Midterm 1 Flashcards
Act-Consequentialism
Basic Concepts / Principles:
An act is morally permissible (required) if and only if it results in the maximum possible good possible in that situation / as much good as any alternative action would have resulted in
Variations: Act-Utilitarianism, objective consequentialism (action is objectively consequentialist if it best promotes good, right action does not have to be performed with the motive of doing what is right)
Pros: straightforward, powerful and systematic, clear guidance, general, less likely to be “contaminated” by culture, social class, self-interest, etc
Objections: too demanding, contractualism
Notes:
- you can be consequentialist without being utilitarian
- judgment based on expected consequence
- not a decision-procedure in acting
Act-Utilitarianism (Singer)
Basic Concepts / Principles:
An act is morally permissible if and only if it results in the maximum aggregate well-being minus ill-being
Objections: moral schizophrenia, implies that you must keep saving lives and keep acting for the maximum aggregate well-being, too moral freedom, little room for self-interests and personal attachments, moral duties are hostages to others’ bad behavior
Notes:
- well-being is the only thing that is good in itself; everything else is instrumentally good since it produces well-being
- instrumental social value
- some actions are morally wrong in themselves
- some actions are praiseworthy but not morally required (supererogatory)
Theories of Well-being
Hedonistic - well-being consists in happiness, nothing is good or bad for a person unless they are consciously aware of it
Desire-Fulfillment - well-being consists in desire-satisfaction
Objective List - well-being consists in the items on some objective list (ex. pleasure, moral goodness, knowledge, etc). Whether or not if they desire them and whether or not it makes them happy, these things are good for a person
Moral Schizophrenia (Stocker’s Modern Ethical Theories)
Basic Concepts / Principles:
The moral principles one wants to follow and their personal values clash
Love, friendship, etc: greatest pleasure in a person’s life, and ethical egoist and utilitarian should therefore aim to engage in such relationships
BUT… having motivations of an egoist rules out genuine love or friendship; since to love a person or treat them as a friend is to take their welfare as the final goal of your action
If an individual’s purpose for relationships is to make their own life pleasurable, they do not treat others’ welfare as the final goal
Ethical egoism, if followed directly, is self-defeating… precludes you from having genuine love or friendship, resulting in moral schizophrenia
Objections:
only applies to subjective consequentialist who understands consequentialism as a form of decision-making rather than a standard of rightness
Notes:
Ethical Egoism - view that an action is right if and only if it better promotes the agent’s interests than any other available action
Hedonistic Egoism - agent’s interests are reducible to pleasure
Contractualism (Scanlon)
Basic Concepts / Principles:
An action is morally right if and only if it is justifiable to each person, that is, if and only if a principle permitting the action could not be reasonably rejected, for personal reasons, as a principle for the general regulation of behavior.
Don’t look at benefits and harms in the aggregate, but examine how people are affected as individuals. Separation of persons
For a principle to be reasonably rejectable, there must be someone who can reject it from a personal standpoint, that is, by appealing to implications that the principle has for them
Notes:
The reason to avoid wrongdoing is not to avoid the bad effects of wrongdoing
The Greater Burden Principle: Unreasonable to reject a principle because it imposed a burden on you when every alternative principle would impose much greater burdens on others
Numbers can break the tie when we must choose between preventing a smaller or a larger number of people from suffering an equivalent burden
DDE Doctrine of Double Effect (Quinn)
Basic Concepts / Principles:
It is sometimes permissible for an agent to bring about a harm in the pursuit of an important good when:
The harm is necessary to achieve the good; The harm is proportionate to the good; The harm is merely foreseen but not intended
Two actions may have the same “consequential profile” (the goodness of their consequences is the same). But one action may be permissible, and the other impermissible, depending on the intentions with which the actions were performed.
Objections: consequentialism, Thomson and Scanlon
Notes:
An agent who acts from bad motives with the intention of causing death or harm may reveal a bad character, but the agent’s intentions in acting doesn’t influence the permissibility of his action
“Intended as a means” > using people as objects
“Merely foreseen” > people are unintentional collateral damage
Trolley Problem (Killing vs Letting Die)
Act-Consequentialism: when an act affects who lives or dies, what matters is how many people will live and how many will die (causal details are irrelevant)
Thomson: To achieve better distribution, we may redirect the harm, but may not do similar things to a person to achieve better distribution
(You can bring a trolley to a person but not a person to the trolley)
DDE: Death of large man comes about through direct harmful agency.
Death of the one on side track comes about through indirect harmful agency
Kant: No, not universalizable, “mere means,” autonomy / heteronymous
Act Utilitarian: Push, 5 lives is greater than 1
Rule Utilitarian: No, generally leads to bad outcomes
variations: fat man case, bystander case, enemy case
Notes:
‘The Simple Story’: All else equal, we have a much stronger duty against killing a person than letting a person die
Perhaps what matters is the causal role that the death of the victim plays in saving the greater number (Francis Kamms)
Kantian Ethics
Basic Concepts / Principle:
The only thing with unconditional value or “worth” is a goodwill (a person who does good for the right reasons shows good will)
Good will is the only thing to which we attribute unconditional worth or value
In all conditions, external conditions cannot influence; even if action does not achieve the purpose
Good will is not good because of what it accomplishes
Good will is manifested in actions that are performed with a certain kind of motivation, namely from duty
Actions from duty are distinguished from other actions not by their purpose but by their maxim
Maxim of an action from duty has the form of law (it is universal)
Therefore, the principle of a good will is to do only those actions whose maxims can be conceived as having the form of a universal law (Categorical Imperative)
Maxim of Action: “subjective principle of volition” that expresses an agent’s intended action and their reason for performing that action.
Performing an action because it is morally required = thinking of the maxim of the action as a kind of law (universal law)
Objections:
Notes:
What gives a morally good action its special value is the motivation behind it, the principle on the basis of which it was chosen, or in Kant’s terms, willed
Necessary condition of an action being done from duty is that its purpose be that action itself, not some ulterior end
A priori: can be known to be true just by thinking. No observation about the world needed
Hypothetical imperatives: something is required in order to achieve an aim or goal, because it is a necessary means to that goal
Categorical imperatives: something is required in itself, unconditionally, irrespective of any aim.
Types of Moral Luck (Nagel)
Outcome Luck: luck in the way one’s actions or projects turned out
(blameworthiness; deservingness of punishment)
Circumstantial luck: luck involved in the kinds of problems and situations one faces (Fundamental Attribution Error; Obedience to Authority Experiment)
Constitutive luck: luck involved in one’s having the inclinations, capacities and temperament that one does
Causal luck: luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances (external vs internal luck)
Objections:
if the Control Principle is consistently applied, it threatens to erode most of the moral assessments we find it natural to make
Kant: blaming people for what they are like is irrational and unfair. What matters is the quality of their quill in acting. And if, despite having these vices, a person succeeds in acting from the motive of dirty, there is nothing to reproach.
Notes:
The Control Principle (CP): 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.
Agent regret =/ moral luck; not guilt or self-blame, but a kind of sadness or regret (will not have to reproach himself)
Metaphysical Determinism (Taylor)
Basic Concepts / Principles:
Given exactly what went before, the world could now be none other than it is
The facts of the past, together with the laws of nature determine every truth about the present and the future
Given the past and the laws of nature, only one kind of nature is possible
Incompatibilism:
The simple Argument supports incompatibilism, the thesis that if determinism is true, there can be no moral responsibility.
Incompatibilists hold that, if the thesis of metaphysical determinism is correct, my actions are not ‘free’ in a sense that would make me morally responsible for them.
Objections:
Soft Determinism / Compatibilism:
If free activity is unforced and unimpeded activity, then there is no inconsistency between determinism and the claim that I sometimes act freely.
There is a perfectly intelligible sense in which I could have acted otherwise, even if determinism is true
Notes:
The Simple Argument
There is no moral blame nor merit in anyone who cannot help what they do
If determinism is true, you cannot help what you do
Therefore, if determinism is true, you are not to praise or blame for anything
Simple Indeterminsim (Taylor)
Simple Concepts / Principles:
if things are not caused by my own free will, desires, and impulses, they are not caused at all
According to Taylor’s libertarian conception of agency, an action that is free is caused by the agent who performs it.
Objections:
(Liberatarianism objection) Seems metaphysically extravagant and ad hoc
Science suggests nature is governed by laws, some of which are, deterministic and others of which are indeterministic statistical laws.
Since we are part of nature, how can we assume that our own behavior is not governed by these laws as well? What makes us so special?
what is a person (Frankfurt)
Someone is a person if and only if they have second-order volitions.
First Order Desire: a desire to do or not do something or other
Second Order Desire: a desire to have or not have certain first-order desires
Second-order Desire: a desire to have or not have certain first-order desires
Second-order Volition: a desire that a certain first-order desire will be our will
Objections:
it is possible for second-order desires to come into conflict
Further, the only way to resolve a conflict between our second-order desires is to form a third-order desire that resolves the conflict between our second-order desires
Notes:
The Principle of Alternate Possibilities: there is no moral blame or merit in anyone who could not have acted otherwise
Frankfurt’s Responsibility Principle: we are morally responsible for action X if we have a second-order desire that our will be to do X
