According to a well-known objection to consequentialism, the answer to the preceding question is alarmingly straightforward: your consequentialist friend will abandon you the minute that she can more efficiently promote goodness via options that do not include her maintaining a relationship with you. The most prominent response to this objection is to emphasize the profound value of friendship for human agents and to remind critics of the distinction between the theory’s criterion of rightness and an effective decision-making procedure. Whether or (...) not this response is viable remains a contentious issue within the now considerable literature generated on the topic, yet it is a curious fact that the debate has unfolded in such a way that the question of when a consequentialist agent ought to break from her indirect methods of promoting the good and revert back to a direct form of consequentialist decision-making has not been decisively settled. In this paper, I claim that the empirical considerations at stake for resolving this question are more complicated than is normally acknowledged; however, I argue that this should not deter sophisticated consequentialists from endorsing flexible psychological dispositions in order to monitor these empirical considerations as best as can be expected for agents with our distinctly human faculties and limitations. (shrink)

I discuss three features of Matt Stichter’s new book The Skillfulness of Virtue. The thesis of the book is that virtue is best conceptualized as a type of skill, and the chapters of the book explore the implications of this thesis for our understanding of moral development, social psychology and comparisons of virtuous agents with agents who exhibit familiar types of non-moral expertise. The features of the book that I examine are (1) Stichter’s rejection of an ability to articulate reasons (...) for acting as a necessary condition for acting virtuously; (2) his comparison of expertise and virtue with respect to apt motivations and practical wisdom; and (3) whether his thesis invites a comparison of virtue and familiar non-moral expertise that is ultimately unfavourable to the adoption of virtue ethics as a normative ethical theory. I present no devastating objections, for I agree with most of what Stichter presents in the book. Rather, my aim is to raise points of clarification that might further the stimulating discussion of virtues and skills that Stichter’s book already provides. (shrink)

In replying to certain objections to the existence of God, Robert Adams, Bruce Langtry, and Peter van Inwagen assume that God can appropriately choose a suboptimal world, a world less good than some other world God could have chosen. A number of philosophers, such as Michael Slote and Klaas Kraay, claim that these theistic replies are therefore committed to the claim that satisficing can be appropriate. Kraay argues that this commitment is a significant liability. I argue, however, that the relevant (...) defenses of theism are committed to the appropriateness of, not satisficing, but motivated submaximization. When one submaximizes with motivation, one aims at the optimum but accepts the good enough because of a countervailing consideration. When one satisfices, one aims at the good enough and chooses the good enough because it realizes her aim at the good enough. While commitment to the appropriateness of satisficing may be a significant liability, commitment to the appropriateness of motivated submaximization is not. (shrink)

An agent submaximizes with motivation when she aims at the best but chooses a less good option because of a countervailing consideration. An agent satisfices when she rejects the better for the good enough, and does so because the mere good enough gets her what she really wants. Motivated submaximization and satisficing, so construed, are different ways of choosing a suboptimal option, but this difference is easily missed. Putative proponents of satisficing tend to argue only that motivated submaximization can be (...) appropriate while critics of satisficing tend to criticize satisficing, as I construe it. The existing literature, then, leaves satisficing in a very bad state: there are no good arguments for it and there are three unanswered objections to it. This paper clarifies the distinction between motivated submaximization and satisficing and refutes the three most prominent objections to the claim that satisficing can be appropriate. (shrink)

Many forms of virtue ethics, like certain forms of utilitarianism, suffer from the problem of indirection. In those forms, the criterion for status of a trait as a virtue is not the same as the criterion for the status of an act as right. Furthermore, if the virtues for example are meant to promote the nourishing of the agent, the virtuous agent is not standardly supposed to be motivated by concern for her own flourishing in her activity. In this paper, (...) I propose a virtue ethics which does not suffer from the problem. Traits are not virtues because their cultivation and manifestation promote a value such as agent flourishing. They are virtues in so far as they are habits of appropriate response to various relevant values. This means that there is a direct connection between the rationale of a virtue and what makes an action virtuous or right. (shrink)

In this paper, I am concerned to show that a wide and interesting range of phenomena commonly described as ‘weakness of will’ should be understood as manifesting a defect of what I shall call ‘executive cowardice’ rather than a strong kind of irrationality. More specifically, I claim that such cases should not be understood as an irrational bypassing of an all-things-considered judgment about the thing to do—a view succinctly described by Peacocke thus: The akrates is irrational because although he intentionally (...) does something for which he has some reason, there is a wider set of reasons he has relative to which he does not judge what he does to be rational. (shrink)

Derek Parfit, Philip Pettit and Michael Smith defend a version of consequentialism that covers everything. I argue that this version of consequentialism is false. Consequentialism, I argue, can only cover things that belong to a combination of things that agents can bring about.

The nudge approach seeks to improve people’s decisions through small changes in their choice environments. Nudge policies often work through psychological mechanisms that deviate from traditional notions of rationality. Because of that, some critics object that nudging treats people as irrational. Such treatment might be disrespectful in itself and might crowd out more empowering policies. I defend nudging against these objections. By defending a nonstandard, ecological model of rationality, I argue that nudging not only is compatible with rational agency but (...) can even support it. Accordingly, a concern with rationality speaks for more rather than less public policy nudging. (shrink)

If non-consequentialists are to embrace the requirement of universalizability, then they will have to adopt a surprisingly relativistic stance. Not only will they say, in familiar vein, that the premises adduced in moral argument may be only agent-relative in force, that is, may involve the use of an indexical – as in the consideration that this or that option would advance my commitments, discharge my duty, or benefit my children – and may provide reasons only for the indexically relevant agent, (...) in this case me. They will also have to construe the consideration adduced in typical moral conclusions to the effect that this or that option is right or ought to be chosen, or whatever, as itself only agent-relative in force. So at any rate I argue. (shrink)

Consequentialism ought not to make an impact, explicit or implicit, on every decision. All it ought generally to enjoy is what I describe as a virtual presence in the deliberation that produces decisions. [...] The argument that we have conducted suggests that the virtuous agent ought in general to remain faithful to his or her instincts and ingrained habits, only occasionally breaking with them in the name of promoting the best consequences.

Philosophers of language and linguists need to be wary of generalizing from too small a sample of natural languages. They also need to be wary of neglecting possible insights from philosophical traditions that have focused on natural languages other than the most familiar Western ones. Take, for example, classical Indian philosophy, where philosophical concerns with language were very much involved with the early development of Sanskrit linguistics. Indian philosophers and linguists frequently discussed more general issues about semantics, often in ways (...) that are both similar to and interestingly different from Western philosophers.One such issue is the problem of sentential unity: what is the relation of our understanding of the meaning of a sentence to our understanding of the meaning of the words that compose it? If words have meanings, why is the meaning of a sentence not just the meaning of the words that compose it? A challenging Indian response is that of the grammarian and philosopher Bhartṛhari (fifth-century), who advocated for a kind of sentence-holism according to which words are unreal and sentence-meaning is primary. (shrink)

Cost-effectiveness analysis suggests that a society should allocate its health care budget in order to achieve the greatest total health for its budget. However, in ‘rescue’ cases, where an individual’s life is in immediate peril, reasoning in terms of cost-effectiveness can appear inhumane. Hence considerations of cost-effectiveness and of rescue appear to be in tension. However, by attending to the division of labour in medical decision making it is possible to see how cost-effectiveness analysis and rescue-style reasoning are commonly combined (...) in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

A traditional picture is that cases of deontic constraints--- cases where an act is wrong (or one that there is most reason to not do) even though performing that act will prevent more acts of the same morally (or practically) relevant type from being performed---form a kind of fault line in ethical theory separating (agent-neutral) consequentialist theories from other ethical theories. But certain results in the recent literature, such as those due to Graham Oddie and Peter Milne in "Act and (...) Value", do not sit well this traditional wisdom. My aim in this paper is to argue that both the traditional wisdom and Oddie and Milne are mistaken. I begin by looking more closely at the traditional wisdom and why it fails (§1). Then I develop my account of this fault line in ethical theory and its importance (§2). Finally I show that a diagnosis of where Oddie and Milne go wrong follows as a corollary of this new account (§3). An important upshot will be that discussions of cases of deontic constraints would do best to focus on the account of the nature and importance of the cases identified in this paper rather than continuing to work with the mistaken traditional picture. (shrink)

I argue against the standard view that it is possible to describe extensionally different consequentialist theories by describing different evaluative focal points. I argue that for consequentialist purposes, the important sense of the word act must include all motives and side effects, and thus these things cannot be separated.

This paper represents two polemics. One is against suggestions (made by Harman and others) that recent psychological research counts against any claim that there is such a thing as genuine virtue (Cf. Harman, in: Byrne, Stalnaker, Wedgwood (eds.) Fact and value, pp 117–127, 2001 ). The other is against the view that virtue ethics should be seen as competing against such theories as Kantian ethics or consequentialism, particularly in the specification of decision procedures.

In her work on virtue ethics Rosalind Hursthouse has formulated an Aristotelian criterion of rightness that understands rightness in terms of what the virtuous person would do. It is argued here that this kind of criterion does not allow enough room for the category of the supererogatory and that right and wrong should rather be understood in terms of the characteristic behavior of decent persons. Furthermore, it is suggested that this kind of approach has the added advantage of allowing one (...) to make sense of the centrality of negative precepts in commonsense morality. (shrink)

There have been different interpretations of satisficing rationality. A common view is that it is sometimes rationally permitted to choose an option one judges is good enough even when one does not know that it is the best option. But there is available a more radical view of satisficing. On this view, it is rationally permitted to choose an option one judges is good enough even when a better option is known to be available. In this paper I distinguish between (...) two possible interpretations of ‘genuine’ satisficing, a de re and a de dicto interpretation. I then argue that while de re genuine satisficing is always irrational, de dicto genuine satisficing might be rationally permissible. In fact, de dicto genuine satisficing does not appear to be covered by existing accounts of satisficing behaviour. (shrink)

According to the guise of the good thesis, we desire things under the ‘guise of the good.’ Here I sympathetically articulate a generic formulation of the guise of the good thesis, and addre...

Economic approaches to both social evaluation and decision-making are typically Paretian or utilitarian in nature and so display commitments to both welfarism and consequentialism. The contrast between the economic approach and any rights-based social philosophy has spawned a large literature that may be divided into two branches. The first is concerned with the compatibility of rights and utilitarianism seen as independent moral forces. This branch of the literature may be characterized as an example of the broader debate between the teleological (...) and deontological approaches. The second is concerned with the possibility that substantial rights may be grounded in utilitarianism with the moral force of rights being derived from more basic commitments to welfarism and consequentialism. This branch of the literature may be characterized as an exploration of the flexibility of the teleological approach, and, in particular, its ability to give rise to views more normally associated with the deontological approach. This essay is concerned with the second branch of the literature. (shrink)

It has become a commonplace in neo-republican thinking to claim that if the notion of rights can be allowed a place in republican political theory, it can never achieve the prominence that liberalism allegedly grants it. Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism, provides several arguments to buttress this thesis. This article aims at examining these arguments in order to show that once properly stated, they must on the contrary be considered as powerful arguments to the effect that republicans take rights very seriously.

The objective of the paper is to explicate and critically appreciate two forms of consequentialism, namely objective and subjective consequentialism. Consequentialism is a substantive moral theory according to which moral value or good is to produce/promote best consequences (in a sense welfare); and morally right consists in acting so as to promote maximum good (in case of utilitarianism) or to promote best or most good. However, the paper considers important questions, replies to which give us two forms of consequentialism, namely (...) subjective and objective consequentialism, each having their unique features, nuances and limits. Moot problems are as follows: Whether consequentialism as a theory of good is to promote actual good, that is good as matter-of-fact or expected good, that is good expected by the moral agent; and whether as a theory of right, it urges to make decisions for the promotion of good based on some heuristic devices or subjective motives, commitments and so on. Objective consequentialism, as a theory of good prefers promotion of actual good than expected good, and as a theory of right decision-making urges the moral agents to rely on heuristic devices than subjective factors. The contest has been absorbing and fierce, each having so-called strong arguments. The paper reconsiders these contesting arguments and critically examines those to conclude in favour of objective consequentialism on important counts notwithstanding, the value of motives, motivations and commitments of moral agents. (shrink)

Debates about dual-use research often turn on the potential for scientific research to be used to benefit or harm humanity. This dual-use potential is conventionally understood as the product of the magnitude of the harms and benefits of dual-use research, multiplied by their likelihood. This account, however, neglects important social aspects of the use of science and technology. In this paper, I supplement existing conceptions of dual-use potential to account for the social context of dual-use research. This account incorporates relational (...) and positional concerns that feature in the success or failure of dual-use. I then defend this account against foreseeable objections. (shrink)

Debates about our moral relation to the law typically focus on the moral force of law. Often, the question asked is: Do we have a moral duty to follow the law? Recently, that question has been given a virtue-ethical formulation: Is there a virtue in abiding by the law? This paper considers our moral relation to the law in terms of virtue but focuses on a different question from the traditional ones. The question here is: Can the law model virtue (...) in beneficial ways that enable us to cultivate virtue? This paper shows that the law can do this by setting a moral example that we have good reason to emulate. This is significant given the distinctive influence the law has over our lives. The paper begins by examining the nature of a model, comparing different models of virtue, and then questions the possibility of a complete model of virtue such as the so-called Virtuous Person. The paper then articulates several ways in which the law can model virtue for us and responds to three objections: 1) the embodiment problem, 2) the poisoning problem, and 3) the emulation problem. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

Following John Rawls, writers like Bernard Williams and Christine Korsgaard have suggested that a transparency condition should be put on ethical theories. The exact nature of such a condition and its implications is however not anything on which there is any consensus. It is argued here that the ultimate rationale of transparency conditions is epistemic rather than substantively moral, but also that it clearly connects to substantive concerns about moral psychology. Finally, it is argued that once a satisfactory form of (...) the transparency condition is formulated, then, at least among the main contenders within ethical theory, it speaks in favor of a broadly Aristotelian approach to ethical theorizing. (shrink)

Political instrumentalism claims that the right to rule should be distributed such that justice is promoted best. Building on a distinction made by consequentialists in moral philosophy, I argue that instrumentalists should distinguish two levels of normative thinking about legitimacy, the critical and applied level. An indirect instrumentalism which acknowledges this distinction has significant advantages over simpler forms of instrumentalism that do not.

A generation of social theorists have argued that if free-rider considerations show that certain collective action predicaments are unresolvable under individual, rational choice – unresolvable under an arrangement where each is free to pursue their own relative advantage – then those considerations will equally show that the predicaments cannot be resolved by recourse to norms (Buchanan, 1975, p. 132; Heath, 1976, p. 30; Sober and Wilson, 1998, 156ff; Taylor, 1987, p. 144). If free-rider considerations explain why people do not spontaneously (...) keep the streets clean, though they would each prefer unlittered streets, then those considerations will also explain why there is no effective norm against littering the streets. (shrink)

The distinction between the regulative (‘practical’, ‘subjective’, ‘decision-procedural’) and the theoretical (‘objective’, ‘absolute’) pertains to the aims (the desiderata) of an account of justification. This distinction began in ethics and spread to epistemology. Each of internalism, externalism, is separately forced to draw this distinction to avoid a stock, otherwise fatal, argument levelled against them by the other. Given this situation however, we may finesse much partisan conflict in epistemology by simply seeing differing accounts of justification as answering to radically distinct (...) desiderata of adequacy. We should see knowledge as answering to the theoretical desideratum of adequacy alone; and rationality as answering to the regulative desideratum of adequacy alone. Objections to this ‘Gordian’ [knot] approach to epistemology (from virtues theorists and others) are rejected. Such an approach may make for accounts that violate our ordinary language intuitions; but in developing an epistemological axiology, any such intuitions are not to the point. (shrink)

Consequentialism is often charged with being self-defeating, for if a person attempts to apply it, she may quite predictably produce worse outcomes than if she applied some other moral theory. Many consequentialists have replied that this criticism rests on a false assumption, confusing consequentialism’s criterion of the rightness of an act with its position on decision procedures. Consequentialism, on this view, does not dictate that we should be always calculating which of the available acts leads to the most good, but (...) instead advises us to decide what to do in whichever manner it is that will lead to the best outcome. Whilst it is typically afforded only a small note in any text on consequentialism, this reply has deep implications for the practical application of consequentialism, perhaps entailing that a consequentialist should eschew calculation altogether. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

n this thesis I describe how conventions specify how to put normative principles into practice. I identify a class of recurring situations where there are some given normative principles in effect, but they underdetermine what each individual should do, and what is best for an individual depends on what others do. I demonstrate that in such cases, whenever the community develops a response that repeatedly brings them to as good an outcome as is available according to their principles, that response (...) is a Lewisian convention where the benefit of an outcome to each individual is measured by the extent to which it conforms to the principles they subscribe to. Since these conventions are constrained by the normative principles, I call them limited conventions. They are supplements to the principles, and are ineradicably involved in moral action insofar as the abovementioned cases of moral underdetermination are in play. That has the consequence that in these cases the only reliable way to follow your principles is to follow the relevant conventions. As examples of this mechanism I offer a conventionalist analysis of authority, such that the commands of an authority is normative when they instantiate a limited convention, and of the variation in understandings of virtue and vice across societies, such that the evaluative vocabulary of each society is a set of different limited conventions about how to express in word and deed the evaluative points of the virtues and vices in question. Finally, I discuss how conventions and similar forms of guidance provide a way for individuals to participate in their community’s moral life without having a full understanding of the principles that underlie it, or even if they are profoundly ignorant or outright mistaken about the demands of morality. (shrink)

A venerable idea in the history of moral philosophy is that central among the normative notions is the notion of goodness or value. This idea, which can be found at least as early as 1903 in G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, claims that goodness is central in that all other normative notions can be explained in terms of it. Moore’s approach and the dominant approach to the project of explaining the normative notions of rightness and what we have reason to do (...) is the consequentialist program. While the most famous element of this program is the consequentialist moral theory that says an act is right just in case the outcome of that act is at least as good as the outcome of any alternative act, the consequentialist program in general hopes to similarly explain the notion of a reason in terms of goodness. So the consequentialist theory of practical reason says that an agent has more reason to do some act a than to do some act b just in case the outcome of doing a is better than the outcome of doing b. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to explore the intersection of two issues. The first concerns the role that feasibility considerations play in constraining normative claims – claims, say, about what we (individually and collectively) ought to do and to be. The second concerns whether normative claims are to be understood as applying only to actions in their own right or also non-derivatively to attitudes. In particular, we argue that actions and attitudes may be subject to different feasibility constraints – (...) and hence that how we conceive of the role of feasibility in an account of normativity will depend in part on how we conceive of the role of actions and attitudes in normative theorising. (shrink)

Consequentialism is seen by Philip Pettit mainly as a theory of the appropriate; in his conception of virtual consequentialism he is much less concerned with the theory of Good. Nevertheless, he pays attention to values such as rights, freedom, loyalty, confidence, dignity and love, although his analyses are isolated, and the connections with other values are not taken into account. He focuses especially on the values of freedom and rights. Contrary to Pettit, Amaryta Sen is much more concerned with the (...) latter, although there is no complex value framework to be find in his evaluator relative theory. He sees these values as the basis of the value system of any morais. (shrink)