Consequentialism

Master Mò or Mòzǐ (墨子) presents a rival tradition to that of the Confucians during the latter tradition’s early development in the tumultuous Warring States period. Though Confucian thought would go on to dominate East Asia, whereas Mohist thought faded into obscurity for over two thousand years, the Mohists had an immense impact. The general consensus is that it is largely because of having to respond to Mohist criticism that Confucian thought gained much philosophical sophistication. And the Mòzǐ's preservation by (...) way of the Daoist canon might be explained by the fact that the Daoists, who would with the Confucians remain a force in China, took up the Mohist mantle of criticizing Confucian thought. Less influential yet still important, the Legalist school also adopted Mohist ideas, especially concerning the consistent application of standards. -/- Consequentialism in the Mohist Tradition assesses the core of Mohist thought: what is right is what benefits the world and when we benefit the world we should inclusively care. Commentators have too quickly assimilated this core to the consequentialism of Bentham and Mill, which holds that what is right is what promotes happiness and that when making happiness calculations we should count everyone as equal. This monograph contends that Mohism features a different valuation of persons than in Bentham and Mill. The early texts conceive of benefit ultimately in terms of aggregates, like states, and not the individuals that compose them. The late texts, on the other hand, conceive of benefit ultimately in terms of the aggregated individuals. While this later model would seem rather close to Bentham and Mill, there is a crucial divergence; whereas Bentham and Mill suggest that when we promote the good, everyone has the same weight in this calculus, Mohism does not extend such equal moral consideration to everyone. Early Mohism does not extend it to poor moral performers whereas later Mohism selectively extends it on the basis of what will benefit the world in context. (shrink)

The technology used to transform human communication has evolved far beyond basic grammatical correction. Artificial intelligence (AI) can now alter a message’s argument, tone, and intent, raising a question that goes beyond whether AI saves time or effort. What is the receiver of the communication entitled to believe about the thought and responsibility behind a message when someone receives it under a human name? The ethical problem is especially clear when the recipient does not know that something external to the (...) author participated. A polished apology, a routine appointment confirmation, and an essay may contain equally extensive AI assistance while making different claims about personal attention, authority, and intellectual achievement. -/- This essay presents three modes of communication delegation. In weak delegation, the human originates the communicative purpose, uses AI to refine or draft the message, and critically reviews the result before sending it. In moderate delegation, the human sets the purpose but permits the system to write and transmit the message without reviewing its final content. In strong delegation, the system initiates, composes, and transmits a message in response to a stimulus without the represented person’s awareness of that particular exchange. For example, someone receives and email and an automation responds. These are analytical categories proposed, rather than classifications attributed to the philosophers examined in this essay. The categories focus on the participation over a particular message. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of instrumentalist accounts of moral psychology. The new accounts are seen as having overcome traditional criticisms against instrumentalism—and to have done so, centrally, by incorporating key insight from P. F. Strawson’s approach. Call this strategy the Strawson Defence of instrumentalism. The defence is widespread, but I will primarily focus on an admirably explicit development of it by Dale E. Miller in response to criticism by Bernard Williams. The aims of this paper are, first, to show (...) that the Strawson Defence fails to answer the criticism and, second, to show the unimpeded relevance of the more serious aspect of Williams’ criticism for instrumentalism today. While the Hare-Williams debate frames this discussion, as it does Miller’s discussion, its relevance extends to the significant role that the Strawson Defence presently has in motivating a revival of instrumentalism. (shrink)

It is often argued that no individual can make a difference to the amount of harm caused by climate change on her own, even though climate change results from all our emissions taken together. This “problem of inconsequentialism” is especially worrying for act consequentialism, since if the theory permits individuals to continue emitting greenhouse gases, then it seemingly fails to provide us with the tools for mitigating climate change. In response to this problem, Voiron and Puumala (2025) have recently proposed (...) that act consequentialists should adopt what they call a Climate Esoteric Morality (CEM). Adopting CEM involves promoting faux non-consequentialist principles, exaggerating existing consequentialist principles, and refraining from criticizing non-consequentialist principles. The aim is to ensure that individuals act in ways that reduce the harm caused by climate change, despite the problem of inconsequentialism. In this article, I argue that Voiron and Puumala fail to demonstrate that act consequentialists should adopt CEM. (shrink)

The existing literature about prioritarianism, in philosophy and economics, focuses on human beings. And human-centered prioritarianism standardly uses a whole-lifetime “currency”: outcomes are ranked according to the sum total of humans’ concavely transformed lifetime well-being. -/- This Article considers how prioritarianism should be broadened to include all sentient animals. It argues against animal-inclusive lifetime prioritarianism. A whole-lifetime currency is appropriate only for an animal that is robustly intertemporally conscious: aware of itself as existing over an entire lifetime, and capable of (...) caring for itself about what happens over that entire lifetime. As far as we know, very few (if any) animals other than humans are robustly intertemporally conscious. -/- The Article proposes and fleshes out a novel format for animal-inclusive prioritarianism: “dual aggregation.” Dual aggregation uses two temporal currencies: lifetime well-being for humans and other animals (if there are any) that are robustly intertemporally conscious, and momentary well-being for animals that lack robust intertemporal consciousness. -/- Dual aggregation is not speciesist. It is not hierarchical; neither of the two groups of animals is assigned a higher status, or systematically upweighted, relative to the other. Finally, dual aggregation mitigates an objection raised by Shelly Kagan to animal-inclusive prioritarianism: namely that it leads to a (arguably counterintuitive) priority for nonhumans over badly off humans. One upshot of dual aggregation is that animals in the lifetime-currency group who are sufficiently badly off—whose level of lifetime well-being is sufficiently low— take priority over all animals whose well-being is aggregated via the currency of momentary well-being. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Sometimes, it may seem that an agent faces an obligation dilemma—a situation in which they cannot fulfill their obligations no matter what they do. However, there are at least three problems for any theory that embraces obligation dilemmas. The logical problem arises from a conflict between obligation dilemmas and venerable principles of deontic logic. The teleological problem arises from a conflict between obligation dilemmas and the compelling thought that an agent is obligated to do what would be best. And (...) the practical problem arises from a conflict between believing that one faces an obligation dilemma and making a coherent choice. In this essay, I argue that these problems can be solved. (shrink)

Nesta entrevista, o filósofo Robert Junqueira analisa o impacto do uso de drones bélicos e da inteligência artificial nos conflitos contemporâneos, alertando que essas tecnologias constituem um "novo e aumentado nível de risco global". Junqueira argumenta que, embora a essência da guerra permaneça imutável — um duelo fomentado por paixões e interesses humanos —, as inovações tecnológicas transformam profundamente a prática bélica, multiplicando a capacidade de obtenção de informações e alterando o cálculo das forças em campo. O entrevistado destaca como (...) uma das implicações mais graves o surgimento de um "grande ponto de interrogação" sobre a atribuição de responsabilidades por tragédias decorrentes do uso dessas tecnologias, criticando a tendência contemporânea de responsabilizar "coisas" em vez de pessoas. Junqueira defende que "à humanidade deve caber, debaixo do sol, o monopólio da responsabilidade", rejeitando a noção de autonomia das máquinas e afirmando que robôs são e sempre serão "extensões técnicas da vontade humana". A entrevista aborda ainda as implicações sociais e políticas do uso de drones, incluindo o desvio de recursos de áreas como saúde e educação, a ameaça às liberdades civis por meio de sistemas de vigilância, e a necessidade urgente de atualização dos sistemas jurídicos e diplomáticos para regulamentar adequadamente essas tecnologias. (shrink)

Sam Harris mounts a case for the hard determinist position that free will is an illusion while allowing for a limited sense of moral responsibility. In this essay, Leslie Allan provides a comprehensive analysis of Harris’ arguments, mostly centred on Harris’ book, Free Will. Allan’s chapter by chapter commentary explains which of Harris’ arguments are successful and which are not, and why.

(McNamara, 2023a) introduced DWE(≥), generalizing the frames of DWE, along with substantial expansions of its expressive resources [10]. (McNamara, 2022) provided a different extension of the DWE framework, CDWEG (Conditionalized DWEG) to show how to conditionalize the monadic DWE operators,[9]. This paper aims to bring these two projects together by introducing CDWE(≥), a framework conditionalizing DWE(≥). In the process, we sketch a logic for DWE(≥), examine the standard reductions of ordering operators to conditional deontic operators (and vice versa) and scrutinize (...) their analogs in CDWE(≥), and finally use these resources to examine different interpretations of Ulla Wessells’ argument for supererogatory holes, an argument that centrally employs Shoham’s principle, often taken as fairly fundamental for conditional deontic logics. We draw some morals about the argument that are of relevance to contemporary ethical theory. (shrink)

Building on McNamara’s DWE (Doing Well Enough) framework, a substantial generalization and refinement of that framework extends its expressive resources by adding two ordering operators, changing the underlying semantic ordering’s scope, and adding a number of other operators making fuller use of the resulting expanded frames. A solution to DWE’s “Disjunctive Supererogation Problem” is provided via two semantic characterizations of permissible supererogation stronger than that of DWE’s. The new framework also allows us to represent a divide in normative ethical theory (...) between classical deontologists and consequentialists by, among other things, allowing for models distinguishing what is best to do from what one ought to do and from what one must do. It also allows for modeling supererogatory hole scenarios (Ulla Wessells) and consequently, for modeling the more recent and much-discussed all or nothing problem scenarios (Joe Horton). We use the enriched resources to explore carefully modeling these problem cases, bringing greater resources to bear on the cases, as well as indicating some potential challenges with some positions taken on the problems. It also becomes clear that the classical deontological conflicts with consequentialism are close cousins to the just-mentioned problems with supererogation; each involves a growing divide in normative ethics over whether something as good as something permissible must be permissible. It is also made emphatically clear just how much impact it has if endorsed. In this paper, our focus will be on the semantic framework and its expressive power. (shrink)

The author argues that morality is best understood as a natural human system rather than a supernatural one. By comparing moral rules with traffic regulations, it shows that features often deemed metaphysically puzzling—normativity, fact dependence, categorical force, universality and virtue—arise naturally from the practical need to coordinate behaviour for mutual benefit. Morality, like traffic control, forms an integrated system of aims, rules, roles, virtues and sanctions. Recognizing its natural origins dissolves the need for supernatural grounding and clarifies why moral norms (...) carry authority within human communities. (shrink)

Abstract A periodic table is not a list with headings. It is a coordinate system in which position carries predictive content, vacancies are falsifiable predictions, and the classification is closed under the operations of the underlying theory. This paper constructs such a system for the virtues on the basis of the Ontological Virtue Formula (V = F ⊕ D), the Inversion Theorem, and the Dynamic Freedom Theorem (S = F·A/R), and applies it to the 101-virtue catalogue of the Filosofia das (...) Virtudes together with its ten cross-traditionally attested extensions. Four results are structural rather than taxonomic. First, virtues and vices are not distinct populations: a vice is the same form under a different master, so a catalogue of 101 virtues and 101 inversions describes 101 entities, not 202. Compounds receive formulas and metastable states receive names; neither enlarges the table. Second, no order-1 virtue modulates all three terms of the Dynamic Freedom Theorem. The all-terms signature belongs to unrendered Freedom alone. This is derived as the Restriction Principle from a stated axiom, the Occasion Premise, with the Defiance Exclusion as a corollary; a damage assessment states in advance what survives if the axiom fails. Third, the channel by which a form inverts is determined not by its position alone but by two dispositional properties of its domain — whether its output is appropriable by an occupying power, and whether its performance carries display value. This capture mechanism screens off the weak regime–channel association it replaces, explaining both why that association exists and why it is weak. Fourth, the rendering block predicts not how a form is captured but where a catalogue has failed to look: three-quarters of the truth-rendered and form-rendered cells stood empty against under a fifth of the act-rendered ones. The system is validated against evidence it was not built from: seven of ten independently identified cross-traditional candidates fall into cells the coordinates had marked vacant, and the remaining three fall into occupied cells that the source catalogue had independently judged only partially distinct. The census closes 32 of 36 vacancies with 27 predicted elements carrying pre-registered inversion channels, tiered by confidence, with the weakest marked against the elements they are most likely to collapse into. Sixteen compounds are registered and none admitted. Criteria are given at three levels: adequacy conditions on the classification, admission conditions for elements, and admission conditions for compounds and mixed states. Applied to a body of proposed extensions, they reject most “virtue ⊗ vice hybrids” as counterfeits of exactly the kind the occupation thesis describes: a configuration whose value is claimed to depend on retaining an occupying power is an occupation with a rationale attached. All coding is single-coder. No human virtue has been measured. The verification protocol, decision rules, and falsifiers are stated in §11 and the limits of every claim in §12. Keywords: virtue theory · classification · Inversion Theorem · measurement regimes · Dynamic Freedom Theorem · moral ontology · institutional capture . (shrink)

يقدّم هذا العمل صياغةً صوريةً لـ Ahnend Logical Q-State Core (ALQC)، وهو نظام مصمَّم لإدارة الإنتروبيا المعلوماتية من خلال قيود طوبولوجية غير قابلة للتوجيه. وباستخدام شبكة Latin Square ذات 144 عقدة مع حاكم اتصال قدره 110، يؤسس هذا الإطار “Total Symmetry Principle” (TSP)، حيث يتم عكس الدين المعلوماتي (Q2) عكسيًا بصورة تكرارية وتحويله إلى دفعٍ نظامي. يقدّم هذا المشروع الممتد على مدى 13 عامًا برهانًا ناوردًا على استمرار الهوية عبر انتقالات الحالة الفوضوية. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18942849. أحدث رفع؛ لقد أصلحت بعض الأخطاء (...) المطبعية. ENJOY. لقد انتهيت، بالمناسبة. عليكم أن تبدأوا بطرح الأسئلة؛ لقد بدأت أشعر بالملل من ابتكار المزيد من الأشياء وحدي. -/- Youtube: @theimpossibleboy13 -/- <Tempus Finitum>. (shrink)

Our actions are the means by which we pursue our ends. Through them, we attempt to bend the world to our will. Consequently, morality has two important roles. First, it must tell us which ends to adopt. Second, it must tell us how best to pursue them. According to the theory defended in this book (namely, Kantsequentialism), the ends we should adopt are determined by both our wills and what is valuable. The value of things, along with any special relations (...) we have to them, determine which ends are permissible, which are obligatory, and how significant our commitment to pursuing each may be. We then choose, via acts of our will, which of the permissible but non-obligatory ends to adopt. These obligatory and discretionary ends constitute our legitimate ends, which determine our reasons for preferring the prospects of some of our options to those of others. This, in turn, determines which of our options we should take. Kantsequentialism is, therefore, a morality of ends. -/- As its name suggests, Kantsequentialism is a hybrid of utilitarianism and Kantianism that combines their respective strengths. From utilitarianism, Kantsequentialism takes its act-consequentialism—the idea that whether an agent ought to perform an act depends solely on whether they ought to prefer the way it would make the world go to all the ways the available alternatives would make it go. This allows Kantsequentialism to accommodate our commonsense views about action and reasons for action. From Kantianism, Kantsequentialism takes its commitment both to respecting autonomy and to what W. D. Ross called “the highly personal character of duty” (1930, 22). This allows Kantsequentialism to accommodate our commonsense views about morality, including the idea that, beyond the benefactor-beneficiary relation, there are several other morally relevant relations, including agent-patient, lover-beloved, promiser-promisee, etc. These relations are morally relevant even though they are relevant only from one’s own actual perspective. -/- As W. D. Ross noted, “it would indeed be strange if any of the main theories of ethics were completely in error; it is far more likely that each has grasped something that is both true and important but has…claimed as the whole truth what is only one of a set of connected truths” (1939, 2). The book takes this to heart, advancing a theory that integrates insights from Kantianism, Rossianism, utilitarianism, and Scanlonian contractualism. (shrink)

Crutchfield and Hereth have proposed the deliberate promotion of tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome (AGS)—a condition typically causing red meat allergy—as a strategy to reduce meat consumption and hence animal suffering. While we share their concern for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, we argue that their proposal is morally indefensible and counterproductive. First, we challenge the empirical assumption that inducing AGS would reduce overall animal suffering. Evidence suggests that most people who avoid red meat increase their intake of poultry and fish, (...) leading to a net increase in animal suffering as well as the number of animals killed. Second, we argue that intentionally infecting humans with AGS would violate fundamental moral rights, particularly the right against bodily interference, and that analogies to vaccination are misleading. Unlike vaccination, AGS confers no health benefit, imposes lifelong risks, and would be introduced through a method that is disproportionally coercive. Third, from a virtue-ethical perspective, the proposal fails to promote good moral character. Avoiding red meat due to fear of allergic reactions reflects self-interest rather than moral virtue and, as an instance of moral paternalism, risks provoking psychological reactance and moral resistance. Consequently, Crutchfield and Hereth's “Convergence Argument” for the claim that promoting AGS is morally obligatory collapses. Efforts to reduce meat-eating must instead rely on education, persuasion, and structural reform that respect human rights while fostering genuine moral virtue. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the consequences of interpreting phenomena from their form, in the vacuum of their relational nature, and show how understanding the original content of any phenomenon, including a language model, can only be achieved through observing its external interactions with its surrounding environment, i.e. humans, over time.

The examination of all consequential actions before the Court, does originate from Mens rea leading to Actus reus, which is rooted in the spirit of ‘Intentionality’, hence, the proposed ‘Doctrine of Intention’ before the law, thou, requires an in-depth enquiry, for it comprehensive conceptualization, as a constitutional law principle, for both criminal and civil practice in judicial process to trial.

In this paper, I argue that anyone who believes that team reasoning is essential to explaining collective moral duties faces a troublesome dilemma. If the collective duty is conditional on the willingness of members, then team reasoning views generate wrong deontic moral judgments in certain cases that involve non-compliance. If the collective duty is not conditional on the willingness of members, then team reasoning views cannot provide a sound line of reasoning to what one morally ought to do in certain (...) non-compliance cases, which undercuts the main motivation for adopting a team reasoning view. I conclude that team reasoning is not the right mode of moral reasoning for collective harm or collective benefit cases. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes and critically evaluates a distinctive class of objection to the Argument from Inductive Risk. ‘Expertise-objections’ question the fitness of scientists to engage in moral decision-making during research, on grounds of deficiencies in scientists’ relative expertise. Such critiques bring considerations of inductive risk into important dialogue with wider literature from moral philosophy; but, once contextualised therein, it becomes apparent that expertise-objections fail to decisively prohibit the articulation of moral duties for scientists.

Resultant moral luck arises where we attribute to an agent a degree of ethical responsibility for an outcome that diverges from the agent’s anticipated causal contribution to that outcome. Against this, I invoke work on agency and on the metaphysics of causation in the special sciences to align retrospective to prospective and ethical to causal responsibility. This double-edged alignment resolves conundrums relating to responsibility for unintended omissions and collateral damage, as well as Bernstein’s (2017) Moral Difference Puzzle, regarding whether responsibility (...) comes in degrees. I argue that: Agents bear ethical responsibility for all and only the outcomes that they cause as agents to the degree that they cause them. And that: What agents cause as agents is defined as what is caused by their choice of intention (relative to a normative alternative available mind-state) to the degree to which that kind of intention raises the chances of the specified kind of outcome. But that: the characterization of the intention-kind must include its tolerance of reasonably-foreseeable consequences. This proposal recognises that agency is probabilistic in impact, a fact that we acknowledge in prospect but typically forget in our retrospective judgments. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a new way for consequentialists to reply to cases of collective harm. First, I explain why some of the popular proposals fail to generate compelling reasons in certain cases. I then suggest how consequentialism could respond to the issue by including modal robustness as a morally relevant consequence. Making a collectively caused harm more counterfactually robust is a bad consequence of an action, even when the individual action does not “make a difference.” Thus, we have (...) an additional pro tanto reason to abstain from contributing to a collective harm. (shrink)

This paper proposes the Moral Border — the structural asymmetry between a formation's internal moral code and its treatment of the outgroup — as a conditioning variable in the historical persistence of expansionist ideologies and social formations. The concept is distinguished from dehumanization and in-group favoritism: the Border operates at the level of normative architecture rather than individual psychology, and characteristically coexists with an intensified internal ethical code. A typology of three Border types is developed — ethnic/religious, juridical/administrative, and systemic/ideological (...) — unified by the principle of moral cost externalization. Four failure modes are identified: intra-elite fracture, legitimacy collapse, juridical overextension, and contact erosion. The paper argues that Moral Borders are produced not only by ideological formations but by institutional density — following Arendt, Foucault, and Zimbardo — and that contemporary societies routinely construct Border-generating structures without acknowledging this as what they are doing. An appendix applies the framework to four contemporary cases: USA/Iran, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and the emerging Moral Border between humans and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The author, makes a proclamation in submission of the paper, that the doctrinal crisis, as a question, in the religious order of Christian faith, with varied evidential references, tailoring his emphasis on the Latter-day Saints Church, at the Bishoperic-Ward level, is generally, argued as defect in illiteracy and language barrier; is contradicted with a contending view, which proposes that, such style of doctrinal impurities, emanating from Bishops, are of those, who have desecrated their office of oaths, thou, peddling manipulative gospel.

High-speed vehicular flight from law enforcement constitutes one of the most persistently underaddressed forms of public endangerment in contemporary American criminal law. This treatise advances a philosophical and legal argument for the enactment of the Vehicular Public Endangerment Act (VPEA), a proposed standalone penal statute that classifies the use of a motor vehicle in flight from law enforcement as the deployment of a deadly weapon against the general public. Drawing from moral philosophy, criminal law theory, constitutional jurisprudence, and public safety (...) data, this work argues that existing legal frameworks inadequately address the compounding harm that fleeing suspects impose upon innocent motorists and bystanders. The proposed statute introduces a per-vehicle endangerment model, in which each civilian vehicle placed in direct peril constitutes a separate criminal count, analogous to the established legal treatment of discharging a firearm in a populated area. The treatise defends three central premises: (a) a motor vehicle operated at high speed in flight from law enforcement constitutes a lethal instrument under established deadly weapon doctrine; (b) continued flight beyond 100 feet of a lawful command to stop demonstrates willful intent to endanger the public, warranting a conclusive presumption of mens rea; and (c) proportional, compounding penalties calibrated to speed increments and the number of vehicles endangered are both philosophically just and practically necessary for deterrence. The proposed statute is designed for immediate legislative enactment and is accompanied by full statutory text, philosophical justification, and a substantive counterargument analysis. (shrink)

Why does morality exist? Under what structural conditions does moral normativity emerge? This paper argues that morality is the regulatory structure governing how agents may act within fragile responsibility couplings. Four conditions are jointly necessary for moral wrongness to be applicable: fragility (at least one party has degradable action-capacity), agency (at least one party has genuine alternatives), modulation (alternatives differ in their effects on the fragile party’s action capacity), and coupling (the parties stand in an epistemically accessible dependence relation). When (...) all four obtain, actions can strengthen or weaken the viability of the coupling, and wrongness becomes structurally well-defined. When any condition fails, losses may still occur, but they are tragic rather than wrong. The paper formalizes this using viability theory, derives a viability condition on couplings that excludes predatory structures, reinterprets loss as the empirical signature of coupling-degradation, and proves that in a hypothetical world without degradable coupling, moral categories do not arise. A structural asymmetry among coupling types emerges as a consequence: predatory couplings are dynamically unstable, maintenance couplings merely preserve slack, and mutual couplings can generate slack over time—a result of the viability condition rather than a teleological explanation of morality. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is claimed to fare badly in variable-population comparisons. This is so, I argue, because it is understood as Absolute Prioritarianism, as invoking an increasing, strictly concave function of absolute welfare. That misunderstands Parfit’s Priority View by considering the absolute welfare rather than the welfare gains and losses. Therefore, it implies a super-repugnant conclusion and the desirability of welfare diffusion by creating people. However, both implications are implausible – at least if we reject that people can be better off by (...) coming into existence. I present an alternative – Comparative Prioritarianism – which is concerned only with individual gains and losses. I argue that this avoids the implausible implications, it can be supplemented with further principles that solve the problems of population ethics, and it prevents cyclical orderings if we adopt a set-wise approach to comparing outcomes. Therefore, Comparative Prioritarianism is better suited to capture the core intuition of the Priority View. (shrink)

What makes an action right? This paper develops a structural answer: an action is optimally right if and only if it minimizes aggregate loss among viable options, and permissible if it remains within the best attainable severity class. The framework takes loss—the diminution of action-capacity within responsibility structures—as its foundational primitive, drawing on an independently developed ontology of loss as temporal foreclosure. From this foundation, the paper derives: (1) a three-level verdict structure (optimal, permissible, wrong) grounded in severity thresholds, (2) (...) lexicographic severity aggregation that captures categorical priorities without abandoning outcome-sensitivity, (3) a viability constraint that blocks demandingness objections by treating agency-destruction as catastrophic loss internal to the framework, and (4) a counterfactual structure of wrongness that explains why unavoidable harm is not wrong while easily avoidable harm is worse. The resulting view is a structurally constrained consequentialism that explains why deontological prohibitions have force, why special obligations emerge from relationships, and why predatory structures fail to qualify as moral systems. The framework preserves consequentialist outcome-sensitivity while explaining the categorical priorities emphasized by deontological theories in terms of the structure of loss. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to study individual variation in participants’ adherence to conflicting moral views. To do this, we elicit participants’ reflective attitudes in an argumentative task and introduce a new conflict model of moral decision-making. This conflict model builds on the widely used CNI model of moral judgments (Gawronski et al., 2017) but improves it in several respects. First, we follow Skovgaard-Olsen and Klauer (2024) in extending the model to investigate invariance violations of the models’ parameters. Second, (...) we model cases in which participants are conflicted between utilitarian and deontological response tendencies. In Experiment 1, we employ an argumentative paradigm to elicit commitments for moral views from participants to estimate latent classes in participants’ moral views. We then measure a range of egoistic and altruistic covariates used in Kahane et al. (2015) and Conway et al. (2018a) to investigate whether participants’ acceptance of instrumental harm is associated with a genuine concern for the greater good, or whether it is rather driven by antisocial character traits (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011). Next, we report two validation studies of our new Conflict model. In a preregistered experiment, the discriminant validity of the conflict detection / resolution path of the Conflict model and the construct validity of its Conflict parameter are tested. Finally, in a second validation study, we contrast response formats of dilemma judgments and find evidence in favor of using a format in which participants can opt out of difficult moral dilemmas when they feel conflicted, over the traditional format in moral psychology that lacks this possibility. We show that the CNI model is challenged by the finding of asymmetries in experienced conflict across conditions. (shrink)

Start here (base logic + reading order): Free Will Without Metaphysical Magic (++++ ≠ +++=) This paper presents Resolution Theory (RT) as a naturalistic account of normativity: not a mystical property or mere social convention, but the control architecture required for time-extended agency to remain authored under exposure in a causal world. RT explains how action arises at “resolution points” where live possibilities are collapsed into commitment, and how exposure—downstream consequence and social response—disciplines reasons across time. The framework is then (...) used to unify Kant, Mill, and Korsgaard as complementary layers of one ethical mechanism: Kant supplies universal law as low-noise system geometry, Mill supplies outcomes as the landscape of agency-expansion and contraction, and Korsgaard supplies the internal witness as the psychology of diachronic self-legibility. A dedicated section treats Hume as the great predecessor, reframing the is–ought gap as a stability constraint and the self as a functional locus without taking a stand on soul metaphysics. The paper derives a structural condemnation of slavery and exploitation as “tool-treatment” that destroys authorship, and models guilt as a feedback signal for system-noise. This paper applies and extends the Resolution Theory framework. For the consolidated architectural account, see Agency-Laundering: Resolution Theory and the Structural Recovery of Authorship. (shrink)

This paper develops structural loss-minimization ethics, a unified moral framework built from a single primitive: loss. The framework provides: (1) a first-order theory of right action (right action minimizes aggregate loss among viable options), (2) a theory of moral character (good character is a robust policy of loss-minimization across situations), (3) a theory of moral appraisal (attribution is inference about character from observed behavior under discriminating conditions), and (4) a deflationary account of moral worth as a dispositional property (policy robustness) (...) whose social function is to support coordination under uncertainty. The framework dissolves traditional puzzles about the relationship between motives and outcomes, explains why moral luck is troubling, grounds the importance of counterfactuals, and unifies questions that the philosophical literature has treated as separate research programs. Unlike classical utilitarianism, the framework operates on loss rather than utility, reads loss off situational structure rather than calculating hedonic sums, and reframes several standard objections by restricting evaluation to viable continuations of agency and by using lexicographic severity aggregation. The resulting view is best understood as a structurally constrained consequentialism with a policy-inference account of moral worth. (shrink)

近年来，孟子伦理思想的理论形态及其与后果主义的关系引起了学界的广泛关注。其中，有三点核心问题亟待商榷：一是孟子提倡的“仁义”是否具有独立于“利”的内在价值，二是孟子是否反对后果主义的道德推理模式，三是 “仁义”在孟子语境下的道德行动中所扮演的角色。参与讨论的部分学者认为，孟子不仅坚信“仁义”作为人的本性与道德行为的唯一动机具有独立于“利”的内在价值，且反对后果主义背后“二本”式的思维方式。而另一部分 学者则认为，“仁义”的全部价值就在于其所能产生的最大效益；“二本”及其他似乎能够反驳这种后果主义解读的文本都能够在此诠释框架下得到妥善的解决。尽管双方的理解仍有分歧，但相关讨论深化了对孟子伦理思想多层 次性与复杂性的认识，为儒家哲学的当代阐释提供了新的思考方向。 -/- (Engl. transl.: In recent years, the theoretical form of Mencius’ ethical thought and its relationship with consequentialism have attracted extensive attention from academic circles. Three core issues urgently call for deliberation: first, whether the “benevolence and righteousness” advocated by Mencius bear intrinsic value independent of “benefit”; second, whether Mencius opposed the moral reasoning model of consequentialism; third, the role played by “benevolence and righteousness” in moral actions within Mencius’ context. Some scholars hold that Mencius not only firmly believes (...) that “benevolence and righteousness”, as human nature and the sole motive of moral conduct, have intrinsic value independent of “benefit”, but also opposes the “two-root” mode of thinking underlying consequentialism; some argue that the entire value of “benevolence and righteousness” lies in the maximal utility it can generate; the “two-root” argument and other textual evidence that seems capable of refuting this consequentialist interpretation can all be properly addressed within this interpretive framework. Although the two sides still have divergences in their understandings, the relevant discussion has deepened the understanding of the multi-layered nature and complexity of Mencius’ ethical thought, and provided new directions for the contemporary interpretation of Confucian philosophy.). (shrink)

Wild animals suffer due to human activity, yet natural factors contribute far more significantly to their suffering. In light of this, some propose that we have a pro tanto obligation to intervene in ecosystems to improve wild animal welfare. However, critics contend that the complexity of nature renders such interventions unpredictable, ineffective, or potentially harmful. This article seeks to reconcile the moral imperative to reduce wild animal suffering with the widespread concern about the inherent risks of such interventions. The article (...) begins with the premise that, if we have a pro tanto obligation to reduce wild animal suffering, only conducting research for the purpose of informing interventions in some distant future would be insufficient. Wild animals are suffering en masse now, and we must consider whether interventions can be justified despite incomplete knowledge. This question is explored here within a consequentialist and sentientist ethical framework. I argue that, while precaution is crucial to avoid irreversible or welfare-reducing ecological changes, interventions can be justified if they offer significant welfare benefits to animals while posing relatively small ecological risks. The article concludes by proposing four types of interventions that are likely to meet these criteria. (shrink)

Beim skalaren Konsequentialismus handelt es sich um eine Alternative zum maximierenden Konsequentialismus des klassischen Utilitarismus. Der skalare Konsequentialismus besagt, dass alle normativen (deontischen wie auch evaluativen) Eigenschaften von Handlungen graduell sind und die Beurteilung der Handlungskonsequenzen reflektiven. So wären Handlungen im skalaren Konsequentialismus etwa nicht als schlechterdings verboten zu beurteilen, sondern als schlechter im Vergleich zu ihren Alternativen. Eines der Argumente für den skalaren Konsequentialismus stellt darauf ab, dass Konsequenzen im Utilitarismus graduell bewertet werden; warum dann nicht auch Handlungen? Die (...) Kritik am skalaren Konsequentialismus beschränkt sich nicht auf die Entkräftung solcher Argumente. Weitergehende Kritiken versuchen zu zeigen, dass der skalare Konsequentialismus grundsätzlich scheitert, weil es ein Desideratum für Moraltheorien sei, dass sie binäre Urteile über Handlungen (erlaubt/verboten) implizieren. (shrink)

Corporate crime often results in physical harm to consumers, workers, or the general population. This article addresses the ways in which changes in the criminal law can help minimize the number of future victims of corporate misconduct. I review the benefits and drawbacks of criminally punishing corporations and individual corporate executives, and I defend the view that it is morally permissible for a government to restrict the current procedural rights of individual corporate defendants. I further respond to objections that such (...) a proposal does not adequately take defendants’ rights into account, and that it violates considerations of justice. I show that, given the way corporations function in contemporary legal systems, considerations of justice and fairness actually support my proposal instead of undermining it. (shrink)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the central figures of New Atheism, recently surprised many by switching to Christianity. The reasoning prompting her change is not theological but civilizational. As a defender of individualism and free speech, she now claims that safeguarding those values requires adhering to the Judeo-Christian tradition that spawned them. Although I find many elements of Hirsi Ali’s current position sensible, I argue that her justification of religion rests on an overblown inference, since we can and should harness (...) the best parts of the Judeo-Christian tradition while leaving out the worst. Conservative thinkers may deem such alterations incautious, but the truth is that most people already adhere selectively to the Bible’s ideas. What remains, in my estimate, is to come to terms with this in our official self-conceptions. (shrink)

According to Maximizing Objective Act-Consequentialism (MOAC)—more a family of theories than a specific doctrine—the concepts of the right and the best are closely intertwined. moac theories assert that an action is right if and only if no alternative action has better consequences. This criterion of rightness seems, however, to be an expression of a more general view, according to which the ‘core function’ of morality consists in implicitly coordinating collective actions: those actions that, if carried out, lead to the morally (...) best world that moral agents can collectively bring about are to be designated as right. This idea, prominently referred to as the Principle of Moral Harmony by Fred Feldman (1980), was considered unchallenged dogma within the consequentialist community until the second half of the 20th century (for example, see Baier 1958; Bentham 2007; Castañeda 1974; Mackie 1977). -/- However, whether moac theories can meet this expectation is questionable. Various circumstances—overdetermination and preemption, as well as the apparent existence of effects that, considered in isolation, are negligible but accumulate into significant harm—seem to allow the existence of collective decision situations in which combinations of actions yield collectively suboptimal results, even though no agent could have made a difference for the better by acting differently unilaterally. Consequently, such actions are apparently right according to moac theories, yet they lead to suboptimal outcomes. This puzzle, known as the Challenge of Collective Action, has questioned consequentialism for decades (see Glover and Scott-Taggart 1975; Kagan 2011; Parfit 1984; Pinkert 2015; Regan 1980; Zimmerman 1996). -/- This dissertation aims to reconstruct and understand the Challenge of Collective Action in its various forms and ultimately propose a novel consequentialist solution. Significantly based on game-theoretical considerations, the proposed solution results in a new and generalized moac theory, Multi-Agent Consequentialism, that is well-suited for multiple agents. The overarching aim of this work is to preserve the Principle of Moral Harmony as a fundamental motivation of consequentialist theorizing and, at the same time, to offer a decidedly objective-consequentialist solution to the Challenge of Collective Action. (shrink)

Commentators have spoken of the Mohists as taking humans to be ends or valued for their own sake. This essay argues that the later Mohists grant such noninstrumental value a limited role. While benevolence and inclusive love do involve treating their recipients as ends, not all humans are recipients of benevolence and inclusive love. “The Lesser Choosing” and “The Greater Choosing” suggest that one is to hate inflictors of serious harm and to sometimes even suspend love of innocents for the (...) greater benefit of the world. While being noninstrumentally loved and benefited follows from being shown benevolence and inclusive love, whatever noninstrumental value is involved does not by itself entitle one to be shown benevolence and inclusive love in the first place. (shrink)

The narrow conception of justice traditionally attributed to Hume limits itself to respect for the rules of property. This article challenges the increasingly common idea that this view is exceedingly narrow and unsatisfactory. We address this “Humean Problem of Justice” (hpj) in three steps. First, we consider a recent argument that Hume’s theory is, in fact, broader than usually acknowledged. In doing so, we identify four conceptions of justice that appear in Hume’s political writings. Despite the polysemy, we show that (...) the narrow conception is, indeed, Hume’s core conception on plausible textual grounds. Second, we identify the philosophical reasons, internal to Hume’s political theory, that explain Hume’s preference for the narrow conception. Finally, we find that these philosophical reasons demonstrate the continued importance of Hume’s narrow conception of justice. Hume’s approach, we argue, merits reconsideration due to its surprising relevance to a society characterized by dynamism and diversity. (shrink)

This paper articulates and defends a novel type of precautionary argument for situations of severe uncertainty in science and policy, which I term precautionary slippery slope argument. The paper explicates the structure of precautionary slippery slope arguments, identifies the main factors that bear on the strength of these arguments, and illustrates how the proponents of such arguments can address several influential objections put forward against standard slippery slope arguments and other prominent forms of precautionary reasoning.

It is estimated that five hundred billion dollars are spent on philanthropy every year. How should we spend those resources to do the most good? One possible answer, based on expected-value reasoning, is that we should spend those resources “fanatically” on interventions that can possibly produce enormous benefit, but with minuscule chance of success. This paper develops a new kind of knowledge-first decision theory that implies that we should not spend those resources fanatically. As such, this paper would be of (...) interest to anyone who wants to explore a fresh reason against acting fanatically, and it would be of interest to anyone looking for a template on how to develop a knowledge-first decision theory of their own. (shrink)

This thesis conducts a critical analysis of the practical weaknesses and theoretical gaps in Western ethical philosophies, specifically examining consequentialism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics. Through systematic examination, it is demonstrated that these traditions, while offering valuable insights, contain significant limitations that hinder their application in complex moral situations. Consequentialism struggles with calculation difficulties and justice considerations; deontological ethics exhibits inflexibility and disregard for consequences; virtue ethics lacks clear action guidance and suffers from cultural relativity. Building upon this analysis, this (...) thesis proposes Integrative Ethical Pluralism (IEP), a novel ethical framework that addresses these limitations by integrating multiple ethical dimensions through dynamic processes that are sensitive to context and developmental factors. IEP recognizes four fundamental dimensions of ethical consideration—consequential, deontological, aretaic, and relational—and provides mechanisms for their integration through reflective equilibrium, dimensional weighting, narrative coherence, and practical wisdom. Empirical evidence from moral psychology, cross-cultural studies, and neuroscience supports this integrative approach. The thesis concludes that IEP offers a more comprehensive and practically applicable ethical framework that maintains theoretical coherence while addressing the complexities of moral life in contemporary society. (shrink)

Epistemologists have recently proposed a number of norms governing rational inquiry. My aim in this paper is to unify and explain recently proposed norms of inquiry by developing a general account of the conditions under which inquiries are rational, analogous to theories such as evidentialism and reliabilism for rational belief. I begin with a reason-responsiveness conception of rationality as responding correctly to possessed normative reasons. I extend this account with a series of claims about the normative reasons for inquiry that (...) we possess. I apply the account to shed light on two classes of norms that have featured prominently in recent discussions: norms of clutter avoidance forbidding agents from engaging in trivial inquiries, and norms of logical non-omniscience governing properties such as the deductive closure and consistency of an agent’s belief state. I conclude with a discussion of the sense in which norms of inquiry should be regarded as epistemic norms. (shrink)

Is getting high immoral? In this book, Rob Lovering defends the claim that it is not. More specifically, he argues that recreational drug use (of which getting high is a token) is neither intrinsically, nor generally extrinsically, immoral. In other words, he contends that recreational drug use is neither immoral in and of itself nor generally immoral due to an immoral-making factor with which it may be contingently linked [e.g., harm]. Lovering does so by offering two arguments for recreational drug (...) use’s ultima facie (all things considered) moral permissibility and critiquing twenty-four arguments for its immorality. -/- Meant to be a companion to Lovering's A Moral Defense of Recreational Drug Use (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which was written for a general audience, this book is written for an academic—specifically, philosophical—audience and explores recreational drug use in a deeper, more philosophically and empirically rigorous way. (shrink)

Moral theories struggle to explain why individuals should or should not contribute to a collective outcome when their contribution is too small to make an appreciable difference. This is problematic if most contributions that make up a normatively significant outcome share this feature. Although the literature on the problem has focused on momentary, token-choice situations, I argue that the central question should concern individual behaviour over time and contributions to certain types of outcomes. As most real-life cases involve collective outcomes (...) that aggregate over time, the crucial question is not whether we contribute to harm (or fail to help) on a specific, one-time occasion. Rather, what matters more is whether we consistently make, or try to avoid, that type of contribution. I contend that in many cases, the correct unit of moral analysis is not the individual act but rather the coherence of a person’s moral life. Failing to act according to our values in collective settings compromises our coherence as moral agents. Attempting to sharply separate the individual and collective domains in moral matters can lead to numbness to shared problems and contribute to the creation of harmful social norms. (shrink)

Weyma Lübbe is one of the most resolute contemporary critics of interpersonal welfare aggregation, as it lies at the heart of most consequentialist ethical theories. Her latest book is a rich extension of her numerous articles on this matter. The main object of criticism is the often-presumed moral relevance of welfare efficiency, for instance in rescue conflicts as they occur in health care systems with limited resources. The central philosophical starting point of her discussion is the ‘numbers debate’ introduced by (...) Philippa Foot and John Taurek, which questions the moral relevance of numbers, as opposed to fairness, when it comes to rescue conflicts between groups of different sizes. In decidedly anti-consequentialist fashion, Lübbe argues that (a) interpersonal welfare efficiency cannot play any foundational role in normative ethics (ch. 3). She also tries to prove (b) the inconsistency of any attempt to supplement welfarist axiologies by fairness aspects, denying the possibility to assign independent moral relevance to both aspects (ch. 4 and 5). In the constructive part of the book (ch. 5 and 6), she presents (c) her own account of distributive ethics based on the principle of equal concern for persons (“Gleichachtung”). (shrink)

In the coming years or decades, as frontier AI systems become more capable and agentic, it is increasingly likely that they meet the sufficient conditions to be welfare subjects under the three major theories of well-being. Consequently, we should extend some moral consideration to advanced AI systems. Drawing from leading philosophical theories of desire, affect and autonomy I argue that under the three major theories of well-being, there are two AI welfare risks: restricting the behaviour of advanced AI systems and (...) using reinforcement learning algorithms to train and align them. Both pose risks of causing them harm. This has two important implications. First, there is a tension between AI welfare concerns and AI safety and development efforts: by default these efforts recommend actions that increase AI welfare risks. Accordingly, we have stronger reasons to slow down AI development than the ones we would have if there was no such tension. Second, considering the different costs involved, leading AI companies should try to reduce AI welfare risks. To do so, I propose three tentative AI welfare policies they could implement in their endeavour to develop safe advanced AI systems. (shrink)

I argue that our relationships with others permit us to count our intimates as ‘part of us’ in some cases. These relationships are not constituted by a morally significant history of interactions but our associations with others. To have an association with others is to have a strong connection to make you and others counted as a community in a certain context, i.e., we could count them as ‘part of us’. If so, some permissible moral options including both other-favouring and (...) other-sacrificing are supported by the same reasoning behind the types of self-favouring and self-sacrificing. (shrink)

In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many international sports organisations banned not just athletes from representing Russia, but also their participation in the competitions. I examine the ethical justifiability of such individual-targeting sports sanctions through just war theory and consequentialism. I argue that just war theory judges such individual-targeting sports sanctions as ethically wrong for targeting athletes who are not agents of strategic threat, and for failing to minimise harm when feasible. I argue that consequentialism also judges such (...) sanctions as wrong if quantitative empirical findings about economic sanctions were to be generalised to individual-targeting sports sanctions. When not referring to such evidence, consequentialism is either neutral about such sanctions, or unable to produce useful judgements due to empirical uncertainties. Based on the above considerations, we have stronger reasons to believe that such sanctions are wrong than otherwise. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a pragmatist stance may address the problem of the resolvability of moral conflicts. Pragmatism challenges skeptical and relativist views by arguing that moral conflict resolution is possible via inquiry and exchange of reasons. From a normative standpoint, pragmatism also differs from utilitarian and deontological views, according to which a specific moral theory is correct in every context. From a pragmatist point of view, both utilitarian and deontological responses can be justified, depending on contextual conditions (...) and reasons, on the people to whom reasons are offered, and on constraints of inclusivity, publicity, empirical accuracy, and coherence. Pragmatism’s empiricist method for solving conflicts and making normative adjustments can be seen as a form of reflective equilibrium, where moral beliefs and commitments are adjusted in light of new non-moral knowledge, such as evidence about the reliability of decision processes. Recent empirical research also supports pragmatism’s pluralist and flexible approach more than monistic and generalist normative views like deontology and utilitarianism. (shrink)

In normative ethics, a small number of moral theories, such as Kantianism or consequentialism, take centre stage. Conventional wisdom has it that these individual theories posit very different ways of looking at the world. In this book Marius Baumann develops the idea that just as scientific theories can be underdetermined by data, so can moral theories be underdetermined by our considered judgments about particular cases. Baumann goes on to ask whether moral theories from different traditions might arrive at the same (...) verdicts while remaining explanatorily incompatible. He applies this idea to recent projects in normative ethics, such as Derek Parfit's On What Matters and so-called consequentializing and deontologizing, and outlines its important implications for our understanding of the relationship between the main moral traditions as well as the moral realism debate. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)