Henry Sidgwick regarded his failure to reconcile the claims of rational egoism with those of utilitarianism to reveal a fundamental contradiction within practical reason. However, the conflict that concerns him arises only in relation to a particular kind of agent. While Sidgwick construes his version of the problem to be a systematic formulation of a conflict that arises within the practical reasoning of ordinary people, it is actually an example of a worst-case scenario that reflects the common philosophical tendency to (...) deal with issues in their most challenging form. But such a transformation of ordinary conflicts between self-interest and morality into an insoluble philosophical problem obscures the nature of the more typical practical conflict. (shrink)

Rarely do everyday discussions of ethical issues invoke ethical theories. Even ethicists deploy ethical theories less frequently than one might expect. In my experience, the most powerful ethical arguments rarely appeal to an ethical theory. How is this possible? I contend that ethical argumentation can proceed successfully without invoking any ethical theory because the structure of good ethical argumentation involves leveraging a sturdy norm, where the norm is usually far more specific than a complete ethical theory. To illustrate this idea, (...) I present the argumentative structure of five powerful articles in the ethics literature. I further argue that the present model of ethical argumentation is consistent with the coherence model of ethical justification, but the former need not--and usually should not--invoke the latter explicitly for various practical reasons. (shrink)