Results for 'character consequentialism'

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  1. Agency, Character and the Real Failure of Consequentialism.Kevin C. Klement - 2000 - Auslegung 23 (1):1-34.
    Certain consequentialists have responded to deontological worries regarding personal projects or options and agent-centered restrictions or constraints by pointing out that it is consistent with consequentialist principles that people develop within themselves, dispositions to act with such things in mind, even if doing so does not lead to the best consequences on every occasion. This paper argues that making this response requires shifting the focus of moral evaluation off of evaluation of individual actions and towards evaluation of whole character (...)
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  2. Is global consequentialism more expressive than act consequentialism?Elliott Thornley - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):75-84.
    Act consequentialism states that an act is right if and only if the expected value of its outcome is at least as great as the expected value of any other act’s outcome. Two objections to this view are as follows. The first is that act consequentialism cannot account for our normative ambivalence in cases where agents perform the right act out of bad motives. The second is that act consequentialism is silent on questions of character: questions (...)
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  3. Consequentialism and our best selves.Miles Tucker - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):101-120.
    I develop and defend a maximizing theory of moral motivation: I claim that consequentialists should recommend only those desires, emotions, and dispositions that will make the outcome best. I advance a conservative account of the motives that are possible for us; I say that a motive is an alternative if and only if it is in our psychological control. The resulting theory is less demanding than its competitors. It also permits us to maintain many of the motivations that we value (...)
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  4. Spinozian consequentialism of ethics of social consequences.Michaela Petrufová Joppová - 2018 - Ethics and Bioethics (in Central Europe) 8 (1-2):41-50.
    The present article deals with specific normative concepts of Spinoza’s ethical system and compares them to certain aspects of the theory of ethics of social consequences. At first, a way to approach the problem of normativity in Spinoza is presented, concentrating on the obligatory character of rational - or intellectual - motives. Then, theoretical evidence is presented which links Spinoza to normative-ethical consequentialism. The basis for a consequentialist model of Spinoza’s ethics is the concept of perfection, and on (...)
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  5. Consequentialism, Moral Motivation and the Deontic Relevance of Motives.Seven Sverdlik - 2016 - In Iakovos Vasiliou (ed.), Moral Motivation: A History. New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    This paper surveys the history of consequentialist thinking about the deontic relevance of motives in the period of its development, 1789-1912. If a motive is relevant deontically it is a factor that determines whether the action it leads to is right or wrong. Bentham, Austin, Mill, Sidgwick and Moore all either stated or implied that motives are never relevant deontically. Their related views on moral motivation—or which motives are morally praiseworthy—are also examined. Despite the arguments given by Mill and Moore, (...)
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  6. Maximizing Dharma: Krsna’s Consequentialism in the Mahabharata.Joseph Dowd - 2011 - Praxis 3 (1).
    The Mahabharata, an Indian epic poem, describes a legendary war between two sides of a royal family. The epic’s plot involves numerous moral dilemmas that have intrigued and perplexed scholars of Indian literature. Many of these dilemmas revolve around a character named Krsna. Krsna is a divine incarnation and a self-proclaimed upholder of dharma, a system of social and religious duties central to Hindu ethics. Yet, during the war, Krsna repeatedly encourages his allies to use tactics that violate dharma. (...)
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  7. Was Dave Chappelle Morally Obliged to Leave Comedy? On the Limits of Consequentialism.Phillip Deen - 2020 - The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1):135-152.
    Dave Chappelle took an extended leave from comedy for moral reasons. I argue that, while he had every right to leave comedy because of his moral concerns, he was not obliged to do so. To make this case, I present Chappelle’s argument that the potential negative consequences of his racial humor obliged him to leave. Next, I argue against Chappelle’s argument about avoidable harms as the harms are not his responsibility, he was not being negligent, and the benefits of his (...)
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  8. The Cultivation of Virtue in Buddhist Ethics.Charles K. Fink - 2013 - Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20:667-701.
    One question pursued in Buddhist studies concerns the classification of Buddhist ethics. Damien Keown has argued that Aristotelian virtue ethics provides a useful framework for understanding Buddhist ethics, but recently other scholars have argued that character consequentialism is more suitable for this task. Although there are similarities between the two accounts, there are also important differences. In this paper, I follow Keown in defending the aretaic interpretative model, although I do not press the analogy with Aristotelian ethics. Rather, (...)
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  9. Aesop's fox: Consequentialist virtue meets egocentric bias.Dale L. Clark - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (6):727 – 737.
    In her book Uneasy Virtue, Julia Driver presents an account of motive or trait utilitarianism, one that has been taken as “the most detailed and thoroughly defended recent formulation” of consequential virtue ethics. On Driver's account character traits are morally virtuous if and only if they generally lead to good consequences for society. Various commentators have taken Driver to task over this account of virtue, which she terms “pure evaluational externalism.” They object that, on Driver's account of virtue, it (...)
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  10. “Interest-based Open-Mindedness: Advocating the Role of Interests in the Formation of Human Character” [in Hebrew]. [REVIEW]Nadav Berman, S. - 2018 - Katharsis 30:146-165.
    Ayalon Eidelstein’s Openness and Faith focuses on the centrality of the idea of openness, or open-mindedness, to the educational sphere. The first half presents the challenges in modern ‘divided-consciousness’ and its consequences of egoism, materialism, and hedonism on the one hand, and religious fanatism on the other. Eidelstein’s main audience is the Israeli secular public, to which he proposes an educational and philosophical middle-way rooted in sincere human and inter-human openness. This openness is inspired by the idea of disinterestedness that (...)
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  11. Must Depression be Irrational?Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2024 - Synthese 204 (79):1-26.
    The received view about depression in the philosophical literature is that it is defined, in part, by epistemic irrationality. This status is undeserved. The received view does not fully reflect current clinical thinking and is motivated by an overly simplistic, if not false, account of depression’s phenomenal character. Equally attractive, if not more so, is a view that says depression can be instantiated either rationally or irrationally. This rival view faces challenges of its own: it appears to entail that (...)
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  12. Means, Ends, and the Critique of Pure Superheroes.Robert Loftis - 2009 - In William Irwin & Mark D. White (eds.), Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test. Wiley. pp. 59-75.
    The characters Ozymandias and Rorschach from Watchmen seem to represent opposite sides in the debate in philosophical ethics between consequentialists, who believe that the ends sometimes justify the means, and deontologists, who want us not to think in terms of ends and means at all. Closer examination, however, reveals that neither character is really true to their stated philosophies. Instead Moore and Gibbons intend these characters and their philosophies as critiques of authoritarians and the ideologies authoritarians use to rationalize (...)
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  13. What's Aristotelian about neo‐Aristotelian Virtue Ethics?Sukaina Hirji - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):671-696.
    It is commonly assumed that Aristotle's ethical theory shares deep structural similarities with neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that this assumption is a mistake, and that Aristotle's ethical theory is both importantly distinct from the theories his work has inspired, and independently compelling. I take neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to be characterized by two central commitments: (i) virtues of character are defined as traits that reliably promote an agent's own flourishing, and (ii) virtuous actions are defined as the sorts of (...)
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  14. Changing the Paradigm for Engineering Ethics.Jon Alan Schmidt - 2014 - Science and Engineering Ethics 20 (4):985-1010.
    Modern philosophy recognizes two major ethical theories: deontology, which encourages adherence to rules and fulfillment of duties or obligations; and consequentialism, which evaluates morally significant actions strictly on the basis of their actual or anticipated outcomes. Both involve the systematic application of universal abstract principles, reflecting the culturally dominant paradigm of technical rationality. Professional societies promulgate codes of ethics with which engineers are expected to comply, while courts and the public generally assign liability to engineers primarily in accordance with (...)
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  15. Kant and Moral Motivation: The Value of Free Rational Willing.Jennifer K. Uleman - 2016 - In Iakovos Vasiliou (ed.), Moral Motivation: A History. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 202-226.
    Kant is the philosophical tradition's arch-anti-consequentialist – if anyone insists that intentions alone make an action what it is, it is Kant. This chapter takes up Kant's account of the relation between intention and action, aiming both to lay it out and to understand why it might appeal. The chapter first maps out the motivational architecture that Kant attributes to us. We have wills that are organized to action by two parallel and sometimes competing motivational systems. One determines us by (...)
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  16. Marxism Against Utilitarianism in Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity.Donovan Miyasaki - manuscript
    Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity appears to defend a distinctly existentialist, deontologically-constrained version of consequentialism. On that interpretation, her belief that freedom consists in the real possibilities provided by our concrete situation leads her to reject Kantian autonomy to allow for some consequentialist decisions, while her belief that our situation derives its meaning from freely-chosen projects leads her to limit such choices to their consequences for situated freedom rather than general happiness. However, I will argue that Beauvoir’s view is better (...)
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  17. Moral Lessons from Psychology: Contemporary Themes in Psychological Research and their relevance for Ethical Theory.Henrik Ahlenius - 2020 - Stockholm: Stockholm University.
    The thesis investigates the implications for moral philosophy of research in psychology. In addition to an introduction and concluding remarks, the thesis consists of four chapters, each exploring various more specific challenges or inputs to moral philosophy from cognitive, social, personality, developmental, and evolutionary psychology. Chapter 1 explores and clarifies the issue of whether or not morality is innate. The chapter’s general conclusion is that evolution has equipped us with a basic suite of emotions that shape our moral judgments in (...)
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  18. 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 (...)
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  19. Selling Arms and Expressing Harm.James Christensen - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1):6-22.
    According to an argument commonly made by politicians, selling weapons to oppressive and aggressive regimes can sometimes be permissible because the sale renders the victims of these regimes no worse off than they would have been had the sale not been made. We can refer to this argument as the inconsequence argument. My primary aim in this article is to identify one reason why the inconsequence argument will often not succeed in vindicating arms sales to oppressive and aggressive regimes. The (...)
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  20. A virtue ethical account of making decisions about risk.N. Athanassoulis & A. Ross - 2010 - Journal of Risk Research 13 (2):217.
    Abstract Most discussions of risk are developed in broadly consequentialist terms, focusing on the outcomes of risks as such. This paper will provide an alternative account of risk from a virtue ethical perspective, shifting the focus to the decision to take the risk. Making ethical decisions about risk is, we will argue, not fundamentally about the actual chain of events that the decision sets in process, but about the reasonableness of the decision to take the risk in the first place. (...)
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  21. 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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  22. Is J.S. Mill’s Account of Free Speech Sustainable in the Age of Social Media?Nevin Chellappah - 2022 - Stance 15:44-55.
    In this paper, I examine whether John Stuart Mill’s account of free speech can survive three main challenges posed by social media. First, I consider the problem of social media failing to distinguish between emotive and factual language. Second, I look at the problem of algorithms creating moralism. I then turn to a potential objection to my first two challenges. The objection elucidates the benefits of social media’s emotional and algorithmic character, amplifying arguments and increasing public engagement. However, I (...)
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  23. Early Christian Ethics.Sarah Catherine Byers - 2017 - In Sacha Golob & Jens Timmermann (eds.), The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 112-124.
    G.E.M. Anscombe famously claimed that ‘the Hebrew-Christian ethic’ differs from consequentialist theories in its ability to ground the claim that killing the innocent is intrinsically wrong. According to Anscombe, this is owing to its legal character, rooted in the divine decrees of the Torah. Divine decrees confer a particular moral sense of ‘ought’ by which this and other act-types can be ‘wrong’ regardless of their consequences, she maintained. There is, of course, a potentially devastating counter-example. Within the Torah, Abraham (...)
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  24. Ex Machina: Testing Machines for Consciousness and Socio-Relational Machine Ethics.Harrison S. Jackson - 2022 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 5.
    Ex Machina is a 2014 science-fiction film written and directed by Alex Garland, centered around the creation of a human-like artificial intelligence (AI) named Ava. The plot focuses on testing Ava for consciousness by offering a unique reinterpretation of the Turing Test. The film offers an excellent thought experiment demonstrating the consequences of various approaches to a potentially conscious AI. In this paper, I will argue that intelligence testing has significant epistemological shortcomings that necessitate an ethical approach not reliant on (...)
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  25. 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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  26. Virtuous Law-Breaking.G. Alex Sinha - 2021 - Washington University Jurisprudence Review 2 (13):199-252.
    A rapidly growing body of scholarship embraces virtue jurisprudence, a series of (often ad hoc) attempts to incorporate the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics into legal theory. Broadly understood, virtue ethics describes an approach to moral questions that emphasizes the importance of developing and embodying various virtues, often as manifestations of human flourishing. Scholars typically contrast virtue ethics with deontological and consequentialist moral theories, tracing virtue-centered analysis to ancient Greek philosophers, and in particular to Aristotle. Virtue ethics has experienced a (...)
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  27. (1 other version)Bhagavad Gītā: The Dialectic of Four Moral Theories (Ethics-1, M08).Ranganathan Shyam - 2016 - In A. Raghuramaraju (ed.), Philosophy, E-Pg Pathshala. Delhi: India, Department of Higher Education (NMEICT).
    This is the first of lessons on the Bhagavad Gītā. The Bhagavad Gītā is a small section of the Mahābhārata, which is a dialectical experiment in moral theory. Here the characters not only assume the role of prominent ethical theories, but must also work through the ethical challenge as a matter of practice. In this module I explicate the main arguments of the Gītā, which lead us from teleological accounts of ethics (Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism) to procedural accounts (Deontology and (...)
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  28. You Can't Choose Your Family: Impartial Morality and Personal Obligations in Alias.Brendan Shea - 2014 - In Patricia Brace & Robert Arp (eds.), The Philosophy of J. J. Abrams. The University Press of Kentucky. pp. 173-189.
    In this essay, I critically examine the ways in which the characters of Alias attempt to balance their impartial moral obligations (e.g. duties toward humanity) and their personal obligations (e.g. duties toward one's children). I specifically examine three areas of conflict: (1) choices between saving loved ones and maximizing consequences, (2) choices to maintain or sever relationships with characters who are vicious or immoral, and (3) choices to seek or not seek revenge on the behalf of loved ones. I conclude (...)
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  29. Scalar consequentialism the right way.Neil Sinhababu - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (12):3131-3144.
    The rightness and wrongness of actions fits on a continuous scale. This fits the way we evaluate actions chosen among a diverse range of options, even though English speakers don’t use the words “righter” and “wronger”. I outline and defend a version of scalar consequentialism, according to which rightness is a matter of degree, determined by how good the consequences are. Linguistic resources are available to let us truly describe actions simply as right. Some deontological theories face problems in (...)
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  30. (1 other version)Epistemic Consequentialism: Its Relation to Ethical Consequentialism and the Truth-Indication Principle.Jochen Briesen - 2016 - In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 277-306.
    Consequentialist positions in philosophy spell out normative notions by recourse to final aims. Hedonistic versions of ETHICAL consequentialism spell out what is MORALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Veritistic versions of EPISTEMIC consequentialism spell out what is EPISTEMICALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing the number of true beliefs and decreasing the number of false ones. Even though these theories are in many respects structurally analogous, there are also interesting (...)
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  31. The Consequentialist Scale: Translation and empirical investigation in a Greek sample.George Kosteletos, Ioanna Zioga, Evangelos D. Protopapadakis, Andrie Panayiotou, Konstantinos Kontoangelos & Charalabos Papageorgiou - 2023 - Heliyon 9 (7):e18386.
    The Consequentialist Scale (Robinson, 2012) [89] assesses the endorsement of consequentialist and deontological moral beliefs. This study empirically investigated the application of the Greek translation of the Consequentialist Scale in a sample of native Greek speakers. Specifically, 415 native Greek speakers completed the questionnaire. To uncover the underlying structure of the 10 items in the Consequentialist Scale, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted. The results revealed a three-factor solution, where the deontology factor exhibited the same structure as the original (...)
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  32. Consequentialism and Collective Action.Brian Hedden - 2020 - Ethics 130 (4):530-554.
    Many consequentialists argue that you ought to do your part in collective action problems like climate change mitigation and ending factory farming because (i) all such problems are triggering cases, in which there is a threshold number of people such that the outcome will be worse if at least that many people act in a given way than if fewer do, and (ii) doing your part in a triggering case maximises expected value. I show that both (i) and (ii) are (...)
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  33. Consequentialist Options.Jussi Suikkanen - 2014 - Utilitas 26 (3):276-302.
    According to traditional forms of act-consequentialism, an action is right if and only if no other action in the given circumstances would have better consequences. It has been argued that this view does not leave us enough freedom to choose between actions which we intuitively think are morally permissible but not required options. In the first half of this article, I will explain why the previous consequentialist responses to this objection are less than satisfactory. I will then attempt to (...)
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  34. II*—Rule-Consequentialism, Incoherence, Fairness1.Brad Hooker - 1995 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1):19-36.
    Brad Hooker; II*—Rule-Consequentialism, Incoherence, Fairness1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 19–36, https://d.
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  35. Consequentialism and Its Demands: The Role of Institutions.Attila Tanyi & András Miklós - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-21.
    Consequentialism is often criticised as being overly demanding, and this overdemandingness is seen as sufficient to reject it as a moral theory. This paper takes the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given. Our question, therefore, is how to respond to the Objection. We put forward a response that we think has not received sufficient attention in the literature: institutional consequentialism. On this view institutions take over the consequentialist burden, whereas individuals, (...)
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  36. Why Consequentialism’s "Compelling Idea" Is Not.Paul Hurley - 2017 - Social Theory and Practice 43 (1):29-54.
    Many consequentialists take their theory to be anchored by a deeply intuitive idea, the “Compelling Idea” that it is always permissible to promote the best outcome. I demonstrate that this Idea is not, in fact, intuitive at all either in its agent-neutral or its evaluator-relative form. There are deeply intuitive ideas concerning the relationship of deontic to telic evaluation, but the Compelling Idea is at best a controversial interpretation of such ideas, not itself one of them. Because there is no (...)
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  37. Rule-Consequentialism's Assumptions.Kevin P. Tobia - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (4):458-471.
    Rule-Consequentialism faces “the problem of partial acceptance”: How should the ideal code be selected given the possibility that its rules may not be universally accepted? A new contender, “Calculated Rates” Rule-Consequentialism claims to solve this problem. However, I argue that Calculated Rates merely relocates the partial acceptance question. Nevertheless, there is a significant lesson from this failure of Calculated Rates. Rule-Consequentialism’s problem of partial acceptance is more helpfully understood as an instance of the broader problem of selecting (...)
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  38. Consequentialism, Collective Action, and Causal Impotence.Tim Aylsworth & Adam Pham - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (3):336-349.
    This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of (...)
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  39. Maxim Consequentialism for Bounded Agents.Mayank Agrawal & David Danks - manuscript
    Normative moral theories are frequently invoked to serve one of two distinct purposes: (1) explicate a criterion of rightness, or (2) provide an ethical decision-making procedure. Although a criterion of rightness provides a valuable theoretical ideal, proposed criteria rarely can be (nor are they intended to be) directly translated into a feasible decision-making procedure. This paper applies the computational framework of bounded rationality to moral decision-making to ask: how ought a bounded human agent make ethical decisions? We suggest agents ought (...)
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  40. Geometric Averaging in Consequentialist Ethics.Alfred Harwood - manuscript
    When faced with uncertainty, consequentialists often advocate choosing the option with the largest expected utility, as calculated using the arithmetic average. I provide some arguments to suggest that instead, one should consider choosing the option with the largest geometric average of utility. I explore the difference between these two approaches in a variety of ethical dilemmas and argue that geometric averaging has some appealing properties as a normative decision-making tool.
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  41. Consequentialism and Moral Rationalism.Douglas W. Portmore - 2011 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    IN THIS PAPER, I make a presumptive case for moral rationalism: the view that agents can be morally required to do only what they have decisive reason to do, all things considered. And I argue that this view leads us to reject all traditional versions of act‐consequentialism. I begin by explaining how moral rationalism leads us to reject utilitarianism.
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  42. Consequentialism, Animal Ethics, and the Value of Valuing.Timothy Perrine - 2019 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (3):485-501.
    Peter Singer argues, on consequentialist grounds, that individuals ought to be vegetarian. Many have pressed, in response, a causal impotence objection to Singer’s argument: any individual person’s refraining from purchasing and consuming animal products will not have an important effect on contemporary farming practices. In this paper, I sketch a Singer-inspired consequentialist argument for vegetarianism that avoids this objection. The basic idea is that, for agents who are aware of the origins of their food, continuing to consume animal products is (...)
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  43. Consequentialism and Nonhuman Animals.Tyler John & Jeff Sebo - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 564-591.
    Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well- being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly anti-conservationist stance, permitting (...)
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  44. Institutional consequentialism and global governance.Attila Tanyi & András Miklós - 2017 - Journal of Global Ethics 13 (3):279-297.
    Elsewhere we have responded to the so-called demandingness objection to consequentialism – that consequentialism is excessively demanding and is therefore unacceptable as a moral theory – by introducing the theoretical position we call institutional consequentialism. This is a consequentialist view that, however, requires institutional systems, and not individuals, to follow the consequentialist principle. In this paper, we first introduce and explain the theory of institutional consequentialism and the main reasons that support it. In the remainder of (...)
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  45. Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach.Evan Westra - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (5):1217-1241.
    Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a (...)
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  46. An Epistemic Non-Consequentialism.Kurt L. Sylvan - 2020 - The Philosophical Review 129 (1):1-51.
    Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attractive about epistemic consequentialism while yielding predictions that are harder (...)
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  47. Consequentialism and Reasons for Action.Christopher Woodard - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 179–196.
    Consequentialist theories often neglect reasons for action. They offer theories of the rightness or the goodness of actions, or of virtue, but they typically do not include theories of reasons. However, consequentialists can give plausible accounts of reasons. This chapter examines some different ways in which such accounts might be developed, focusing on Act Consequentialism and Rule Consequentialism and on the relationship between reasons and rightness. It notes that adding claims about reasons to consequentialist theories may introduce a (...)
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  48. Global consequentialism and the morality and laws of war.Hilary Greaves - forthcoming - In Kuosmanen McDermott and Roser (ed.), Human rights and 21st century challenges. Oxford University Press.
    Rights-based approaches and consequentialist approaches to ethics are often seen as being diametrically opposed to one another. In one sense, they are. In another sense, however, they can be reconciled: a ‘global’ form of consequentialism might supply consequentialist foundations for a derivative morality that is non-consequentialist, and perhaps rights-based, in content. By way of case study to illustrate how this might work, I survey what a global consequentialist should think about a recent dispute between Jeff McMahan and Henry Shue (...)
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  49. Consequentialism with Wrongness Depending on the Difficulty of Doing Better.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (2):108-118.
    Moral wrongness comes in degrees. On a consequentialist view of ethics, the wrongness of an act should depend, I argue, in part on how much worse the act's consequences are compared with those of its alternatives and in part on how difficult it is to perform the alternatives with better consequences. I extend act consequentialism to take this into account, and I defend three conditions on consequentialist theories. The first is consequentialist dominance, which says that, if an act has (...)
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  50. Consequentialism and Its Demands: A Representative Study.Attila Tanyi & Martin Bruder - 2014 - Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (2):293-314.
    An influential objection to act-consequentialism holds that the theory is unduly demanding. This paper is an attempt to approach this critique of act-consequentialism – the Overdemandingness Objection – from a different, so far undiscussed, angle. First, the paper argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, in order to investigate the (...)
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