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  1. You Don't Have to Do What's Best! (A problem for consequentialists and other teleologists).S. Andrew Schroeder - 2011 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Define teleology as the view that requirements hold in virtue of facts about value or goodness. Teleological views are quite popular, and in fact some philosophers (e.g. Dreier, Smith) argue that all (plausible) moral theories can be understood teleologically. I argue, however, that certain well-known cases show that the teleologist must at minimum assume that there are certain facts that an agent ought to know, and that this means that requirements can't, in general, hold in virtue of facts about value (...)
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  • A Better World.Ryan Preston-Roedder - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):629-644.
    A number of moral philosophers have endorsed instances of the following curious argument: it would be better if a certain moral theory were true; therefore, we have reason to believe that the theory is true. In other words, the mere truth of the theory—quite apart from the results of our believing it or acting in accord with it—would make for a better world than the truth of its rivals, and this fact provides evidence of the theory’s truth. This form of (...)
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  • Does morality demand our very best? On moral prescriptions and the line of duty.Michael Ferry - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):573-589.
    It is widely accepted that morality does not demand that we do our very best, but our most significant moral traditions do not easily accommodate this intuition. I will argue that the underlying problem is not specific to any particular tradition. Rather, it will be difficult for any moral theory to account for binary moral concepts like permissible/impermissible while also accounting for scalar moral concepts like better/worse. If only the best is considered permissible, morality will seem either unreasonably demanding or (...)
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  • Normative Supervenience and Consequentialism.Krister Bykvist - 2003 - Utilitas 15 (1):27.
    Act-consequentialism is usually taken to be the view that we ought to perform the act that will have the best consequences. But this definition ignores the possibility of various non-maximizing forms of act-consequentialism, e.g. satisficing theories that tell us to perform the act whose consequences will be good enough. What seems crucial to act-consequentialism is not that we ought to maximize value but that the normative status of alternative actions depends solely on the values of their outcomes. The purpose of (...)
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  • Consequentializing moral theories.Douglas W. Portmore - 2007 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (1):39–73.
    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. (...)
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  • Dual-ranking act-consequentialism.Douglas W. Portmore - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (3):409 - 427.
    Dual-ranking act-consequentialism (DRAC) is a rather peculiar version of act-consequentialism. Unlike more traditional forms of act-consequentialism, DRAC doesn’t take the deontic status of an action to be a function of some evaluative ranking of outcomes. Rather, it takes the deontic status of an action to be a function of some non-evaluative ranking that is in turn a function of two auxiliary rankings that are evaluative. I argue that DRAC is promising in that it can accommodate certain features of commonsense morality (...)
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  • Offsetting Harm.Michael Deigan - 2022 - In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 12.
    It is typically wrong to act in a way that foreseeably makes some impending harm worse. Sometimes it is permissible to do so, however, if one also offsets the harm increasing action by doing something that decreases the badness of the same harm by at least as much. This chapter argues that the standard deontological constraint against doing harm is not compatible with the permissibility of harm increases that have been offset. Offsetting neither prevents one's other actions from doing harm (...)
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  • The Ethics of Partiality.Benjamin Lange - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 1 (8):1-15.
    Partiality is the special concern that we display for ourselves and other people with whom we stand in some special personal relationship. It is a central theme in moral philosophy, both ancient and modern. Questions about the justification of partiality arise in the context of enquiry into several moral topics, including the good life and the role in it of our personal commitments; the demands of impartial morality, equality, and other moral ideals; and commonsense ideas about supererogation. This paper provides (...)
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  • Exploitation and Effective Altruism.Daniel Muñoz - 2021 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 20 (4):409-423.
    How could it be wrong to exploit—say, by paying sweatshop wages—if the exploited party benefits? How could it be wrong to do something gratuitously bad—like giving to a wasteful charity—if that is better than permissibly doing nothing? Joe Horton argues that these puzzles, known as the Exploitation Problem and All or Nothing Problem, have no unified answer. I propose one and pose a challenge for Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem.
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  • African Reasons Why Artificial Intelligence Should Not Maximize Utility.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - In Beatrice Dedaa Okyere-Manu (ed.), African Values, Ethics, and Technology: Questions, Issues, and Approaches. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 55-72.
    Insofar as artificial intelligence is to be used to guide automated systems in their interactions with humans, the dominant view is probably that it would be appropriate to programme them to maximize (expected) utility. According to utilitarianism, which is a characteristically western conception of moral reason, machines should be programmed to do whatever they could in a given circumstance to produce in the long run the highest net balance of what is good for human beings minus what is bad for (...)
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  • Satisficing.John Turri - 2013 - In J. E. Crimmins & D. C. Long (eds.), Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism. Bloomsbury Academic.
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  • Three Paradoxes of Supererogation.Daniel Muñoz - 2020 - Noûs 55 (3):699-716.
    Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.
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  • Deontic Pluralism and the Right Amount of Good.Richard Y. Chappell - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 498-512.
    Consequentialist views have traditionally taken a maximizing form, requiring agents to bring about the very best outcome that they can. But this maximizing function may be questioned. Satisficing views instead allow agents to bring about any outcome that exceeds a satisfactory threshold or qualifies as “good enough.” Scalar consequentialism, by contrast, eschews moral requirements altogether, instead evaluating acts in purely comparative terms, i.e., as better or worse than their alternatives. After surveying the main considerations for and against each of these (...)
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  • All Reasons Are Moral.Daniel Muñoz - manuscript
    Morality doesn't always require our best. Prudent acts and heroic sacrifices are optional, not obligatory. To explain this, some philosophers claim that reasons of self-interest must have a special "non-moral" significance. A better explanation, I argue, is that we have prerogatives based in rights.
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  • Ethical relationships in the teaching profession in Slovakia.Marta Gluchmanova - 2016 - Journal of Educational Sciences and Psychology 6 (2):1-20.
    Authors deal with theoretical and social contexts of the teaching profession as a starting point for empirical research into ethical relationships among Slovak primary and secondary school teachers. They surveyed the opinions of teachers at that level regarding their relationship with students, parents, colleagues and superiors. According to the research results, more than 80% of respondents positively rate the behaviour of teachers towards their students and parents from the viewpoint of realising ethical values, based on which they could be an (...)
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  • Moral Status and Agent-Centred Options.Seth Lazar - 2019 - Utilitas 31 (1):83-105.
    If we were required to sacrifice our own interests whenever doing so was best overall, or prohibited from doing so unless it was optimal, then we would be mere sites for the realisation of value. Our interests, not ourselves, would wholly determine what we ought to do. We are not mere sites for the realisation of value — instead we, ourselves, matter unconditionally. So we have options to act suboptimally. These options have limits, grounded in the very same considerations. Though (...)
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  • G. E. Moore and theory of moral/right action in ethics of social consequences.Vasil Gluchman - 2017 - Ethics and Bioethics (in Central Europe) 7 (1-2):57-65.
    G. E. Moore’s critical analysis of right action in utilitarian ethics and his consequentialist concept of right action is a starting point for a theory of moral/right action in ethics of social consequences. The terms right and wrong have different meanings in these theories. The author explores different aspects of right and wrong actions in ethics of social consequences and compares them with Moore’s ideas. He positively evaluates Moore’s contributions to the development his theory of moral/right action.
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  • A Defense of Scalar Utilitarianism.Kevin Patrick Tobia - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (3):283-294.
    Scalar Utilitarianism eschews foundational notions of rightness and wrongness in favor of evaluative comparisons of outcomes. I defend Scalar Utilitarianism from two critiques, the first against an argument for the thesis that Utilitarianism's commitments are fundamentally evaluative, and the second that Scalar Utilitarianism does not issue demands or sufficiently guide action. These defenses suggest a variety of more plausible Scalar Utilitarian interpretations, and I argue for a version that best represents a moral theory founded on evaluative notions, and offers better (...)
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  • Demandingness, Well-Being and the Bodhisattva Path.Stephen E. Harris - 2015 - Sophia 54 (2):201-216.
    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 (...)
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  • Satan, Saint Peter and Saint Petersburg: Decision theory and discontinuity at infinity.Paul Bartha, John Barker & Alan Hájek - 2014 - Synthese 191 (4):629-660.
    We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (...)
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  • Pragmatic encroachment in accounts of epistemic excellence.Anne Baril - 2013 - Synthese 190 (17):3929-3952.
    Recently a number of philosophers have argued for a kind of encroachment of the practical into the epistemic. Fantl and McGrath, for example, argue that if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. (Fantl and McGrath 2007) In this paper I make a preliminary case for what we might call encroachment in, not knowledge or justification, but epistemic excellence, recent accounts of which include those of Roberts and Wood (2007), Bishop and Trout (2005), (...)
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  • Moral Perception and Particularity.Lawrence A. Blum - 1994 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.
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  • A Royal Road to Consequentialism?Martin Peterson - 2010 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2):153-169.
    To consequentialise a moral theory means to account for moral phenomena usually described in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, in a consequentialist framework. This paper seeks to show that all moral theories can be consequentialised. The paper distinguishes between different interpretations of the consequentialiser’s thesis, and emphasises the need for a cardinal ranking of acts. The paper also offers a new answer as to why consequentialising moral theories is important: This yields crucial methodological insights about how to (...)
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  • Reasons and oughts: an explanation and defence of deontic buck-passing.Euan Hans Metz - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Reading
    This thesis is about what a normative reason is and how reasons relate to oughts. I argue that normative reasons are to be understood as relational properties of favouring or disfavouring. I then examine the question: What is the relation between reasons, so understood, and what we ought to do, believe, or feel? I argue that the relation is an explanatory one. We should explain what we ought to do in terms of reasons, and not the other way around. This (...)
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  • Human Dignity as the Essence of Nussbaum’s Ethics of Human Development.Vasil Gluchman - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (4):1127-1140.
    Martha C. Nussbaum, in the context of ancient philosophy, formulated ethics of human development based on 10 basic human capabilities as a precondition of meaningful human development, i.e. the ability to live a dignified human life. The paper, thus, deals with a capabilities approach with the aim of analysing the content of the idea of human dignity in Nussbaum’s understanding and its place in the conception of ethics of human development, since human dignity is the very core of the conception (...)
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  • Integrity and Impartial Morality.Greg Scherkoske - 2012 - Dialogue 51 (2):289-312.
    ABSTRACT: Among recent criticisms of impartial moral theories, especially in consequentialist and deontological forms, Bernard Williams’ integrity objection is perhaps the most tantalizing. This objection is a complaint—at once both general and deep—that impartial moral theories are systematically incapable of finding room for integrity in human life and character. Kantians have made forceful responses to this integrity objection and have moved on. Consequentialists have found the objection more trying. I offer reasons to think that consequentialists too can safely move on. (...)
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  • How Morality Becomes Demanding Cost vs. Difficulty and Restriction.Marcel van Ackeren - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3):315-334.
    ABSTRACTThe standard view of demandingness understands demandingness exclusively as a matter of costs to the agent. The paper discusses whether the standard view must be given up because we should think of demandingness as a matter of difficulty or restriction of options. I will argue that difficulty can indeed increase demandingness, but only insofar as it leads to further costs. As to restrictions of options, I will show that confinement can become costly and thus increase demandingness in three ways, by (...)
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  • Alternative actions and the spirit of consequentialism.Krister Bykvist - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 107 (1):45 - 68.
    The simple idea behind act-consequentialism isthat we ought to choose the action whoseoutcome is better than that of any alternativeaction. In a recent issue of this journal, ErikCarlson has argued that given a reasonableinterpretation of alternative actions thissimple idea cannot be upheld but that the newtheory he proposes nevertheless preserves theact-consequentialist spirit. My aim in thispaper is to show that Carlson is wrong on bothcounts. His theory, contrary to his ownintentions, is not an act-consequentialisttheory. By building on a theory formulated (...)
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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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  • Probabilism Today: Permissibility and Multi-Account Ethics.Jonathan Hill - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2):235-250.
    In ethics, ‘probabilism’ refers to a position defended by a number of Catholic theologians, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They held that, when one is uncertain which of a range of actions is the right one to perform, it is permissible to perform any which has a good chance of being the right one—even if there is another which has a better chance. This paper considers the value of this position from the viewpoint of modern ethical philosophy. The (...)
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  • Randomness, game theory and free will.J. Moreh - 1994 - Erkenntnis 41 (1):49 - 64.
    Libertarians claim that human behaviour is undetermined and cannot be predicted from knowledge of past history even in principle since it is based on the random movements of quantum mechanics. Determinists on the other hand deny thatmacroscopic phenomena can be activated bysub-microscopic events, and assert that if human action is unpredictable in the way claimed by libertarians, it must be aimless and irrational. This is not true of some types of random behaviour described in this paper. Random behaviour may make (...)
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  • Dworkin on external skepticism and moral permissions.José Luis Martí & Hugo Omar Seleme - 2016 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (4):470-495.
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  • Economic analysis, common-sense morality and utilitarianism.J. Moreh - 1992 - Erkenntnis 37 (1):115 - 143.
    Economic concepts and methods are used to throw light on some aspects of common-sense ethics and the difference between it and Utilitarianism. (1) Very few exceptions are allowed to the rules of common-sense ethics, because of the cost of information required to justify an exception to Conscience and to other people. No such stringency characterizes Utilitarianism, an abstract system constructed by philosophers. (2) Rule Utilitarianism is neither consistent with common-sense ethics, nor does it maximize utility as has been claimed for (...)
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  • Ethics of Social Consequences as a Hybrid Form of Ethical Theory?Ján Kalajtzidis - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):705-722.
    The contemporary situation within the realm of ethical theories is quite complicated. Were it not enough that many classical ethical theories are evolving into the new modern forms, new types of ethical theories are arising, as well. The main aim of the paper is to introduce this issue of ethical theories which are known under the term hybrid ethical theories. A secondary aim of the paper is to describe and characterize the contemporary ethical theory of ethics of social consequences, and (...)
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  • Consequentialism and permissibility.Brian Mcelwee - 2010 - Utilitas 22 (2):171-183.
    Scalar consequentialism, recently championed by Alastair Norcross, holds that the value of an action varies according to the goodness of its consequences, but eschews all judgements of moral permissibility and impermissibility. I show that the strongest version of scalar consequentialism is not vulnerable to the objection that it is insufficiently action-guiding. Instead, the principle objection to the scalar view is simply that it leaves out important and interesting ethical judgements. In demonstrating this, I counter Rob Lawlor's contention that consequentialists cannot (...)
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