5,856 research outputs found
DER and Policy: The Recommendation of a Topic
If viable, DER justifies certain individual acts thatâby definitionâhave two effects. Presumably, it would in some fashion (at the very least, redundantly) justify policies concerning the very same acts. By contrast, acts that sometimes have a good effect and sometimes have a bad effect do not have the requisite two effects such that DER can justify them immediately. Yet, a policy concerning numerous such acts would have the requisite good and bad effects. For while any one such act would lack the relevant two effects, a series of such acts and a policy governing such a series would have them. This paper addresses DERâs justification of policies that apply to such acts. It shows that there are certain acts which DER mediately justifies by justifying policies (having the requisite two effects) concerning them. Thus, it recommends the larger topic of DERâs bearing on policy
Double-effect Reasoning Defended: A Response to Scanlon
Common morality endorses some form of an exceptionless prohibition against killing innocents. Natural lawyers employ double-effect reasoning (DER) to address hard cases involving deaths of the innocent. Current deontologists (Scanlon and Thomson) criticize DER-proponents as conflating act-with agent-evaluations. Scanlon develops this critique extensively. I respond to his criticism. He maintains that the DER-advocate tells a badly-motivated agent to refrain from an obligatory act. Thus, he asserts, the natural lawyer who employs DER errs. Instead, Scanlon proposes, one ought to assess the act as permissible while blaming the agent. I argue that DER does not succumb to this critique. Moreover, Scanlonâs particular criticism nicely shows the reasonableness of the approach the DER-thinker takes, namely, that defective agents produce defective acts. Thus, employing DER does not lead to a confusion of act-with agent-evaluations. Rather, it results in coherent assessments of both.
The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one âmethod of ethicsâ; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned utilitarianism and that consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic philosopher since him. By it, the kind of consideration which formerly would have been regarded as a temptation, the kind of considerations urged upon men by wives and flattering friends, was given a status by moral philosophers in their theories. It is a necessary feature of consequentialism that it is a shallow philosophy.
âG. E. M. Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosoph
The Instability of the Standard Justification for Physician-Assisted Suicide
Proponents commonly justify the legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in terms of a patient\u27s wanting to die (autonomy) and the patient\u27s having a medically established good reason for suicide. These are the common elements of the standard justification offered for the legalization of PAS. In what follows, I argue that these two conditions exist in significant tension with one another, operating according to distinct dynamics that render the justification for PAS an unstable âlet it be soâ basis for public policy. Moreover, no natural connection keeps these two criteria united. Indeedâas I argueâthe two elements of the justification oppose and threaten to exclude one another. Thus, the PAS justification is too labile a basis for sound public policy
Anscombe, Thomson, and Double Effect
In âModern Moral Philosophyâ Anscombe argues that the distinction between intention of an end or means and foresight of a consequentially comparable outcome proves crucial in act-evaluation. The deontologist J. J. Thomson disagrees. She asserts that Anscombe mistakes the distinctionâs moral import; it bears on agent-evaluation, not act-evaluation. I map out the contours of this dispute. I show that it implicates other disagreements, some to be expected and others not to be expected. Amongst the expected, one finds the ethicistsâ accounts of action and understanding of how agent-assessment relates to act-assessment. Amongst the unexpected, one finds the moralistsâ views about the possibility of self-imposed moral dilemmas and allied positions concerning temporal aspects of âought implies can.â Anscombeâs employment of the distinction in act-evaluation withstands close scrutiny; Thomsonâs denial of it does not
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