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  1. Introduction.Julia Driver - 2001 - Utilitas 13 (2):137.
    The evaluation of character has taken on new significance in moral theory, and, indeed, some advocate a shift in focus away from evaluating action to evaluating character. This has been taken to pose special challenges for utilitarian and consequentialist moral theory. Utilitarianism's commitment to impartiality and its seeming failure to accommodate virtue evaluation have led to problems, some of which are developed in the essays in this volume.
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  • Utilitarianism and psychological realism.Sophie Rietti - 2009 - Utilitas 21 (3):347-367.
    Utilitarianism has frequently been criticized for lacking psychological realism, but what this means and why it is thought to matter varies. This article distinguishes and examines three main relevant kinds of appeals to psychological realism: (a) A minimalist, self-avowedly metaethically neutral and empirically based ‘ought implies can’ approach, exemplified by Owen Flanagan. (b) Arguments from psychological costs and flourishing, exemplified by Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams. (c) ‘Thick’ psychological realism, exemplified by Elizabeth Anscombe, where a conception of human nature does (...)
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  • The ethics of inarticulacy.Will Kymlicka - 1991 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):155 – 182.
    In his impressive and wide?ranging new book, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that modern moral philosophy, at least within the Anglo?American tradition, . offers a ?cramped? view of morality. Taylor attributes this problem to three distinctive features of contemporary moral theory ? its commitment to procedural rather than substantive rationality, its preference for basic reasons rather than qualitative distinctions, and its belief in the priority of the right over the good. According to Taylor, the result of these features (...)
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  • Consequentialism and moral psychology.Philip Pettit - 1994 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1):1 – 17.
    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.
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  • Preempting principles: Recent debates in moral particularism.Sean McKeever & Michael Ridge - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (6):1177-1192.
    Moral particularism, as recently defended, charges that traditional moral theorizing unduly privileges moral principles. Moral generalism defends a prominent place for moral principles. Because moral principles are often asked to play multiple roles, moral particularism aims at multiple targets. We distinguish two leading roles for moral principles, the role of standard and the role of guide. We critically survey some of the leading arguments both for and against principles so conceived.
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  • Consequentialism and Decision Procedures.Toby Ord - 2005 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    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 (...)
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  • Loyalty.John Kleinig - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • On defending deontology.David McNaughton & Piers Rawling - 1998 - Ratio 11 (1):37–54.
    This paper comprises three sections. First, we offer a traditional defence of deontology, in the manner of, for example, W.D. Ross (1965). The leading idea of such a defence is that the right is independent of the good. Second, we modify the now standard account of the distinction, in terms of the agent-relative/agentneutral divide, between deontology and consequentialism. (This modification is necessary if indirect consequentialism is to count as a form of consequentialism.) Third, we challenge a value-based defence of deontology (...)
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  • (1 other version)Hedonism reconsidered.Roger Crisp - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (3):619–645.
    This paper is a plea for hedonism to be taken more seriously. It begins by charting hedonism's decline, and suggests that this is a result of two major objections: the claim that hedonism is the 'philosophy of swine', reducing all value to a single common denominator, and Nozick's 'experience machine' objection. There follows some elucidation of the nature of hedonism, and of enjoyment in particular. Two types of theory of enjoyment are outlined-intemalism, according to which enjoyment has some special 'feeling (...)
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  • Non-consequentialism and universalizability.Philip Pettit - 2000 - Philosophical Quarterly 50 (199):175-190.
    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, (...)
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  • Conflicts of Rules in Hooker’s Rule-Consequentialism.Ben Eggleston - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (3):329-349.
    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.
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  • III—Doing Our ‘Best’? Utilitarianism, Rationality and the Altruist’s Dilemma.Max Khan Hayward - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):49-70.
    Utilitarians think that what matters in ethics is making the world a better place. In that case, it might seem that we each rationally ought to do our best—perform the actions, out of those open to each of us, with the best expected outcomes. In other words, we should follow act-utilitarian reasons. But often the result of many altruistic agents following such individualistic reasons is worse than the result of them following collectivist ‘team-reasons’. So utilitarians should reject act utilitarianism, and (...)
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  • Would a Viable Consent App Create Headaches for Consequentialists?Scott Woodcock - 2024 - Philosophy 99 (1):73-98.
    Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...)
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  • Tao Jiang, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom.Ellie Hua Wang - 2023 - Journal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2):233-237.
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  • Some Question-Begging Objections to Rule Consequentialism.Caleb Perl - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):904-919.
    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.
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  • Get Smart: Outcomes, Influence, and Responsibility.Per-Erik Milam - 2021 - The Monist 104 (4):443-457.
    Once relegated to the margins of the responsibility debate, moral influence theories have recently been rehabilitated. This paper offers a moral influence theory with two parts: a theory of responsibility as influenceability and an act-consequentialist justification of blame. I defend this account against six concerns commonly raised both by opponents and by advocates of similar views. Some concerns target act consequentialism, claiming that it 1) permits blaming innocents; 2) permits coercion, manipulation, and other objectionable forms of influence; and 3) fails (...)
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  • Orders of Normativity: Nietzsche, Science and Agency.Shane C. Callahan - 2020 - Dissertation, University of South Florida
    In this dissertation I set out to address the “scope problem” in Nietzsche scholarship. In the secondary literature, the scope problem is characterized as a problem for Nietzsche, who seems deeply skeptical about nearly every item of his inherited western metaphysical toolkit. If his skepticism about western metaphysics penetrates all dimensions of his thought, how can he motivate a reader to also reject western metaphysics without himself committing to some of it? I stipulate that answering the scope problem means explicating (...)
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  • Epistemic Consequentialism and its Aftermath.Kurt Sylvan - 2019 - Analysis 79 (4):773-783.
    Epistemic Consequentialism represents a shooting-star movement nearing its zenith but already passing its peak of apparent solidarity, with clear fault-lines no.
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  • Responding Appropriately to the Impersonal Good.Jörg Https://Orcidorg Löschke - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (3):701-714.
    A promising strategy to make progress in the debate between consequentialist and non-consequentialist moral theories is to unravel the background assumptions of the respective views and discuss their plausibility. This paper discusses a background assumption of consequentialism that has not been noticed so far. Consequentialists claim that morality is about maximizing the impersonal good, and the background assumption is that an appropriate response to the impersonal good is necessarily a response to the impersonal good as a whole. In this paper, (...)
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  • Utilitarianism about animals and the moral significance of use.David Killoren & Robert Streiffer - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):1043-1063.
    The Hybrid View endorses utilitarianism about animals and rejects utilitarianism about humans. This view has received relatively little sustained attention in the philosophical literature. Yet, as we show, the Hybrid View underlies many widely held beliefs about zoos, pet ownership, scientific research on animal and human subjects, and agriculture. We develop the Hybrid View in rigorous detail and extract several of its main commitments. Then we examine the Hybrid View in relation to the view that human use of animals constitutes (...)
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  • Weighing Lives in War- Foreign vs. Domestic.Saba Bazargan-Forward - 2017 - In Larry May (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Just War. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 186-198.
    I argue that the lives of domestic and enemy civilians should not receive equal weight in our proportionality calculations. Rather, the lives of enemy civilians ought to be “partially discounted” relative to the lives of domestic civilians. We ought to partially discount the lives of enemy civilians for the following reason (or so I argue). When our military wages a just war, we as civilians vest our right to self-defense in our military. This permits our military to weigh our lives (...)
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  • Insane Consequentialism: A Pragmatic Objection to Direct Consequentialism.Nick Zangwill - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (3):317-332.
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  • Love and Ethics in the Works of J. M. E. McTaggart.J. Bieber Trevor - 2015 - Dissertation,
    This dissertation attempts to make contributions to normative ethics and to the history of philosophy. First, it contributes to the defense of consequentialist ethics against objections grounded upon the value of loving relationships. Secondly, it provides the first systematic account of John M. E. McTaggart’s ethical theory and its relation to his philosophy of love. According to consequentialist ethics, it is always morally wrong to knowingly do what will make the world worse-off than it could have been. Many consequentialists also (...)
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  • Situationist Social Psychology and J. S. Mill's Conception of Character: Robert F. Card.Robert F. Card - 2010 - Utilitas 22 (4):481-493.
    The situationist challenge to global character traits claims that on the basis of findings in social psychology, we should only accept at most the existence of local or context-sensitive traits. In this article I explore a neglected area of J. S. Mill's work to outline an account of context-sensitive traits. This account of traits, coupled with a sophisticated consequentialist ethical framework, suggests an interesting view on which persons govern the circumstances of their actions in order to best promote overall well-being.
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  • Evolution and Neuroethics in the Hyperion Cantos.Brendan Shea - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 3 (3).
    In this article, I use science-fiction scenarios drawn from Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion Cantos” (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion) to explore a cluster of issues related to the evolutionary history and neural bases of human moral cognition, and the moral desirability of improving our ability to make moral decisions by techniques of neuroengineering. I begin by sketching a picture of what recent research can teach us about the character of human moral psychology, with a particular emphasis (...)
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  • Objective Morality, Subjective Morality, and the Explanatory Question.Dale Dorsey - 2012 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (3):1-25.
    A common presupposition in metaethical theory is that moral assessment comes in two flavors, one of which is sensitive to our epistemic circumstances, the second of which is not so sensitive. Though this thought is popular, a number of questions arise. In this paper, I limit my discussion to what I dub the "explanatory question": how one might understand the construction of subjective moral assessment given an explanatorily prior objective assessment. I argue that a proper answer to this question is (...)
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  • Actions, inactions and the temporal dimension.Karl Halvor Teigen - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):30-31.
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  • The consequences of taking consequentialism seriously.Philip E. Tetlock - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):31-32.
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  • Do, or should, all human decisions conform to the norms of a consumer-oriented culture?L. Jonathan Cohen - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):12-13.
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  • On begging the question when naturalizing norms.Leonard D. Katz - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):21-22.
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  • Nonconsequentialist decisions.Jonathan Baron - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):1-10. Translated by Jonathan Baron.
    According to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decisions on our judgments about their consequences for achieving our goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they would otherwise judge to be (...)
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  • The Integrity Objection, Reloaded.Jill Hernandez - 2013 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (2):145-162.
    Bernard Williams’ integrity objection poses a significant challenge to utilitarianism, which has largely been answered by utilitarians. This paper recasts the integrity objection to show that utilitarian agents could be committed to producing the overall best states of affairs and yet not positively act to bring them about. I introduce the ‘Moral Pinch Hitter’ – someone who performs actions at the bequest of another agent – to demonstrate that utilitarianism cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent maximizes utility by (...)
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  • Evidence Sensitivity in Weak Necessity Deontic Modals.Alex Silk - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (4):691-723.
    Kolodny and MacFarlane have made a pioneering contribution to our understanding of how the interpretation of deontic modals can be sensitive to evidence and information. But integrating the discussion of information-sensitivity into the standard Kratzerian framework for modals suggests ways of capturing the relevant data without treating deontic modals as “informational modals” in their sense. I show that though one such way of capturing the data within the standard semantics fails, an alternative does not. Nevertheless I argue that we have (...)
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  • Whither Integrity II: Integrity and Impartial Morality.Greg Scherkoske - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (1):40-52.
    The idea that impartial moral theories – consequentialism and Kantian ethics in particular – were objectionably hostile to a person’s integrity was famously championed by Bernard Williams nearly 40 years ago. That Williams’‘integrity objection’ has significantly shaped subsequent moral theorizing is widely acknowledged. It is less widely appreciated how this objection has helped shape recent thinking about the nature and value of integrity itself. This paper offers a critical survey of main lines of response to this objection.
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  • Horror Films and the Argument from Reactive Attitudes.Scott Woodcock - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2):309-324.
    Are horror films immoral? Gianluca Di Muzio argues that horror films of a certain kind are immoral because they undermine the reactive attitudes that are responsible for human agents being disposed to respond compassionately to instances of victimization. I begin with this argument as one instance of what I call the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA), and I argue that Di Muzio’s attempt to identify what is morally suspect about horror films must be revised to provide the most persuasive interpretation (...)
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  • Wisdom and Perspective.Valerie Tiberius - 2005 - Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):163-182.
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  • On Indirectly Self-defeating Moral Theories.Eric Wiland - 2008 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (3):384-393.
    Derek Parfit has notably argued that while a moral theory should not be directly self-defeating, there is nothing necessarily wrong with a moral theory that is only indirectly self-defeating. Here I resist this line of argument. I argue instead that indirectly self-defeating moral theories are indeed problematic. Parfit tries to sidestep the oddities of indirectly self-defeating theories by focusing on the choice of dispositions rather than actions. But the very considerations that can make it impossible to achieve a theory's aims (...)
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  • Against Hegemonism in Moral Theory.Klemens Kappel - 2002 - Utilitas 14 (2):219.
    What I call hegemonism holds that a satisfactory moral theory must in a fairly direct way guide action. This, the hegemonist believes, provides a constraint on moral theorizing. We should not accept moral theories which cannot in the proper sense guide us. There are two alternatives to hegemonism. One is motivational indirection, which is the idea that while agents remain motivated by a moral theory, they may be only indirectly motivated. The other is non-hegemonism, which holds that a correct moral (...)
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  • Hypocrisy and Consequentialism.Eldon Soifer & Béla Szabados - 1998 - Utilitas 10 (2):168.
    Consequentialism has trouble explaining why hypocrisy is a term of moral condem-nation, largely because hypocrites often try to deceive others about their own selfishness through the useof words or deeds which themselves have good consequences. We argue that consequentialist attempts to deal with the problem by separating the evaluation of agent and action, or by the directevaluation of dispositions, or by focusing on long-term consequences such as reliability and erosion of trust, all prove inadequate to the challenge. We go on (...)
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  • Goldstick on the 'Two Hats' Problem.Troy Jollimore - 2003 - Utilitas 15 (3):369.
    The indirect-strategy consequentialist recommends that the consequentialist agent develop certain non-consequentialist feelings and dispositions. It is difficult to see, however, how such an agent could knowingly do this, given her moral beliefs. Goldstick has argued that the problem is not particular to consequentialism; deontologists, too, are obliged to admit the possibility of mental divisions of this sort. I argue, however, that the type of mental division to which the deontologist is committed appears only as a response to a type of (...)
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  • Towards a dialogue between utilitarianism and medicine.Y. Michael Barilan - 2004 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 7 (2):163-173.
    Utilitarianism focuses on the optimization of personal well being in ways that seems to make the practice of medicine irrelevant to the well being of the practitioners, unless given external incentives such as money or honor. Care based on indirect incentives is considered inferior to care motivated internally. This leads to the paradox of utilitarian care. Following Nozick's conceptual Pleasure Machine it is argued that in addition to the promotion of personal well being, people care about fulfilling their well being (...)
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  • From Virtue to Decency.Johan Brännmark - 2006 - Metaphilosophy 37 (5):589-604.
    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 (...)
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  • It ain't my world.Rivka Weinberg - 2009 - Utilitas 21 (2):144-162.
    It seems we have some obligation to aid some others, but it's unclear why, to whom, and to what extent. Many consequentialists claim that we are obligated to help everyone to the marginal utility point but they do so without examining why we are obligated to aid others at all. I argue that we must investigate the basis of our duty to aid others in order to determine the nature and extent of our obligation. Although some consequentialists, notably, Kagan, Singer (...)
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  • Maximizing act consequentialism and friendship.F. Scott McElreath - 2006 - Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (4):413-420.
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  • Can consequentialism cover everything?Bart Streumer - 2003 - Utilitas 15 (2):237-47.
    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.
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  • Sellars's ethics: Variations on Kantian themes.Paul Hurley - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 101 (2-3):291-324.
    In this essay I attempt to tease out and assess two arguments that pervade Sellars's writings on the practical sphere. The first is an argument that categorical reasonableness must be a part of any adequate account of practical reason. The second argues that, nonetheless, the Kantian's strong connection between morality and practical reasonableness cannot be defended. I argue that the former argument is a powerful and ingenious defense of a role for something more than hypothetical reasonableness in the practical sphere, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The persecutor's Wager.Craig Duncan - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (1):1-50.
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  • A Critique of Scanlon's Contractualism.Ashley Purdy - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (7):700-713.
    Part of T. M. Scanlon’s project in What We Owe to Each Other (1998) is to explain the importance and priority of moral reasons. But Scanlon also argues that this priority of moral reasons is compatible with the pursuit of other things we value, such as friendship. To this end, Scanlon claims that contractualist moral reasons internally accommodate our interests in such values. In this paper, I argue that Scanlon is unsuccessful in showing the compatibility of morality and the pursuit (...)
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  • Is act-consquentialism self-effacing?Nikhil Venkatesh - 2021 - Analysis 81 (4):718-726.
    Act-consequentialism (C) is self-effacing for an agent iff that agent’s not accepting C would produce the best outcome. The question of whether C is self-effacing is important for evaluating C. Some hold that if C is self-effacing that would be a mark against it (Williams 1973: 134); however, the claim that C is self-effacing is also used to defend C against certain objections (Parfit 1984: Ch. 1, Railton 1984). -/- In this paper I will show that one argument suggested by (...)
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  • The Eligibility of Rule Utilitarianism.David Mokriski - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (3).
    According to the eligibility theory of meaning, often attributed to David Lewis, the referent of a predicate is the property that best balances the twin constraints of charity and eligibility, where eligibility is a function of metaphysical naturalness. This sort of metasemantics, which is motivated by its ability to resolve problems of indeterminacy and secure shared reference between disputing parties, can be somewhat friendly towards revisionary theories, since highly natural properties can act as “reference magnets,” securing our reference despite some (...)
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