#consequentialist

[delcat177]

Me: I'm trying to remember what that is in ethics

@mycupofstars: A wash

--My sister commenting on consequentialistism, accurately

[sloswimmer]

Second Treatise of Government EP 3 The State of Nature

[ohthosemorals-blog]

Philosophical approaches to Morality

The philosophical approaches to morality are: Utilitarianism (maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain), Categorical (when something is always inherently wrong or right), and Consequentialist (locating morality in the consequences of an act). -Kimi

[diagrammaticmusings]

Lately I’ve been musing over taking ownership of the comprehension of what you are communicating.

[diagrammaticmusings]

Lately I’ve been musing over consequentialist communication. Whose responsibility is comprehension?

[psychbuilder]

Religiosity, Political Orientation, and Consequentialist Moral Thinking

By Jared Piazza and Paulo Sousa Social Psychological and Personality Science April 2014 vol. 5 no. 3 334-342 Abstract Three studies demonstrated that the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives are highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations. In Study 1, both religiosity and political conservatism predicted a resistance toward consequentialist thinking concerning a range of transgressive acts, independent of other relevant dispositional factors (e.g., disgust sensitivity). Study 2 ruled out differences in welfare sensitivity as an explanation for these findings. In Study 3, religiosity and political conservatism predicted a commitment to judging “harmless” taboo violations morally impermissible, rather than discretionary, despite the lack of negative consequences rising from the act. Furthermore, non-consequentialist thinking style was shown to mediate the relationship religiosity/conservatism had with impermissibility judgments, while intuitive thinking style did not. These data provide further evidence for the influence of religious and political commitments in motivating divergent moral judgments, while highlighting a new dispositional factor, non-consequentialist thinking style, as a mediator of these effects. The entire article is here.

[psychbuilder]

Automated ethics

When is it ethical to hand our decisions over to machines? And when is external automation a step too far? by Tom Chatfield Aeon Magazine Originally published March 31, 2014 Here is an excerpt: Automation, in this context, is a force pushing old principles towards breaking point. If I can build a car that will automatically avoid killing a bus full of children, albeit at great risk to its driver’s life, should any driver be given the option of disabling this setting? And why stop there: in a world that we can increasingly automate beyond our reaction times and instinctual reasoning, should we trust ourselves even to conduct an assessment in the first place? Beyond the philosophical friction, this last question suggests another reason why many people find the trolley disturbing: because its consequentialist resolution presents not only the possibility that an ethically superior action might be calculable via algorithm (not in itself a controversial claim) but also that the right algorithm can itself be an ethically superior entity to us. The entire article is here.

[psychbuilder]

What anscombe intended & other puzzles

By Richard Marshall

3:AM Magazine

Originally published March 10, 2012

Richard Marshall interviews Kieran Setiya

Here are some excerpts:

KS: That’s an interesting angle. I would separate two aspects or kinds of philosophical therapy: one aims to change how people live, the other treats philosophical problems not by giving answers but by exposing them as illusory or confused. I am wary of the first ambition, but I cautiously embrace the second. One of the central idea of my first book, Reasons without Rationalism is that a common understanding of the question “Why be moral?” is misconceived.

If you are asking “Why be moral?” you might be asking whether so-called “moral virtues,” such as justice and benevolence, are really virtues, whether they are really ways of being good. That is what Callicles does in Plato’s Gorgias. But it has seemed to many philosophers that the question can be interpreted in another way, as conceding that you have to be just and benevolent in order to be good, and asking “Why be good?” Why should I act as an ethically virtuous person would act, if that is not what I want to do? I argue that the second question makes no sense. It assumes that we can interpret the concept ‘should’ as denoting a standard for action distinct from the standard of ethical virtue or good character, a standard by which they can be challenged. What could this standard be? A while back, I mentioned the ambitious thought that principles of reason might derive from the nature of agency, that a criterion for how we should act might fall out of what it is to act intentionally. In Reasons without Rationalism, I show that we can make sense of “Why be good?” as a substantive question only if this ambitious project can be made to work. And I argue that it can’t. There is no standard for how one should act apart from the standard of ethical virtue or good character. In that sense, the question “Why be good?” is a target for philosophical therapy, not direct response.

(cut)

3:AM: So how do we know what it is to be good, if we can’t use moral theory? What if my model of virtue is Pol Pot, a mass murdering political tyrant? Without moral intuitions to rely on, how can you show that I am making a mistake? Your forthcoming book is called Knowing Right From Wrong. Does it answer this question?

KS: Sort of. The book attempts to show how moral knowledge is possible in the face of radical disagreement. A pivotal thought is that the standards of justification in ethics are “biased towards the truth.” There is no ethically neutral, Archimedean point from which to assess the justification of ethical beliefs. Instead, the basic measure of such beliefs is the standard of correct moral reasoning – a standard that is subject to ethical dispute. When I am confronted with someone who believes that self-interest is the only ethical virtue, it is not just that I am right and he is wrong, but that I am reasoning well about ethics and he is reasoning badly: my beliefs are warranted and his are not. This story doesn’t rest on epistemic egoism, since what justifies me is not that my beliefs are mine, but that they are based on reasoning that tracks the truth.

The entire article is here.