Friday, October 20, 2017

Iterating Badness in the Paradox of Deontology

In 'Must Consequentialists Kill?' (forthcoming in J Phil), Setiya convincingly argues against the "orthodox" view that commonsense verdicts about the ethics of killing entail agent-relativity.  Instead, he observes: "In general, when you should not cause harm to one in a way that will benefit others, you should not want others to do so either." (p.8 on pre-print version)  For example, it's not just the agent that should prefer to avoid themselves killing one to prevent five killings, but we should generally prefer that others likewise avoid killing one to prevent five other killings.  The preference here mandated by commonsense morality is thus agent-neutral in nature: it makes no essential reference to your role in the situation.

Sunday, October 08, 2017

Intelligible Non-Natural Concerns

I've previously argued that -- even by non-naturalist lights -- what matters are various natural properties (e.g. causing pleasure or pain), and the role of the non-natural normative properties is instead to "mark" the significance of these natural properties.

But it's worth flagging that there are exceptions. While I take it that typically what matters are natural features of the world, this is not a universal restriction on what matters. After all, normative properties plausibly have the further normative property of being worthy of philosophical scrutiny. So I do not deny that there may be special cases when it is perfectly reasonable to take an interest in morality de dicto. (Responding to moral uncertainty may be another such case.) My claim was the more modest one that non-naturalism does not commit us to having non-natural properties take center stage in our moral lives.

The special cases where normative properties themselves are of legitimate interest are precisely cases in which it no longer seems perverse or unintelligible to take a special interest in a non-natural property. There's clearly nothing unintelligible about taking a philosophical interest in non-natural properties, after all. (They raise all sorts of interesting questions!) The case of moral uncertainty may be less obvious, so let me discuss that a bit further.

Monday, October 02, 2017

Harms, Benefits, and Framing Effects

Kahneman and Tversky famously found that most people would prefer to save 200 / 600 people over a 1/3 chance of saving all 600, and yet would prefer a 1/3 chance of none of the 600 dying over a guaranteed 400/600 deaths.  This seems incoherent, since it seems our preferences over a pair of options are reversed merely by describing the very same case using different words.

In 'The Asian Disease Problem and the Ethical Implications Of Prospect Theory' (forthcoming in Noûs) Dreisbach and Guevara argue that the folk responses are compatible with a coherent non-consequentialist view.  Their basic idea (if I understand them correctly) is that the "400 will die" case is suggestive of a different causal mechanism: perhaps the 400 die from our intervention, so the choice is between guaranteed or gambled harms, whereas the "saving" choice is between guaranteed or gambled benefits.  They then suggest that non-consequentialist principles might reasonably mandate a special aversion to causing guaranteed harm (and so think it better to risk harming either all or none, despite no difference in expected value between the sure thing and the gamble).  In the first case, by contrast, they suggest that non-consequentialists might think it easier to justify saving some lives as a "sure thing" rather than taking a gamble that would most likely save nobody at all.