Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons

Utilitas ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL OTSUKA
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Separateness Of Persons ◽  
Moral Difference

For a prioritarian by contrast to a utilitarian, whether a certain quantity of utility falls within the boundary of one person's life or another's makes the following moral difference: the worse the life of a person who could receive a given benefit, the stronger moral reason we have to confer this benefit on this person. It would seem, therefore, that prioritarianism succeeds, where utilitarianism fails, to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’. Yet I show that, contrary to these appearances, prioritarianism fails, in ways strikingly parallel to those in which utilitarianism fails, to take this distinction seriously. In so doing, I draw on and develop an earlier critique of prioritarianism by disentangling and pressing two distinct separateness-of-persons objections offered there. One objection is that prioritarianism is insensitive to ‘prudential justifications’. The other is that it is insensitive to the competing claims of different individuals.

Kant, Marginal Cases, and Moral Standing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard
Keyword(s):  
Life Stage ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Identity Problem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Moral Difference

According to the marginal cases argument, there is no property that might justify making a moral difference between human beings and the other animals that is both uniquely and universally human. It is therefore “speciesist” to treat human beings differently just because we are human beings. While not challenging the conclusion, this chapter argues that the marginal cases argument is metaphysically misguided. It ignores the differences between a life stage and a kind, and between lacking a property and having it in a defective form. The chapter then argues for a view of moral standing that attributes it to the subject of a life conceived as an atemporal being, and shows how this view can resolve some familiar puzzles such as how death can be a loss to the person who has died, how we can wrong the dead, the “procreation asymmetry,” and the “non-identity problem.”

Egalitarianism and the Separateness of Persons

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis McKerlie
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Moral View ◽  
Moral Importance ◽  
Separateness Of Persons

Different people live different lives. Each life consists of experiences that are not shared with the other lives. These facts are sometimes referred to as the ‘separateness of persons.’ Some writers have appealed to the separateness of persons to support or to criticize moral views. John Rawls thinks that the separateness of persons supports egalitarianism, while Robert Nozick believes that it supports a rights view. I will call the claim that the separateness of persons counts in favor of a particular moral view the ‘positive connection.’ Both these writers think that utilitarianism is objectionable because it ignores the moral importance of the separateness of persons. I will call the claim that the separateness of persons counts against a moral view the ‘negative connection.’In this paper I will discuss several different attempts at explaining the connection between the separateness of persons and specific moral views. I will begin by describing how egalitarianism, unlike utilitarianism, treats individual lives as morally important units. I will discuss the kind of egalitarianism that aims at equality, but the same points could be made about egalitarian views that give priority to helping the worst off or require that everyone should receive at least a specified minimum share of resources or happiness.

Causing Disability, Causing Non-Disability: What’s the Moral Difference?

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-157
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Stramondo ◽  
Stephen M. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reason ◽  
Moral Difference

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases.

The Ring of Gyges: Overridingness and The Unity of Reason

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Copp
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Interest Conflict ◽  
Unity Of Reason

Does morality override self-interest? Or does self-interest override morality? These questions become important in situations where there is conflict between the overall verdicts of morality and self-interest, situations where morality on balance requires an action that is contrary to our self-interest, or where considerations of self-interest on balance call for an action that is forbidden by morality. In situations of this kind, we want to know what we ought simpliciter to do. If one of these standpoints over-rides the other, then there is a straightforward answer. We ought simpliciter to act on the verdict of the overriding standpoint.For purposes of this essay, I assume that there are possible cases in which the overall verdicts of morality and self-interest conflict. I will call cases of this kind “conflict cases.” The verdict of morality in a conflict case would be a proposition as to what we ought morally to do, or as to what we have the most moral reason to do; the verdict of self-interest would be a proposition as to what we ought to do in our self-interest, or as to what action is best supported by reasons or considerations of self-interest. These propositions are action-guiding or normative in a familiar sense. The conflict between morality and self-interest in conflict cases is there-fore a normative conflict; it is a conflict between the overall verdicts of different normative standpoints. I take it that the question of whether morality overrides self-interest is the question of whether the verdicts of morality are normatively more important than the verdicts of self-interest. In due course, I will explain the idea of normative importance as well as the ideas of a normative proposition and of a reason.

scholarly journals Transitivity, Moral Latitude, and Supererogation

Utilitas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS W. PORTMORE
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
The One ◽  
One Act

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.

scholarly journals Moral Disagreement in Anglican – Roman Catholic Relations

Ecclesiology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Oliver O’Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Ecumenical Dialogue ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
Moral Difference

Abstract The belief that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were divided by moral disagreements came to prominence in the early 1980s and affected the direction of ecumenical dialogue. But no moral disagreements go back to the Reformation era, and the perception of moral difference has undergone many changes since that time, especially reflecting differences of social and political setting. A moral agreement or disagreement is difficult to chart with precision. It is not embodied in a formulation of moral doctrine, since moral reason functions on two planes, that of evaluative description and that of deliberation and decision. Disagreement is phenomenologically present as offence, which has its own dynamic of expansion. Addressing offence, a task involving lay, theological and episcopal contributions, is the primary way in which moral agreement has to be sought and defended.

Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Skulsky
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

By the vagueness of his injunction, the ghost in effect leaves up to Hamlet a choice among available sanctions for revenge. Two such alternatives—unlimited ill will and the code of honor—are eventually discredited in the eyes of the audience, the one by being repellently embodied in Pyrrhus, the other by being set in opposition to the law of nature and (through a parallel with suicide) to conscience and Christian doctrine. Though Hamlet never abandons his commitment to unlimited retribution, he manages to palliate it by appealing from conscience and charity, first to the code of honor, and then, having come to think of himself as a doomed scourge of God, to divine command as a fiat superseding moral reason. These appeals lead up to Hamlet's ultimate reconciliation of conscience with divine fiat, and mark a steady spiritual decline from which he is rescued, through no merit of his own, by the brief madness of his final burst of anger.

A contribution to the critique of moral reason

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Fassin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Moral Anthropology ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Deliberate Effort

Responding to Carlo Caduff’s comments on an earlier paper of mine provides me with the opportunity to refine my defense and illustration of moral anthropology. After having recalled that my personal encounter with moralities and ethics was of the kind of Monsieur Jourdain’s discovery of prose, rather than a deliberate effort to apply moral philosophy to social science, I attempt to clarify my positioning in terms of critical thinking and my reformulation of the concept of moral economies, using my research on the intolerable and on humanitarianism. My explicit intention is to go beyond or rather, more modestly, to veer away from the alternative between the Durkheim-Kant legacy and the Foucault-Aristotle tradition, and from the dialectic between morality as code and ethics as freedom. It is to explore two epistemological frontiers: one related to the place occupied by the anthropologist, which I suggest should be on the threshold of rather than inside or outside Plato’s cave; the other one linked to the separation of a moral and ethical matter from the social gangue of human lives, which I find problematic because of the loss of history and politics it implies. I contend that both frontiers engage what it means and implies to be doing social science in the contemporary world.

Stromatoporoids from the Famennian (Devonian) Wabamun Formation, Normandville oilfield, north–central Alberta, Canada

1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (03) ◽  
pp. 411-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin W. Stearn
Keyword(s):  
Patch Reef ◽  
Abundant Species ◽  
The Other ◽  
North Central ◽  
Biotic Crisis

Stromatoporoids are the principal framebuilding organisms in the patch reef that is part of the reservoir of the Normandville field. The reef is 10 m thick and 1.5 km2in area and demonstrates that stromatoporoids retained their ability to build reefal edifices into Famennian time despite the biotic crisis at the close of Frasnian time. The fauna is dominated by labechiids but includes three non-labechiid species. The most abundant species isStylostroma sinense(Dong) butLabechia palliseriStearn is also common. Both these species are highly variable and are described in terms of multiple phases that occur in a single skeleton. The other species described areClathrostromacf.C. jukkenseYavorsky,Gerronostromasp. (a columnar species), andStromatoporasp. The fauna belongs in Famennian/Strunian assemblage 2 as defined by Stearn et al. (1988).

D. The Line Spectrum of Pulsating Variable Stars

1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 207-244
Author(s):  
R. P. Kraft
Keyword(s):  
Variable Stars ◽  
The Other ◽  
Line Spectrum ◽  
Afternoon Session ◽  
Empirical Information ◽  
Pulsating Variable Stars ◽  
Almost Continuous ◽  
Informal Approach

(Ed. note:Encouraged by the success of the more informal approach in Christy's presentation, we tried an even more extreme experiment in this session, I-D. In essence, Kraft held the floor continuously all morning, and for the hour and a half afternoon session, serving as a combined Summary-Introductory speaker and a marathon-moderator of a running discussion on the line spectrum of cepheids. There was almost continuous interruption of his presentation; and most points raised from the floor were followed through in detail, no matter how digressive to the main presentation. This approach turned out to be much too extreme. It is wearing on the speaker, and the other members of the symposium feel more like an audience and less like participants in a dissective discussion. Because Kraft presented a compendious collection of empirical information, and, based on it, an exceedingly novel series of suggestions on the cepheid problem, these defects were probably aggravated by the first and alleviated by the second. I am much indebted to Kraft for working with me on a preliminary editing, to try to delete the side-excursions and to retain coherence about the main points. As usual, however, all responsibility for defects in final editing is wholly my own.)

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