Russian Pluralism Flashcards
Ordinary Promise
You’ve promised to pick up your friend at the airport. The consequences of keeping your promise will be at least a little better than those of breaking it.
Kantian and Consequentialists: Keep
Disastrous Promise
You’ve promised to pick up your friend at the airport. The consequences of keeping your promise will be disastrous.
Kantians: Keep
Consequentialists: Break
Promise at Parity
You’ve promised to pick up your friend at the airport. The consequences of breaking your promise will be equally as good as those of keeping it.
Kantians: Keep
Consequentialists: Keep, break, either is fine
Slight Sub-Optimal Promise
You’ve promised to pick up your friend at the airport. The consequences of breaking your promise will be only slightly better than those of keeping it.
Kantians: Keep
Consequentialists: Break
Russian Pluralism
- There can be a plurality of morally significant relations in which others stand to you—e.g., promisee to promisor, of creditor to debtor, of partner to partner, of friend to friend, etc.
- Each of the morally significant relations in which other stand to you grounds prima facie duty, which is more or less incumbent on you, depending on the circumstances of the case
- In cases involving multiple, conflicting prima facie duties, one such duty is your
duty sans phrase
Prima Facie Duties = Pro Tanto Duties
- Your duty at “first face” or “at first appearance”
- Duties to a certain extent. If you have a pro tanto duty to do something, then you have a reason to do it.
Why Pro Tanto Duty is more accurate
Example:
- P.78 we should feel guilty about breaking you promise (even in disastrous promise), we need/have a duty to make up for it
- The duty you break is still a duty, it is just outweighed
Duty Sans Phrase
- Your duty “without qualification”
- Your “all-things-considered duty”.
-> If doing something is your all-things-considered duty, you ought (atc) to do it.
Ross’ List of Pro Tanto Duties:
- Fidelity (keep promises, don’t lie)
- Reparation (right past wrongs)
- Gratitude (appreciate services rendered)
- Justice (distribute goods according to merit)
- Beneficence (improve the condition of others)
- Self-Improvement (improve your own condition)
- Non-Maleficence (don’t harm others)
Things to highlight abt the list of Pro Tanto Duties:
- Non-Maleficence is distinct from Beneficence (not to harm vs. to help)
- Non-Maleficence is more stringent weighs more
- These are all fundamentally distinct morally significant factor (they cannot be reduced to one another)– so there is not single principle of morality of this view
- We can’t make absolute claims about how these duties interact
-> We can use the word “usually”
Upshot to the list of Pro Tanto Duties:
On this view (unlike any others), there is no uniform answer of what makes right acts right, no single factor that always determines the rightness or wrongness of an act
Ross was the first to:
- Deviate from looking for a single form of morality
- Distinguish between pro-tonto and all-things-considered duties
-> Our pro-tonto duties are individual forces, but to determine what we actually ought to do (all-things-considered duties), take into account all of the pro-tonto duties
Our pro tanto duties are self-evident:
- “When we have reached sufficient mental maturity and have given sufficient attention to the proposition it is evident without any need of proof, or of evidence beyond itself”.
-> Euclid’s First Axiom: Given two distinct points, there is exactly one line that contains them
-> Modus Ponens: If P, then Q.P. Therefore, Q.
Our all-things-considered duties, in concrete situations, are not self-evident:
We can never know whether something is our all-things-considered duty; at best, we can have a probable opinion.
Note: “This consideration does not, however, make the doing of our duty a mere matter of chance […] We are more likely to do our duty if we reflect to the best of our ability on the prima facie rightness or wrongness of the various possible acts […] than if we act without reflection”.
Advantage of this view
- Theoretical resources to accommodate our intuitive decisions about these cases
- Way less systematic: according to Ross it is worth it which is shown my this quote:
“It is more important that our theory fit the facts than that it be simple, and the account we have given above corresponds (it seems to me) better than either of the simpler theories with what we really think […]”
What is the significance of “what we really think” about moral questions?
“We have no more direct way of access to the facts about rightness and goodness and about what things are right or good, than by thinking about them; the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science”
“The existing body of moral convictions of the best people is the cumulative product of the moral reflection of many generations, which has developed an extremely delicate power of appreciation of moral distinctions; and this the theorist cannot afford to treat with anything other than the greatest respect”.
