Reply to Shafer-Landau, Mcpherson, and Dancy Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9659-0 Authors Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.

What justifies political power? Most philosophers argue that consent or democracy are important, in other words, it matters how power is exercised. But this book argues that outcomes primarily matter to justifying power.

I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se consequentialism enacts constraints through the (...) very same feature that nonconsequentialist theories do. (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)

When presented with a situation involving an agent’s choice between alternative actions, a moral oracle says what the agent is allowed to do. The oracle bases her advice on some moral theory, but the nature of that theory is not known by us. The moral oracle’s test consists in determining whether a series of questions to the oracle can be so constructed that her answers will reveal which of two given types of theories she adheres to. The test can be (...) applied to moral theories in order to determine if they differ in their recommendations for action. Based on this test, a terminology is developed to specify different forms and degrees of distinguishability between moral theories, or types of theories, in terms of their recommendations for action. In conclusion, the test is applied to consequentialism and utilitarianism. (shrink)

To consequentialize a non-consequentialist theory, take whatever considerations that the non-consequentialist theory holds to be relevant to determining the deontic statuses of actions and insist that those considerations are relevant to determining the proper ranking of outcomes. In this way, the consequentialist can produce an ordering of outcomes that when combined with her criterion of rightness yields the same set of deontic verdicts that the non-consequentialist theory yields. In this paper, I argue that any plausible non-consequentialist theory can be consequentialized. (...) I explain the motivation for the consequentializing project and defend it against recent criticisms by Mark Schroeder and others. (shrink)

Agent-relative consequentialism is thought attractive because it can secure agent-centred constraints while retaining consequentialism's compelling idea—the idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available outcome. We argue, however, that the commitments of agent-relative consequentialism lead it to run afoul of a plausibility requirement on moral theories. A moral theory must not be such that, in any possible circumstance, were every agent to act impermissibly, each would have more reason to prefer the world thereby actualized over the (...) world that would have been actualized if every agent had instead acted permissibly. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to provide an effective counterexample to consequentialism. I assume that traditional counterexamples, such as Transplant (A doctor should kill one person and transplant her organs to five terminal patients, thereby saving their lives) and Judge (A judge should sentence to death an innocent person if he knows that an outraged mob will otherwise kill many innocent persons), are not effective, for two reasons: first, they make unrealistic assumptions and, second, they do not pass the (...) rule‐consequentialist institutional test. My example (The Moral Murderer), instead, assumes a realistic empirical framework and the relevant action does not undermine basic social institutions. On the contrary, it reinforces them. In The Moral Murderer, Tom (an adult male) is morally allowed to murder a person (preferably a woman) in order to be punished to death. (shrink)

Consequentializers suggest that for all non‐consequentialist moral theories, one can come up with a consequentialist counterpart that generates exactly the same deontic output as the original theory. Thus, all moral theories can be “consequentialized.” This paper argues that this procedure, though technically feasible, deprives consequentialism of its potential for normative justification. By allowing purported counterexamples to any given consequentialist moral theory to be accommodated within that theory’s account of value, consequentializers achieve a hollow victory. The resulting deontically equivalent consequentalist counterpart (...) that results from absorbing originally non‐consequentialist moral intuitions can now no longer explain, in a theoretically illuminating way, why certain actions are wrong and others right. The paper explains why traditional consequentialist theories did not embrace the procedure, and sketches how consequentialism can consequentialize without incurring the same cost. (shrink)

In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...) various cases. As a result, an important portion of the debate involves empirically tractable questions — questions that can be investigated by probing for people’s judgments in cases in which the two types of considerations come into conflict with one another. (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)