Finals Study Flashcards

Question

a priori

Answer 1

obvious without thinking. "You ought not to harm innocents for no reason"

Answer 2

something is required in order to achieve an aim or goal, because it is a necessary means to that goal

Answer 3

object of moral assessments must be factors under our control. Moral assessments (regarding agent’s praise- or blameworthiness; the rightness or wrongless of theri action, etc) should be luck-independent.

Answer 4

a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment

Answer 5

The special form of sadness or pain accompanying the wish that things had been otherwise with regard to something with which ones agency was somehow involved a kind of sadness or regret, but not guilt or self-blame

Answer 6

luck involved in the kinds of problems and situations one faces (if they were in another circumstance, they would have acted better / worse)

Answer 7

luck in the way one’s actions or projects turned out blameworthiness and deservingness of punishment

Answer 8

luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances determinism

Answer 9

luck involved in one’s having the inclinations, capacities and temperament that one does

Answer 10

we tend to attribute things to people's character rather than looking at the situation they were put in

Answer 11

if determinism is true, you are not to praise or blame for anything

Answer 12

Given exactly what went before, the world could now be none other than it is Can people still be morally responsible?

Answer 13

If determinism is true, free will cannot exist and there can not be moral responsibility

Answer 14

Even if determinism is true, we can still sometimes be responsible for our actions since we could have acted otherwise if we wished to

Answer 15

if things are not caused by my own free will, desires, and impulses, they are not caused at all

Answer 16

An action that is free is caused by the agent who performs it. What we do is sometimes up to us.

Answer 17

desire to do or not do something

Answer 18

desire to have or not have the first-order desire (desire to do something)

Answer 19

a desire that the first-order desire will be our will

Answer 20

there is no moral blame or merit in anyone who could not have acted otherwise

Answer 21

we are morally responsible for action X if we have a second-order desire that our will be to do X

Answer 22

only time power can be executed against an individual is to prevent harm to himself or others

Answer 23

The Principle of Equality: it is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others Take equality to be good in itself Even if nothing can be done to remove inequalities, it is still bad Equality is intrinsically valuable A more equal outcome is in one respect better than a less equal outcome pluralist

Answer 24

we should avoid inequality, insofar as it is the product of unjust human agency If nothing can be done to remove inequalities, it cannot be unjust

Answer 25

believe that besides equality there are other things that also matter, such as total well-being or a decent minimum care about equality and utility middle ground between utilitarianism and egalitarian

Answer 26

it is in itself better if people are better off overall

Answer 27

The moral value of raising a person’s utility by a given amount is greater, the worse-off the recipient. Avoids the Leveling Down Objection since there is no reason to make the better-off worse off if we cannot alos improve the absolute standing of the worse-off.

Answer 28

individual harms do not have much of an effect, but when it adds up to the collective there are large-scale harms oppositions: universalization over generates moral prohibitions

Answer 29

Cases where each act likely makes no difference at all. Yet, some act makes a great deal of difference. In effect, some single act works as a trigger– bringing about the morally relevant difference. If we don’t know which act was the triggering act, then it seems that all we can say is that our own individual act is overwhelmingly likely not to have made a difference.

Answer 30

it isn’t literally true that most individual acts makes no difference at all. Rather, individual acts make a real, but imperceptible, difference along some dimension.

Answer 31

The dominant liberal paradigm for thinking about injustice operates on a liability model of responsibility, which seeks to causally connect the injustice to wrongdoings by an agent or group of agents, who are assigned responsibility for it.

Answer 32

The guiding question isn’t “who is to blame for this injustice?” But “who is responsible for addressing it, by reforming the social structures that give rise to these injustices?”

Answer 33

A policy is paternalistic if and only if it places constraints on the liberty of persons for the purpose of protecting and promoting their own good

Answer 34

things traded in market are valued in a certain way, namely for the use we get out of them (“use-value”)

Answer 35

X and y are numerically identical = x is the same individual as y. Ex. you and you 15 years ago

Answer 36

x and y have the same properties but are not (necessarily) the same individual Ex. two cans of the same Campbell tomatoes

Answer 37

each person has this distinctive necessary property: that of having grown from the particular pair of cells from which this person in fact grew. if this is true, the time dependence claim is true

Answer 38

if any particular person had not been conceived within a month of the time when he was in fact conceived, he would in fact never have existed.

Answer 39

an action harms a person if and only if it makes the person worse off than they would otherwise have been if the action had not been performed.

Answer 40

an action harms a person if and only if it either makes the person worse off than she would otherwise have been or causes her to exist with a life that is not worth living for her.

Answer 41

if in either of two possible outcomes the same number of people would ever live, it will be worse if those who live are worse off, or have a lower quality of life, than those who would have lived. We ought to bring out the better outcome, all else equal.

Answer 42

compares the average well-being of a population rather than the aggregate

Answer 43

The unconditional (or ‘interest-independent’) value that a person has in themself, in virtue of their rational nature

Answer 44

suicide to avoid pain is self-undermining since it is out of self-interest, and makes the person only have conditional [interst-dependent] value

Answer 45

practice of eating only farm animals that have been reared without being caused to suffer and that have been killed with minimal pain and fear

Answer 46

not morally required but morally praise-worthy. "above and beyond" moral duty.

Answer 47

an act is wrong only if it makes someone worse off