Skip to main content

Home/ New Media Ethics 2009 course/ Group items tagged Consequentialism

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: On Utilitarianism and Consequentialism - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...nism-and-consequentialism.html

Ethics Philosophy Utilitarianism Consequentialism

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Utilitarianism and consequentialism are different, yet closely related philosophical positions. Utilitarians are usually consequentialists, and the two views mesh in many areas, but each rests on a different claim
  • Utilitarianism's starting point is that we all attempt to seek happiness and avoid pain, and therefore our moral focus ought to center on maximizing happiness (or, human flourishing generally) and minimizing pain for the greatest number of people. This is both about what our goals should be and how to achieve them.
  • Consequentialism asserts that determining the greatest good for the greatest number of people (the utilitarian goal) is a matter of measuring outcome, and so decisions about what is moral should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • first question we can reasonably ask is whether all moral systems are indeed focused on benefiting human happiness and decreasing pain.
  • Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote the following in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself.”
  • Michael Sandel discusses this line of thought in his excellent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and sums up Bentham’s argument as such: “All moral quarrels, properly understood, are [for Bentham] disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.”
  • But Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism is perhaps too broad: are fundamentalist Christians or Muslims really utilitarians, just with different ideas about how to facilitate human flourishing?
  • one wonders whether this makes the word so all-encompassing in meaning as to render it useless.
  • Yet, even if pain and happiness are the objects of moral concern, so what? As philosopher Simon Blackburn recently pointed out, “Every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing.” But is that the central and sole focus of all moral philosophies? Don’t moral systems vary in their core focuses?
  • Consider the observation that religious belief makes humans happier, on average
  • Secularists would rightly resist the idea that religious belief is moral if it makes people happier. They would reject the very idea because deep down, they value truth – a value that is non-negotiable.Utilitarians would assert that truth is just another utility, for people can only value truth if they take it to be beneficial to human happiness and flourishing.
  • . We might all agree that morality is “functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing,” as Blackburn says, but how do we achieve that? Consequentialism posits that we can get there by weighing the consequences of beliefs and actions as they relate to human happiness and pain. Sam Harris recently wrote: “It is true that many people believe that ‘there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality,’ but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality.”
  • we might wonder about the elasticity of words, in this case consequentialism. Do fundamentalist Christians and Muslims count as consequentialists? Is consequentialism so empty of content that to be a consequentialist one need only think he or she is benefiting humanity in some way?
  • Harris’ argument is that one cannot adhere to a certain conception of morality without believing it is beneficial to society
  • This still seems somewhat obvious to me as a general statement about morality, but is it really the point of consequentialism? Not really. Consequentialism is much more focused than that. Consider the issue of corporal punishment in schools. Harris has stated that we would be forced to admit that corporal punishment is moral if studies showed that “subjecting children to ‘pain, violence, and public humiliation’ leads to ‘healthy emotional development and good behavior’ (i.e., it conduces to their general well-being and to the well-being of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone.” Harris is being rhetorical – he does not believe corporal punishment is moral – but the point stands.
  • An immediate pitfall of this approach is that it does not qualify corporal punishment as the best way to raise emotionally healthy children who behave well.
  • The virtue ethicists inside us would argue that we ought not to foster a society in which people beat and humiliate children, never mind the consequences. There is also a reasonable and powerful argument based on personal freedom. Don’t children have the right to be free from violence in the public classroom? Don’t children have the right not to suffer intentional harm without consent? Isn’t that part of their “moral well-being”?
  • If consequences were really at the heart of all our moral deliberations, we might live in a very different society.
  • what if economies based on slavery lead to an increase in general happiness and flourishing for their respective societies? Would we admit slavery was moral? I hope not, because we value certain ideas about human rights and freedom. Or, what if the death penalty truly deterred crime? And what if we knew everyone we killed was guilty as charged, meaning no need for The Innocence Project? I would still object, on the grounds that it is morally wrong for us to kill people, even if they have committed the crime of which they are accused. Certain things hold, no matter the consequences.
  • We all do care about increasing human happiness and flourishing, and decreasing pain and suffering, and we all do care about the consequences of our beliefs and actions. But we focus on those criteria to differing degrees, and we have differing conceptions of how to achieve the respective goals – making us perhaps utilitarians and consequentialists in part, but not in whole.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10
     
    Is everyone a utilitarian and/or consequentialist, whether or not they know it? That is what some people - from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Sam Harris - would have you believe. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of such claims.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part III: Deontology - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...thics-part-iii-deontology.html

Ethics Deontology

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Plato showed convincingly in his Euthyphro dialogue that even if gods existed they would not help at all settling the question of morality.
  • Broadly speaking, deontological approaches fall into the same category as consequentialism — they are concerned with what we ought to do, as opposed to what sort of persons we ought to be (the latter is, most famously, the concern of virtue ethics). That said, deontology is the chief rival of consequentialism, and the two have distinct advantages and disadvantages that seem so irreducible
  • Here is one way to understand the difference between consequentialism and deontology: for the former the consequences of an action are moral if they increase the Good (which, as we have seen, can be specified in different ways, including increasing happiness and/or decreasing pain). For the latter, the fundamental criterion is conformity to moral duties. You could say that for the deontologist the Right (sometimes) trumps the Good. Of course, as a result consequentialists have to go through the trouble of defining and justifying the Good, while deontologists have to tackle the task of defining and justifying the Right.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • two major “modes” of deontology: agent-centered and victim-centered. Agent-centered deontology is concerned with permissions and obligations to act toward other agents, the typical example being parents’ duty to protect and nurture their children. Notice the immediate departure from consequentialism, here, since the latter is an agent-neutral type of ethics (we have seen that it has trouble justifying the idea of special treatment of relatives or friends). Where do such agent-relative obligations come from? From the fact that we make explicit or implicit promises to some agents but not others. By bringing my child into the world, for instance, I make a special promise to that particular individual, a promise that I do not make to anyone else’s children. While this certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have duties toward other children (like inflicting no intentional harm), it does mean that I have additional duties toward my own children as a result of the simple fact that they are mine.
  • Agent-centered deontology gets into trouble because of its close philosophical association to some doctrines that originated within Catholic theology, like the idea of double effect. (I should immediately clarify that the trouble is not due to the fact that these doctrines are rooted in a religious framework, it’s their intrinsic moral logic that is at issue here.) For instance, for agent-centered deontologists we are morally forbidden from killing innocent others (reasonably enough), but this prohibition extends even to cases when so doing would actually save even more innocents.
  • Those familiar with trolleology will recognize one of the classic forms of the trolley dilemma here: is it right to throw an innocent person in front of the out of control trolley in order to save five others? For consequentialists the answer is a no-brainer: of course yes, you are saving a net of four lives! But for the deontologist you are now using another person (the innocent you are throwing to stop the trolley) as a means to an end, thus violating one of the forms of Kant’s imperative:“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”
  • The other form, in case you are wondering, is: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”
  • Victim-centered deontologies are right- rather than duty-based, which of course does raise the question of why we think of them as deontological to begin with.
  • The fundamental idea about victim-centered deontology is the right that people have not to be used by others without their consent. This is were we find Robert Nozick-style libertarianism, which I have already criticized on this blog. One of the major implications of this version of deontology is that there is no strong moral duty to help others.
  • contractarian deontological theories. These deal with social contracts of the type, for instance, discussed by John Rawls in his theory of justice. However, I will devote a separate post to contractarianism, in part because it is so important in ethics, and in part because one can argue that contractarianism is really a meta-ethical theory, and therefore does not strictly fall under deontology per se.
  • deontological theories have the advantage over consequentialism in that they account for special concerns for one’s relatives and friends, as we have seen above. Consequentialism, by comparison, comes across as alienating and unreasonably demanding. Another advantage of deontology over consequentialism is that it accounts for the intuition that even if an act is not morally demanded it may still be praiseworthy. For a consequentialist, on the contrary, if something is not morally demanded it is then morally forbidden. (Another way to put this is that consequentialism is a more minimalist approach to ethics than deontology.) Moreover, deontology also deals much better than consequentialism with the idea of rights.
  • deontological theories run into the problem that they seem to give us permission, and sometimes even require, to make things actually morally worse in the world. Indeed, a strict deontologist could actually cause human catastrophes by adhering to Kant’s imperative and still think he acted morally (Kant at one point remarked that it is “better the whole people should perish” than that injustice be done — one wonders injustice to whom, since nobody would be left standing). Deontologists also have trouble dealing with the seemingly contradictory ideas that our duties are categorical (i.e., they do not admit of exceptions), and yet that some duties are more important than others. (Again, Kant famously stated that “a conflict of duties is inconceivable” while forgetting to provide any argument in defense of such a bold statement.)
  • . One famous attempt at this reconciliation was proposed by Thomas Nagel (he of “what is it like to be a bat?” fame). Nagel suggested that perhaps we should be consequentialists when it comes to agent-neutral reasoning, and deontologists when we engage in agent-relative reasoning. He neglected to specify, however, any non-mysterious way to decide what to do in those situations in which the same moral dilemma can be seen from both perspectives.
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: The problem with Liberal Utilitarianism - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...th-liberal-utilitarianism.html

Ethics Science Morality

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Sam Harris's reinvention of Utilitarianism/Consequentialism has charmed many, and in my efforts to show people how pure Utilitarianism/Consequentialism fails (in the process encountering people who seem never to have read anything Harris has written or read on the subject, since I have been challenged to show where Harris has proposed Science as the foundation of our moral system, or that one can derive moral facts from facts about the world), "liberal utilitarianism" has been thrown at me as a way to resolve the problems with pure Utilitarianism/Consequentialism.
  • Liberal utilitarianism is not a position that one often encounters. I suspect this is because most philosophers recognise that unless one bites some big bullets, it is incoherent, being beholden to two separate moral theories, which brings many problems when they clash. It is much easier to stick to one foundation of morality.
  • utilitarians typically must claim that ‘the value of liberty. .. is wholly dependent on its contribution to utility. But if that is the case’, he asks, ‘how can the “right” to liberty be absolute and indefeasible when the consequences of exercising the right will surely vary with changing social circumstances?’ (1991, p. 213). His answer is that it cannot be, unless external moral considerations are imported into pure maximizing utilitarianism to guarantee the desired Millian result. In his view, the absolute barrier that Mill extcts against all forms of coercion really seems to require a non-utilitarian justification, even if ‘utilitarianism’ might somehow be defined or enlarged to subsume the requisite form of reasoning. Thus, ‘Mill is a consistent liberal’, he says, ‘whose view is inconsistent with hedonistic or preference utilitarianism’ (ibid., p. 236)...
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • From Riley's Mill on liberty:
  • Mill’s defence of liberty is not utilitarian’ because it ignores the dislike, disgust and so-called ‘moral’ disapproval which others feel as a result of self-regarding conduct.
  • Why doesn’t liberal utilitarianism consider the possibility that aggregate dislike of the individual’s self-regarding conduct might outweigh the value of his liberty, and justify suppression of his conduct? As we have seen, Mill devotes considerable effort to answering this question (111.1 , 10—1 9, IV.8— 12, pp. 260—1, 26 7—75, 280—4). Among other things, liberty in self-regarding matters is essential to the cultivation of individual character, he says, and is not incompatible with similar cultivation by others, because they remain free to think and do as they please, having directly suffered no perceptible damage against their wishes. When all is said and done, his implicit answer is that a person’s liberty in self-regarding matters is infinitely more valuable than any satisfaction the rest of us might take at suppression of his conduct. The utility of self-regarding liberty is of a higher kind than the utility of suppression based on mere dislike (no perceptible damages to others against their wishes is implicated), in that any amount (however small) of the higher kind outweighs any quantity (however large) of the lower.
  • The problem is that if you are using (implicitly or otherwise) mathematics to sum up the expected utility of different choices, you canot plug infinity into any expression, or you will get incoherent results as the expression in question will no longer be well-behaved.
joanne ye

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | When can you speak ill of the dead? - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8170429.stm

shared by joanne ye on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • "It's a hostage to fortune to say nice things when someone dies. And reacting to this one was particularly tricky. For a long time he's been Wacko Jacko. So he wasn't someone who was unequivocally lauded."
  • joanne ye on 19 Aug 09
     
    Case It has been almost two months since Michael Jackson died. Some would call him "the King of Pop" and some would call him "Wacko Jacko". The latter term mostly derived due to his past child abuse cases, which he was never convicted and once acquitted. Problem The judgement of whether Michael Jackson was a good person is hard to reach a conclusion because we will always get both positive and negative accounts. Regardless of whether these accounts constitute misinformation, people (even those who have never met him) continue to talk about him because he was a celebrity (moreover one who had recently passed away). Given his recent death, negative comments (especially if they are misinformation) can really hurt those who love (i.e. family members) or adore (i.e. fans) him. However, positive comments can be misinformation too. Does his recent death make positive misinformation more acceptable? If he really did commit child abuse crimes (note: big assumption here), does that make positive misinformation towards him unjustified (especially to his victims)? Hence, the ethical problem here is the way people should go about talking about other people. Questions 1. We know the old saying, "don't speak ill of the dead". This is in conjunction with Kant's categorical imperative to respect other human beings. Adopting duty-based morality, should the negative comments about Michael Jackson (whether they constitute misinformation or not) be reduced or even stopped? 2. Adopting rights-based morality (specifically the right to free speech) should people be allowed to talk about whatever they want (including new media platform) in whatever way they want to? Should regulation by the authority be implemented? 3. Adopting similar duty-based morality to question one (specifically the virtue of not lying), should positive comments about Michael Jackson (whether they constitute misinformation or not) be increased or even exaggerated? 4. If Michael Jackson really did commit
  • joanne ye on 19 Aug 09
     
    4. If Michael Jackson really did commit child abuse crimes (note: big assumption here), due to the clash of duties (respect VS. not lying), should we talk about those crimes when we discuss about him in a public platform? Does just consequentialism come into play here?
Weiye Loh

It's Only A Theory: From the 2010 APA in Boston: Neuropsychology and ethics - 0 views

itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/...in-boston-neuropsychology.html

Ethics Neuropsychology

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Joshua Greene from Harvard, known for his research on "neuroethics," the neurological underpinnings of ethical decision making in humans. The title of Greene's talk was "Beyond point-and-shoot morality: why cognitive neuroscience matters for ethics."
  • What Greene is interested in is to find out to what factors moral judgment is sensitive to, and whether it is sensitive to the relevant factors. He presented his dual process theory of morality. In this respect, he proposed an analogy with a camera. Cameras have automatic (point and shoot) settings as well as manual controls. The first mode is good enough for most purposes, the second allows the user to fine tune the settings more carefully. The two modes allow for a nice combination of efficiency and flexibility.
  • The idea is that the human brain also has two modes, a set of efficient automatic responses and a manual mode that makes us more flexible in response to non standard situations. The non moral example is our response to potential threats. Here the amygdala is very fast and efficient at focusing on potential threats (e.g., the outline of eyes in the dark), even when there actually is no threat (it's a controlled experiment in a lab, no lurking predator around).
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Delayed gratification illustrates the interaction between the two modes. The brain is attracted by immediate rewards, no matter what kind. However, when larger rewards are eventually going to become available, other parts of the brain come into play to override (sometimes) the immediate urge.
  • Greene's research shows that our automatic setting is "Kantian," meaning that our intuitive responses are deontological, rule driven. The manual setting, on the other hand, tends to be more utilitarian / consequentialist. Accordingly, the first mode involves emotional areas of the brain, the second one involves more cognitive areas.
  • The evidence comes from the (in)famous trolley dilemma and it's many variations.
  • when people refuse to intervene in the footbridge (as opposed to the lever) version of the dilemma, they do so because of a strong emotional response, which contradicts the otherwise utilitarian calculus they make when considering the lever version.
  • psychopaths turn out to be more utilitarian than normal subjects - presumably not because consequentialism is inherently pathological, but because their emotional responses are stunted. Mood also affects the results, with people exposed to comedy (to enhance mood), for instance, more likely to say that it is okay to push the guy off the footbridge.
  • In a more recent experiment, subjects were asked to say which action carried the better consequences, which made them feel worse, and which was overall morally acceptable. The idea was to separate the cognitive, emotional and integrative aspects of moral decision making. Predictably, activity in the amygdala correlated with deontological judgment, activity in more cognitive areas was associated with utilitarianism, and different brain regions became involved in integrating the two.
  • Another recent experiment used visual vs. verbal descriptions of moral dilemmas. Turns out that more visual people tend to behave emotionally / deontologically, while more verbal people are more utilitarian.
  • studies show that interfering with moral judgment by engaging subjects with a cognitive task slows down (though it does not reverse) utilitarian judgment, but has no effect on deontological judgment. Again, in agreement with the conclusion that the first type of modality is the result of cognition, the latter of emotion.
  • Nice to know, by the way, that when experimenters controlled for "real world expectations" that people have about trolleys, or when they used more realistic scenarios than trolleys and bridges, the results don't vary. In other words, trolley thought experiments are actually informative, contrary to popular criticisms.
  • What factors affect people's decision making in moral judgment? The main one is proximity, with people feeling much stronger obligations if they are present to the event posing the dilemma, or even relatively near (a disaster happens in a nearby country), as opposed to when they are far (a country on the other side of the world).
  • Greene's general conclusion is that neuroscience matters to ethics because it reveals the hidden mechanisms of human moral decision making. However, he says this is interesting to philosophers because it may lead to question ethical theories that are implicitly or explicitly based on such judgments. But neither philosophical deontology nor consequentialism are in fact based on common moral judgments, seems to me. They are the result of explicit analysis. (Though Greene raises the possibility that some philosophers engage in rationalizing, rather than reason, as in Kant's famously convoluted idea that masturbation is wrong because one is using oneself as a mean to an end...)
  • this is not to say that understanding moral decision making in humans isn't interesting or in fact even helpful in real life cases. An example of the latter is the common moral condemnation of incest, which is an emotional reaction that probably evolved to avoid genetically diseased offspring. It follows that science can tell us that three is nothing morally wrong in cases of incest when precautions have been taken to avoid pregnancy (and assuming psychological reactions are also accounted for). Greene puts this in terms of science helping us to transform difficult ought questions into easier ought questions.
Weiye Loh

MacIntyre on money « Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...alasdair-macintyre-on-money

Religion Philosophy Capitalism Communism

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • MacIntyre has often given the impression of a robe-ripping Savonarola. He has lambasted the heirs to the principal western ethical schools: John Locke’s social contract, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Yet his is not a lone voice in the wilderness. He can claim connections with a trio of 20th-century intellectual heavyweights: the late Elizabeth Anscombe, her surviving husband, Peter Geach, and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, winner in 2007 of the Templeton prize. What all four have in common is their Catholic faith, enthusiasm for Aristotle’s telos (life goals), and promotion of Thomism, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas who married Christianity and Aristotle. Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903), who revived Thomism while condemning communism and unfettered capitalism, is also an influence.
  • MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups.
  • MacIntyre differs from all these influences and alliances, from Leo XIII onwards, in his residual respect for Marx’s critique of capitalism.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • MacIntyre begins his Cambridge talk by asserting that the 2008 economic crisis was not due to a failure of business ethics.
  • he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy.
  • In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.
  • After Virtue, which is in essence an attack on the failings of the Enlightenment, has in its sights a catalogue of modern assumptions of beneficence: liberalism, humanism, individualism, capitalism. MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well.
  • In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.
  • MacIntyre seeks to oppose utilitarianism on the grounds that people are called on by their very nature to be good, not merely to perform acts that can be interpreted as good. The most damaging consequence of the Enlightenment, for MacIntyre, is the decline of the idea of a tradition within which an individual’s desires are disciplined by virtue. And that means being guided by internal rather than external “goods.” So the point of being a good footballer is the internal good of playing beautifully and scoring lots of goals, not the external good of earning a lot of money. The trend away from an Aristotelian perspective has been inexorable: from the empiricism of David Hume, to Darwin’s account of nature driven forward without a purpose, to the sterile analytical philosophy of AJ Ayer and the “demolition of metaphysics” in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic.
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 10
     
    The influential moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has long stood outside the mainstream. Has the financial crisis finally vindicated his critique of global capitalism?
Weiye Loh

Does Anything Matter? by Peter Singer - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

Morality Relativism Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.
  • Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.
  • One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question? Parfit’s response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defense of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do – one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon, and one from Bentham’s utilitarianism – and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”
  • Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.
  • When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.” Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11
     
    Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer. Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930's, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, "You ought not to hit that child," all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20▼ items per page