Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Reasons Deflate Global Consequentialism

I guess I don't tend to think of those distinction...

2009-09-28T19:24:07.958-04:00

I guess I don't tend to think of those distinctions as fundamental, or carving normative reality at its joints (so to speak). One might follow Mill in reconstructing these as derivative concepts: e.g. stipulate that the line of 'impermissibility' is to be drawn according to whatever blaming practices would be best. (But for all it's practical importance, such a derivative concept would be of little theoretical/philosophical significance.) If someone insisted on a different understanding of 'impermissibility', I would be skeptical that there's anything substantive in dispute -- we would simply be talking past each other -- unless we could trace back our disagreement to a disagreement about reasons of some sort.

Alternatively, we might take as a further normative primitive reasons for reactive attitudes. Then we could have substantive disputes about when people are blameworthy, that don't simply deflate into either terminological disputes or else factual disputes about what practices would have the best results.

"Global consequentialism" seems a new (2000) name ...

2009-09-25T14:01:24.815-04:00

"Global consequentialism" seems a new (2000) name for a view that used to be known as "act-consequentialism". Sidgwick, Hare, Peter Singer, Shelly Kagan and others certainly held the view about assessing dispositions, motives, character traits, etc. that global consequentialists now affirm.

A problem with taking normative reasons for action to be the basic concepts for moral theory is that everyday moral thought and moral reactive attitudes distinguish the following: 1. the impermissible (wrong), 2. the permissible but neither required nor positively admirable, 3. the required, and 4. the positively admirable that isn't required. Undefeated reasons for action be associated with 2, 3, or 4. Indeed, undefeated reasons that arise from desirability of actions or consequences of actions can be involved in 2, 3, or 4. But very often, what we need to know, for ascriptions of guilt and blame or for prescribing punishment, is whether the agent did what was impermissible or not.