan elaborated by saying that a person’s well-being cannot float freely of her such that it (...) is affected by events that do not affect her (Kagan 1992, 169–189). These two claims—that well-being is necessarily experiential and that changes in well-being must involve changes in the person—are two different ways of specifying the general intuition that a person’s well-being must be strongly tied to her. This general intuition imposes an adequacy constraint on welfare theorizing: To be adequate, a welfare theory cannot allow that someone can be directly benefited by events that are not strongly tied to her. Call this the strong-tie requirement. The strong-tie requirement is easily satisfied by welfare hedonism, but it poses problems for desire-fulfillment welfare theories and objective-list welfare theories. Though a great deal has been written about desire-fulfillment welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement, not as much has been written about objective-list welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement. This paper argues that objective-list welfare theories can satisfy the strong-tie requirement, though probably only if they take a perfectionist form, as opposed to a brute-list form. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen has recently argued for a thesis about the relationship between facts and principles. He claims that Rawls denies this thesis, and the truth of this thesis vitiates Rawls’s constructivist procedure. I argue against both claims by developing an account of Rawls’s justificatory strategy and the role of facts in this strategy, which I claim is similar to the role of facts in some defences of utilitarianism.

In recent years, epistemologists have devoted enormous attention to this question: what should happen when two epistemic peers disagree about the truth-value of some proposition? Some have argued that that in all such cases, both parties are rationally required to revise their position in some way. Others have maintained that, in at least some cases, neither party is rationally required to revise her position. In this paper, I examine a provocative and under-appreciated argument for the latter view due to Elgin (...) Disagreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 53–68, 2010; The Philosopher’s Magazine, fourth quarter, pp 77–82, 2012; True enough, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017; in: Johnson Voicing dissent: the ethics and epistemology of making disagreement public, Routledge, New York, pp 10–21, 2018). I defend it against a series of objections, and I then identify some fruitful ways in which her view could be developed further. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the following thesis: The Problem of Symmetrical Attackers does not falsify forfeiture theory. The theory asserts that except in the case where violence is necessary to avoid a catastrophe, only those who forfeit their rights are liable for defensive violence. The problem focuses on the following sort of case. Symmetrical Attacker Case Al and Bob are doppelgangers. They both mistakenly but justifiably think that the other is about to attack him. They both respond with violence (...) that is necessary and that they think is necessary to prevent the attack. The problem is that one person forfeit his right if and only if the second does not and that it appears to be impossible for both or neither to forfeit. I argue that the forfeiture theory is not falsified by this problem because the problem is equally damaging to every plausible theory of permissible defensive violence. (shrink)

Rule consequentialism (RC) is the view that it is right for A to do F in C if and only if A's doing F in C is in accordance with the the set of rules which, if accepted by all, would have consequences which are better than any alternative set of rules (i.e., the ideal code). I defend RC from two related objections. The first objection claims that RC requires obedience to the ideal code even if doing so has disastrous (...) results. Though some rule consequentialists embrace a disaster-clause which permits agents to disregard some of the rules in the ideal code as a necessary means of avoiding disasters, they have not adequately explained how this clause works. I offer such an explanation and show how it fits naturally with the rest of RC. The second disaster objection asserts that even if RC can legitimately invoke a disaster-clause, it lacks principled grounds from distinguishing disasters from non-disasters. In response, I explore Hooker's suggestion that “disaster” is vague. I contend that every plausible ethical theory must invoke something similar to a disaster clause. So if “disaster” is vague, then every plausible ethical theory faces a difficulty with it. As a result, this vagueness is not a reason to prefer other theories to RC. However, I argue, contra Hooker, that the sense of “disaster” relevant to RC is not vague, and RC does indeed have principled grounds to distinguish disasters from nondisasters. (shrink)

Rule consequentialism (RC) holds that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by an ideal moral code, i.e., the set of rules whose internalization would have the best consequences. But just how many moral codes are there supposed to be? Absolute RC holds that there is a single morally ideal code for everyone, while Relative RC holds that there are different codes for different groups or individuals. I argue that Relative RC better meets the test of reflective equilibrium than (...) Absolute RC. In particular, I contend that Relative RC is superior because it accommodates our convictions about costless benefits. Some have charged that Relative RC threatens our convictions about the generality of moral codes and that it leads inevitably to what Brad Hooker calls “runaway relativism.” I argue that Relative RC has principled reasons for stopping this imagined slide down the slippery slope. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs an Indian Buddhist response to the overdemandingness objection, the claim that a moral theory asks too much of its adherents. In the first section, I explain the objection and argue that some Mahāyāna Buddhists, including Śāntideva, face it. In the second section, I survey some possible ways of responding to the objection as a way of situating the Buddhist response alongside contemporary work. In the final section, I draw upon writing by Vasubandhu and Śāntideva in reconstructing a (...) Mahāyāna response to the objection. An essential component of this response is the psychological transformation that the bodhisattva achieves as a result of realizing the nonexistence of the self. This allows him to radically identify his well-being with the well-being of others, thereby lessening the tension between self and others upon which the overdemandingness objection usually depends. Emphasizing the attention Mahāyāna authors pay to lessening moral demandingness in this way increases our appreciation of the philosophical sophistication of their moral thought and highlights an important strategy for responding to the overdemandingness objection that has been underdeveloped in contemporary work. (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)

the term as used by sunstein seeks to bring together various traditions. however, there are significant differences between uses of the term in the cognitive and the social psychological research, and these differences are accompanied by very distinct evidential criteria. we suggest the term should refer to processes, which means that further evidence is required.

Is surveillance that is targeted towards specific individuals easier to justify than surveillance that targets broad categories of people? Untargeted surveillance is routinely accused of treating innocent people as suspects in ways that are unfair and of failing to pursue security effectively. I argue that in a wide range of cases untargeted surveillance treats people less like suspects than more targeted alternatives. I also argue that it often deters unwanted behaviour more effectively than targeted alternatives, including profiling. In practice, untargeted (...) surveillance is likely to be least costly morally and most efficient when used as a means of enforcing the rules of a specific activity or institution. Targeted alternatives are likely to be more appropriate means of law enforcement. (shrink)

Imagine that an anthropologist returns from her study of a group of people and reports the following:They refuse to kill one person even to avert the death of all involved—including that one person;They won’t directly push someone to his death to save the lives of five others, but they will push a lever to kill him to save five others;They punish transgressors because it feels right, even when they expect the punishment to cause far more harm than good—and even when (...) the harm done by the punishment exceeds the harm done by the transgression being punished.The anthropologist’s report might lead us to conclude that these people are at least confused, and perhaps even dangerous.Here’s some bad news. Those people are us. Or so suggests recent research in experimental psychology and the neurosciences. This research indicates that our moral intuitions have a vaguely deontological character and they prompt us to make any number of judgments that appear arbitrary or otherwise unjustified, such ... -/- I contend that Greene partly misunderstands the practical implications of his own principles. If our ordinary moral judgments are to do the strategic work Greene wants them to do, he needs to endorse fullfledged Sidgwickian self-effacement for at least some areas of micro-level decision making. By the lights of some of Greene’s own arguments, people must accept the correctness—and not simply the usefulness—of the relevant intuitions in their personal conduct to satisfy utilitarian standards. I argue that removing utilitarian reasoning from micro-level decision making is consistent with Greene’s preferred strategy of using utilitarianism as a Bcommon currency^ for resolving moral conflict at the institutional level. To clarify upfront: the aim of this paper is to offer an internal criticism rather than to defend (e.g.,) the relevant empirical research, utilitarianism, self-effacement, and so on. I’m making an argument about where Greene’s own psychological and philosophical commitments should take him. (shrink)

Many metaphysicians utilize the virtue‐driven methodology. According to this methodology, one theory is more worthy of endorsement than another insofar as it is more virtuous. In this paper, I show how a theory's overall virtue is shaped by its ideological parsimony – parsimony with respect to the terminology employed in stating the theory. I distinguish between a theory's truth and its fidelity (‘joint‐carvingness’) and the corresponding epistemic and fidelic virtues. I argue that ideological parsimony is not an epistemic virtue but (...) is a fidelic virtue. Insofar as metaphysicians value fidelity, then, ideological parsimony has an important role in theory choice. (shrink)

In his 2000 book _Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality_, Brad Hooker recognizes that his theory, like most rule-consequentialist theories, must answer the question of how agents are to resolve conflicts that may arise among the rules his theory endorses. Here I examine Hooker’s answer to this question, and I argue that his answer fails to solve a serious problem that arises from such conflicts.

Reflective equilibrium is often credited with extending the idea of accounting for the data from its familiar home in the sciences to the realm of moral philosophy. But careful consideration of the main concepts of this idea—the data to be accounted for and the kind of accounting it is appropriate to expect of a moral theory—leads to a revised understanding of the “accounting for the data” perspective as it applies to the discipline of moral theory selection. This revised understanding is (...) in tension with reflective equilibrium and actually provides more support for the alternative method of moral theory selection that has been termed ‘practical equilibrium’. (shrink)