Results for 'act utilitarians'

982 found
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  1. Utilitarian epistemology.Steve Petersen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1173-1184.
    Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...)
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  2. Utilitarian Moral Virtue, Admiration, and Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (1):77-95.
    Every tenable ethical theory must have an account of moral virtue and vice. Julia Driver has performed a great service for utilitarians by developing a utilitarian account of moral virtue that complements a broader act-based utilitarian ethical theory. In her view, a moral virtue is a psychological disposition that systematically produces good states of affairs in a particular possible world. My goal is to construct a more plausible version of Driver’s account that nevertheless maintains its basic integrity. I aim (...)
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  3. The Influence of Situational Factors in Sacrificial Dilemmas on Utilitarian Moral Judgments.Michael Klenk - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):593-625.
    The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in (...)
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  4. Balancing Acts: Intending Good and Foreseeing Harm -- The Principle of Double Effect in the Law of Negligence.Edward C. Lyons - 2005 - Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 3 (2):453-500.
    In this article, responding to assertions that the principle of double effect has no place in legal analysis, I explore the overlap between double effect and negligence analysis. In both, questions of culpability arise in situations where a person acts with no intent to cause harm but where reasonable foreseeability of unintended harm exists. Under both analyses, the determination of whether such conduct is permissible involves a reasonability test that balances that foreseeable harm against the good intended by the actor's (...)
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  5. The Informational Foundation of the Human Act.Fernando- Luis de Marcos Ortega Flores Morador & Luis de Marcos Ortega (eds.) - 2018 - Alcalá. Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Alcalá.
    This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, (...)
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  6. Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Might’? How (not) to Resolve the Conflict between Act and Motive Utilitarianism.James Skidmore - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):207-221.
    Utilitarianism has often been understood as a theory that concerns itself first and foremost with the rightness of actions; but many other things are also properly subject to moral evaluation, and utilitarians have long understood that the theory must be able to provide an account of these as well. In a landmark article from 1976, Robert Adams argues that traditional act utilitarianism faces a particular problem in this regard. He argues that a on a sensible utilitarian account of the (...)
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  7. Moral rules, utilitarianism and schizophrenic moral education.Kevin McDonough - 1992 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 26 (1):75–89.
    R. M. Hare has argued for and defended a ‘two-level’, view of moral agency. He argues that moral agents ought to rely on the rules of ‘intuitive moral thinking’ for their ‘everyday’ moral judgments. When these rules conflict or when we do not have a rule at hand, we ought to ascend to the act-utilitarian,‘critical’ level of moral thinking. I argue that since the rules at the intuitive level of moral thinking necessarily conflict much more often than Hare supposes, and (...)
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  8. Should the Baby Live? Abortion and Infanticide: When Ontology Overlaps Ethics and Peter Singer Echoes the Stoics.Evangelos D. Protopapadakis - 2010 - In Ancient Culture, European and Serbian Heritage. pp. 396-407.
    Concerning abortion and infanticide, ethics has always seen to each one as quite puzzling an issue. The dilemma expectedly goes like this: “Are they morally good, permissible or acceptable, or are they not?” All three major approaches in ethics, viz. virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism, have fervently exerted themselves in order to settle both. A virtue ethicist is expected to approach the issue wondering: “Is performing abortion and infanticide indicative of virtues, to wit of character traits that the virtuous agent (...)
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  9. Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls: Against Hayward's “Utility Cascades”.Ryan Doody - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (2):225-232.
    In his article “Utility Cascades”, Max Khan Hayward argues that act-utilitarians should sometimes either ignore evidence about the effectiveness of their actions or fail to apportion their support to an action's effectiveness. His conclusions are said to have particular significance for the effective altruism movement, which centers seeking and being guided by evidence. Hayward's argument is that act-utilitarians are vulnerable to succumbing to “utility cascades”, that these cascades function to frustrate the ultimate goals of act-utilitarians, and that (...)
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  10. A plethora of promises — or none at all.Michael Cholbi - 2014 - American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (3):261-272.
    Utilitarians are supposed to have difficulty accounting for our obligation to keep promises. But utilitarians also face difficulties concerning our obligation to make promises. Consider any situation in which the options available to me are acts A, B, C… n, and A is utility maximizing. Call A+ the course of action consisting of A plus my promising to perform A. Since there appear to be a wide range of instances in which A+ has greater net utility then A, (...)
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  11. Priority, Ethical Principle, and Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources. Di Wu - 2021 - Studies in Dialectics of Nature 11 (37):62-68.
    Aiming at the allocation of scarce medical resources, Immanuel and other scholars have put forward a set of influential ethical values and guiding principles. It assigns the priority of resource allocation to those whose lives can be saved and maximized, those who can bring the greatest instrumental value, and those who are the worse off. For other members of society, random selection under the same conditions is adopted. Following the Rawlsian "lexical order, lexicographical" rule, this priority arrangement requires that the (...)
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  12. John Rawls: Two Concepts of Rules.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    In his seminal essay, 'Two Concepts of Rules', John Rawls draws a central distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In this review, Leslie Allan walks through Rawls's essay, highlighting his key arguments for a strengthened version of rule utilitarianism and reflecting on the lasting influence of his analysis.
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  13. On the Assumed Moral Superiority of Passive over Active Euthanasia.Evangelos D. Protopapadakis & Tatia Basilaia - 2024 - ARHE 21 (42):51-74.
    Since the inception of the euthanasia debate, the differentiation be-tween active and passive euthanasia – distinguishing between “let-ting die” and “actively killing” – has emerged as a central point of contention. In this paper, we will contend that: a) the boundary be-tween active and passive euthanasia is inherently nebulous, b) there exists no morally substantive disparity between active and passive euthanasia, and c) if such a disparity could be admitted, it would probably favor active euthanasia over passive. We will seek (...)
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  14. L'etica moderna. Dalla Riforma a Nietzsche.Sergio Cremaschi - 2007 - Roma RM, Italia: Carocci.
    This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...)
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  15. Libertarian Theories of Intergenerational Justice.Peter Vallentyne & Hillel Steiner - 2009 - In Axel Gosseries & Lukas H. Meyer (eds.), Intergenerational Justice. Oxford, Royaume-Uni: Oxford University Press.
    Justice and Libertarianism The term ‘justice’ is commonly used in several different ways. Sometimes it designates the moral permissibility of political structures (such as legal systems). Sometimes it designates moral fairness (as opposed to efficiency or other considerations that are relevant to moral permissibility). Sometimes it designates legitimacy in the sense of it being morally impermissible for others to interfere forcibly with the act or omission (e.g., my failing to go to dinner with my mother may be wrong but nonetheless (...)
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  16. Kantian Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.Ozlem Ulgen - 2017 - Questions of International Law 1 (43):59-83.
    Artificial intelligence and robotics is pervasive in daily life and set to expand to new levels potentially replacing human decision-making and action. Self-driving cars, home and healthcare robots, and autonomous weapons are some examples. A distinction appears to be emerging between potentially benevolent civilian uses of the technology (eg unmanned aerial vehicles delivering medicines), and potentially malevolent military uses (eg lethal autonomous weapons killing human com- batants). Machine-mediated human interaction challenges the philosophical basis of human existence and ethical conduct. Aside (...)
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  17. Leyendas de trolley: Juicio moral y toma de decisiones.Fabio Morandín-Ahuerma - 2019 - Universita Ciencia 8 (22):79-91.
    Sostengo en este artículo que no somos utilitaristas consecuentes en todo momento, ni deontologistas dogmáticos irracionales, más bien, una mezcla de utilitarismo y deontologismo que depende de una serie de factores no descubiertos o explicados convincentemente tanto epigenéticos, evolutivos, como educacionales, axiológicos, psicológicos aprendidos, conscientes e inconscientes en la toma de decisiones. También argumento que no es lo mismo toma de decisión, que construcción del juicio moral. El juicio moral no siempre conduce a la toma de decisión. Se puede tener (...)
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  18. The Consequences of Individual Consumption: A Defence of Threshold Arguments for Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics.Ben Almassi - 2011 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (4):396-411.
    As a moral foundation for vegetarianism and other consumer choices, act consequentialism can be appealing. When we justify our consumer and dietary choices this way, however, we face the problem that our individual actions rarely actually precipitate more just agricultural and economic practices. This threshold or individual impotence problem engaged by consequentialist vegetarians and their critics extends to morally motivated consumer decision-making more generally, anywhere a lag persists between individual moral actions taken and systemic moral progress made. Regan and others (...)
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  19. L'etica del Novecento. Dopo Nietzsche.Sergio Cremaschi - 2005 - Roma RM, Italia: Carocci.
    TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...)
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  20. Republican Theory and Criminal Punishment.Philip Pettit - 1997 - Utilitas 9 (1):59.
    Suppose we embrace the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination: freedom as immunity to arbitrary interference. In that case those acts that call uncontroversially for criminalization will usually be objectionable on three grounds: the offender assumes a dominating position in relation to the victim, the offender reduces the range or ease of undominated choice on the part of the victim, and the offender raises a spectre of domination for others like the victim. And in that case, so it appears, the (...)
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  21. The Utilibot Project: An Autonomous Mobile Robot Based on Utilitarianism.Christopher Cloos - 2005 - In Anderson Michael, Anderson Susan & Armen Chris (eds.), AAAI Fall Symposium.
    As autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) begin living in the home, performing service tasks and assisting with daily activities, their actions will have profound ethical implications. Consequently, AMRs need to be outfitted with the ability to act morally with regard to human life and safety. Yet, in the area of robotics where morality is a relevant field of endeavor (i.e. human-robot interaction) the sub-discipline of morality does not exist. In response, the Utilibot project seeks to provide a point of initiation for (...)
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  22. L’etica del primo Wittgenstein e i dibattiti della Vienna fin-de-siècle: né oltre né dentro il mondo.Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz - 2022 - Scenari. Rivista Semestrale di Filosofia Contemporanea 16:107-121.
    If we classify ethical theories into ‘immanentist’ (those that detect what is ethically acceptable in some type of world events, such as the utilitarian growth of general benefits) and ‘transcendentalist’ (those that locate in some space beyond this world the reason why we should behave ethically – for example, due to some kind of otherworldly reward –), then the moral philosophy of the so-called ‘first’ Wittgenstein would occupy a special place between both extremes of such a dichotomy. To a certain (...)
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  23. J. S. Mill and Robert Veatch's Critique of Utilitarianism.Rem B. Edwards - 1985 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 23 (2):181-200.
    Modern bioethics is clearly dominated by deontologists who believe that we have some way of identifying morally correct and incorrect acts or rules besides taking account of their consequences. Robert M. Veatch is one of the most outspoken of those numerous modern medical ethicists who agree in rejecting all forms of teleological, utilitarian, or consequentialist ethical theories. This paper examines his critique of utilitarianism and shows that the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill is either not touched at all by his (...)
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  24. Efficiency, Practices, and the Moral Point of View: Limits of Economic Interpretations of Law.Mark Tunick - 2009 - In Mark D. White (ed.), THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF LAW AND ECONOMICS. Cambridge University Press.
    This paper points to some limitations of law and economics as both an explanative and a normative theory. In explaining law as the result of efficiency promoting decisions, law and economics theorists often dismiss the reasons actors in the legal system give for their behavior. Recognizing that sometimes actors may be unaware of why institutions evolve as they do, I argue that the case for dismissing reasons for action is weaker when those reasons make reference to rules of practices that (...)
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  25. How to Philosophize With A Hammer (A Squeaky Plastic One).Chris A. Kramer - 2021 - In Kishor Vaidya (ed.), Teach with a Sense of Humor: Why (and How to) Be a Funnier and More Effective Teacher and Laugh All the Way to Your Classroom. pp. 176-187.
    "The Mind is not a Vessel to be Filled but a Fire to be Kindled", and "Education is Not the Filling of Pail But the Lighting of a Fire", and ... Something About a Horse ... You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it smile? Because of the long face and all? (No, that can’t be it). Anyway, borrowing a bit from Plutarch and Yeats (maybe, there is no agreement on whether he said that about pails (...)
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  26. Grenzen für den Utilitarismus. Ein transzendentales Gegenargument.Olaf L. Müller - 2002 - In Wolfram Hogrebe (ed.), Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: XIX. Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie, Bonn, 23.-27. September 2002 : Vorträge und Kolloquien. Sinclair Press. pp. 107-115.
    Let us imagine an ideal ethical agent, i.e., an agent who (i) holds a certain ethical theory, (ii) has all factual knowledge needed for determining which action among those open to her is right and which is wrong, according to her theory, and who (iii) is ideally motivated to really do whatever her ethical theory demands her to do (even when she speaks). If we grant that the notions of omniscience and ideal motivation both make sense, we may ask: Could (...)
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  27. A Consequentialism with Subjective Decision Criterion. Commentary to From Value to Rightness / Ein Konsequentialismus mit subjektivem Entscheidungskriterium. Kommentar zu From Value to Rightness.Annette Dufner - 2021 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 75 (4):584-586.
    A particularly significant criticism of utilitarian and consequentialist moral theories is that they are overly demanding. According to the epistemic variant of this critique, it is overly demanding to have to determine which of one's possible actions would promote the good in the best possible way. A particularly striking articulation of this concern was put forward by James Lenman, who argued that not only is it difficult to predict the consequences of actions, but it is often outright impossible. The reason, (...)
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  28. The Direct Inverse Effect.Suhail Vawda - manuscript
    This paper discusses the two primary groups of jurisprudential theories, Utilitarianism and Deontology, and attempts to show that there is a phenomenon that occurs when the results are opposite to what was expected. When this happens, the Utilitarian position prior to the results would become a Deontological position after the results, and vice versa i.e. the Deontological position prior to the results would become a Utilitarian position after the results, provided that the results are opposite to what was expected. This (...)
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  29. Intentions and consequences in military ethics.Peter Olsthoorn - 2011 - Journal of Military Ethics 10 (2):81-93.
    Utilitarianism is the strand of moral philosophy that holds that judgment of whether an act is morally right or wrong, hence whether it ought to be done or not, is primarily based upon the foreseen consequences of the act in question. It has a bad reputation in military ethics because it would supposedly make military expedience override all other concerns. Given that the utilitarian credo of the greatest happiness for the greatest number is in fact agent-neutral, meaning that the consequences (...)
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  30. Bentham’s Mugging.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (4):386-391.
    A dialogue, in three parts, on utilitarian vulnerability to exploitation.
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  31.  18
    The Moral Dissociation Curve, Blind Spots and Prescribing Death in Canada.I. I. Richard W. Sams - unknown
    Provider assisted death is becoming a leading cause of death in Canada since the passage of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation in 2016. What was to be exceptional has now become common; some are calling for it to be expected. Increasing numbers of patients with chronic, non-terminal conditions are being euthanized. Healthcare personnel are now approving and offering MAiD to vulnerable patients who are depressed, disabled, chronically ill or impoverished. This paper presents a rationale from a transcendent moral law (...)
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  32. From Analysis to Synthesis: Conceiving a Transformative Metaphysics for the Twenty-First Century.Mikhail Epstein - 2020 - In Mikhail Sergeev, Alexander Nikolaevich Chumakov & Mary Elizabeth Theis (eds.), Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology. Boston: Brill | Rodopi. pp. 74–100.
    The article aims to substantiate the philosophy of synthesis, which is built on the basis of analysis, but gives it a constructive direction. The turning point from analysis to synthesis is the problematization of the elements identified in the analysis, their criticism, replacement, or rearrangement, leading to the construction of alternative concepts and propositions that expand the field of the thinkable and innovate the categorical apparatus of philosophy. This article provides examples of philosophical synthesis at different levels: alternative terms and (...)
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  33. Is saving more lives always better? On giving a chance to minorities.Valena Reich - 2022 - Aporia 32 (2):1-11.
    Questioning the ethical reasoning behind ways of attributing value to lives impacts philosophical dilemmas encountered in policy making and innovation in AI. For instance, this sort of reasoning requires us to determine how self-driving cars should behave when encountering real-life dilemmas such as inevitably crashing into one person as opposed to a group of people. -/- This issue will be examined with the Rocks Case, a case of conflict of interest where all the relevant parties are strangers, and we can (...)
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  34. (1 other version)Is Morality Subjective? – A Reply to Critics.Leslie Allan -
    Leslie Allan defends his thesis that ethics is objective in the sense of requiring moral agents to offer impartial reasons for acting. Radical subjectivists have attacked this requirement for impartiality on a number of grounds. Some critics make the charge that Allan's thesis is simply a version of subjectivism in disguise. He responds by showing how a broadly naturalist view of ethics accommodates objective moral constraints. Allan also counters cases in which impartiality is purportedly not morally required and considers the (...)
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  35. Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy.Michael Koenigs, Michael Kruepke, Joshua Zeier & Joseph Newman - 2011 - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (6):1-7.
    Psychopathic behavior is characteristically amoral, but to date research studies have largely failed to identify any systematic differences in moral judgment capability between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. In this study, we investigate whether significant differences in moral judgment emerge when taking into account the phenotypic heterogeneity of the disorder through a well-validated distinction between psychopathic subtypes. Three groups of incarcerated participants [low-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12), high-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12) and non-psychopaths (n 1⁄4 24)] completed a moral judgment test involving (...)
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  36. Acting Oneself as Another: An Actor’s Empathy for her Character.Shaun Gallagher & Julia Gallagher - 2020 - Topoi 39 (4):779-790.
    What does it mean for an actor to empathize with the character she is playing? We review different theories of empathy and of acting. We then consider the notion of “twofoldness”, which has been used to characterize the observer or audience perspective on the relation between actor and character. This same kind of twofoldness or double attunement applies from the perspective of the actor herself who must, at certain points of preparation, distinguish between the character portrayed and her own portrayal (...)
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  37. Perceiving utilitarian gradients: Heart rate variability and self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task.Alejandro Rosas, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Jorge Martínez Cotrina, David Aguilar-Pardo, Juan Carlos Caicedo Mera & Diego Mauricio Aponte - 2021 - Social Neuroscience 16 (4):391–405.
    It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian responses in a 4-point scale and collected data on (...)
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  38. Late Utilitarian Moral Theory and Its Development: Sidgwick, Moore.Anthony Skelton - 2019 - In John Shand (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy). Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 281-310.
    Henry Sidgwick taught G.E. Moore as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Moore found Sidgwick’s personality less than attractive and his lectures “rather dull”. Still, philosophically speaking, Moore absorbed a great deal from Sidgwick. In the Preface to the Trinity College Prize Fellowship dissertation that he submitted in 1898, just two years after graduation, he wrote “For my ethical views it will be obvious how much I owe to Prof. Sidgwick.” Later, in Principia Ethica, Moore credited Sidgwick with having (...)
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  39. Utilitarian Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for Non-Pandemic Diseases.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 21 (12):39-42.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique set of challenges for national governments regarding how to deal with a major international pandemic of almost unprecedented scope. As the pandemic consti...
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  40. Utilitarian voting.Jonathan Baron - manuscript
    Self-interest voting is irrational when it has even a small cost, but it can be rational for those who care about others; its expected utility (EU) may exceed its cost. For cosmopolitan voters (those who care about outsiders), the EU of voting increases with the number of affected others. The EU of voting for the good of the world now and in the future can thus be large. In some cases, the EU of parochial voting (e.g., considering only one's nation) (...)
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  41. Epistemic Problems of Utilitarian Practical Reasoning.John Dilworth - 1998-9 - Proceedings of the Heraclitean Society 19.
    Utilitarian (U.) theories must be capable of being applied in practical reasoning, or they would have no value as a guide to rational conduct. However, I show that epistemic extensions to U. theories produce logical confusion. Basic questions about what one needs to know in order to apply a U. analysis embroil one in an infinite regress. And attempts to incrementally apply U. either are no help at all (leaving one entirely 'in the dark'), or in general constitute arbitrary gambles (...)
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  42. The Utilitarian Justification of Prepunishment.Voin Milevski - 2014 - Polish Journal of Philosophy 8 (1):25-35.
    According to Christopher New, prepunishment is punishment for an offence before the offence is committed. I will first analyze New’s argument, along with theepistemic conditions for practicing prepunishment. I will then deal with an important conceptual objection, according to which prepunishment is not a genuine kind of ‘punishment’. After that, I will consider retributivism and present conclusive reasons for the claim that it cannot justify prepunishment without leading to paradoxical results. I shall then seek to establish that from the utilitarian (...)
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  43. Acts and Embodiment.Kit Fine - 2022 - Metaphysics 5 (1):14–28.
    The theory of embodiment is used in providing an account of the identity of acts and in providing solutions to various puzzles concerning acts.
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  44. Utilitarian Practical Ethics: Sidgwick and Singer.Anthony Skelton - 2011 - In Placido Bucolo, Roger Crisp & Bart Schultz (eds.), Atti del secondo Congresso internazionale su Henry Sidgwick: etica, psichica, politica. Universita degli Studi di Catania.
    It is often argued that Henry Sidgwick is a conservative about moral matters, while Peter Singer is a radical. Both are exponents of a utilitarian account of morality but they use it to very different effect. I think this way of viewing the two is mistaken or, at the very least, overstated. Sidgwick is less conservative than has been suggested and Singer is less radical than he initially seems. To illustrate my point, I will rely on what each has to (...)
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  45. The Utilitarian Theory of Equality Before the Law.William E. Conklin - 1976 - Ottawa Law Review 8 (3):485-517.
    This Article argues that a particular political theory underlies the judicial interpretation of ‘equality before the law’. The Canadian Courts at the date of writing have elaborated two tests for the signification of ‘equality before the law’. The Article traces the two tests to the utilitarian political theory outlined by John Stuart Mill. The one test sets out the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ or ‘social interests’ as the criterion for adjudicating equality. The second test identifies the reasonable relationship (...)
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  46. Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape.Daniel W. Harris, Daniel Fogal & Matt Moss - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press.
    What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. -/- We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are (...)
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  47. Act Utilitarianism.Ben Eggleston - 2014 - In Ben Eggleston & Dale E. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 125-145.
    An overview (about 8,000 words) of act utilitarianism, covering the basic idea of the theory, historical examples, how it differs from rule utilitarianism and motive utilitarianism, supporting arguments, and standard objections. A closing section provides a brief introduction to indirect utilitarianism (i.e., a Hare- or Railton-style view distinguishing between a decision procedure and a criterion of rightness).
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  48. Document Acts.Barry Smith - 2013 - In Anita Konzelmann Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents: Contributions to Social Ontology. Dordrecht: Imprint: Springer. pp. 19-31.
    The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and (...)
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  49. Acts and Alternative Analyses.Arvid Båve - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (4):181–205.
    I show that the act-type theories of Soames and Hanks entail that every sentence with alternative analyses (including every atomic sentence with a polyadic predicate) is ambiguous, many of them massively so. I assume that act types directed toward distinct objects are themselves distinct, plus some standard semantic axioms, and infer that act-type theorists are committed to saying that ‘Mary loves John’ expresses both the act type of predicating [loving John] of Mary and that of predicating [being loved by Mary] (...)
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  50. Speech-Act Theory: Social and Political Applications.Daniel W. Harris & Rachel McKinney - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    We give a brief overview of several recent strands of speech-act theory, and then survey some issues in social and political philosophy can be profitably understood in speech-act-theoretic terms. Our topics include the social contract, the law, the creation and reinforcement of social norms and practices, silencing, and freedom of speech.
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