These are the revision notes which I created, using both the lecture series and tutorial work, to sit the Ethics paper for my PPE finals in 2021. The notes cover consequentialism, Kantian ethics, and three topics in meta-ethics (non-cognitivism, error theory, and moral realism).
I achieved a Fi...
- Descriptive Ethics is the study of people’s beliefs and actual behaviour
- Normative Ethics, is split into:
o practical ethics (first order questions like ‘is torture wrong?’)
o normative theory, which is the effort to uncover the principles behind first order practical judgements (should
we maximise the balance of pleasure over pain?)
- Metaethics, involving second order questions about the ethical statements in areas like:
o Metaphysical questions like ‘what are ethical statements’
o Epistemological ones like ‘can we have moral knowledge, and if so, how?’
o Linguistic ones like ‘what is the semantic function of moral discourse?’
o Psychological ones like ‘how does moral discourse impact moral motivation?’
These can interlink
- Connection between descriptive ethics and metaethics:
o The observance of widespread moral disagreement (a descriptive claim) might be used to support the
metaethical conclusion that moral claims are only true relative to a particular societal framework.
- Connection between normative ethics and metaethics:
o In the discussion about ‘piety’ in Plato’s Euthyphro, it is argued that Euthyphro can only justify his first-order
claim (that it is pious to prosecute his father for murder) if he can provide an adequate second-order account
of what it is for something to be pious. The same for rightness.
Dworkin argues that there is no real distinction between metaethics and normative ethics – one may be more abstract, but both
can only be argued out of moral conscience and conviction. E.g. we argue against the metaethical claim that there are no moral
truths by pointing out that its normative consequences (that torturing children would be morally permissible perhaps).
Common sense morality
Refers to the pre-theoretical moral judgments of ordinary people
What use is it?
- Some argue that it provides the facts which a moral theory must explain
- Others argue the point of a moral theory is to allow us to improve these pre-theoretical judgements, to point out the
ways in which we fail and act inconsistently, and help us improve morally.
o Someone like Singer would fall squarely in the latter camp
,Tom Barnes
Consequentialism
Why we might want to be consequentialists rather than Kantians
Two long standing problems with Kant
1. What actually happens does not matter (the person who opens the door to the murderer should have a completely clean
conscience)
- Kantianism fetishizes intention, leading to moral narcissism, and disregard for the harm following from our actions.
2. The Kantian attempt to vindicate morality fails
- Sidgwick argues that for a Kantian, immorality demonstrates unfreedom, so we cannot blame people for acting
immorally
o Korsgaard (more charitable) the above shows lack of freedom of a strong sense, but not the weak sense
required for attribution of blame
- Enoch objects that we have no reason to care about being free in the Kantian sense
o Kant is appealing to the sheer beauty of the noble idea of a universal kingdom of ends, his vision of the good.
Does it appeal to us?
What consequentialism gives us
- The end of moral conduct is something less mysterious than ‘rational freedom in the Kingdom of ends’, rather it is to
maximise the good
- Focuses on what actually happens
- Follows intuition that since morally praiseworthy action seems to be concerned with the wellbeing of others, the proper
end of moral conduct is wellbeing, and the criterion for moral assessment is promotion of wellbeing.
What is consequentialism?
The aim of a moral theory is to answer
- What is the goal of practical reason?
- What is the ultimate end?
- What makes an act right?
Consequentialist thinking has two steps.
1. There is an axiology, a theory of the good, which allows us to rank states of affairs from best to worst.
2. We claim that the moral status of acts is derived from an operation on the axiology e.g. that the morally best action is
the one which maximises the good.
Some basic consequentialist beliefs
- We can rank overall states of affairs, and the moral worth of an action is judged with reference to the state of affairs it
produces
- The state of affairs encompasses the consequences, the act itself, the thought processes involved, etc.
- It is at least permissible, or in some forms of consequentialism obligatory, to bring about good outcomes. Having
identified certain ends as good, it would be immoral not to attempt to bring them about.
- A feature of consequentialist thinking (though not exclusively so) is that they ‘make the good prior to the right’ (Rawls).
Varieties of Consequentialism
There are different axiologies we might use for ranking states of affairs.
- Hedonism (endorsed by classical utilitarians like Bentham / Mill) – the good consists in pleasure and the absence
of pain.
, Tom Barnes
o This is a form of ‘welfarism’, according to which nothing is intrinsically good unless good for someone;
and nothing intrinsically bad unless bad for someone.
- Desire Satisfaction (endorsed by preference utilitarians like Hare) – the good consists in our desires being fulfilled
and not frustrated.
o E.g. if I have a desire not to be hated by my friends, and it turns out that they secretly hate me without
me knowing, then I am worse off according to preference utilitarianism but not classical utilitarianism.
- We might be pluralistic, and say that multiple things are intrinsically valuable, e.g. both welfare and equality.
- The uniting feature is that the axiology is agent neutral – they rank outcomes from an impartial perspective ‘the
perspective of the universe’ (Sidgwick).
Maximising vs. satisficing:
- Maximising consequentialism: an act is right only if it brings about the best possible outcome.
- Satisficing consequentialism: Proposed by Slote, it says that an act is right if it brings about an outcome that is ‘good
enough’ relative to the other possible outcomes
o PROBLEM: Seems to make utilitarianism way too permissive, and licenses gratuitous harm (Bradley). Seems I
can worsen the outcome if I don’t go below a certain point.
Take a situation where we come across a wallet in the woods with £1000, and it is plausible
that if we do nothing, it will be lost forever as an animal will take it away. It seems plausible,
if we are a satisficing consequentialist, and we think that what matters is we perform the
action which is good enough, relative to the best possible action, then in this situation, it will
therefore be morally permissible for us to keep some of the money, and hand in the rest.
However it ought to be plainly obvious that to do anything except hand in the entire amount
would be wrong, because it belongs to someone else, and hence would be to steal from
them, even if the alternative is probably that they do not get anything back.
So it seems that satisficing consequentialism, in trying to make consequentialism less
demanding in some contexts to bring it into line with intuitions, inadvertently also makes it
far too permissive in other contexts, where only one action should be permissible.
o Seems like a weak retreat from the demandingness objection. Most would rather morality be demanding,
rather than to turn our widespread laziness (most would agree that they should act more morally) into
normative ethical doctrine.
Direct vs. indirect:
- Direct (or act) consequentialism: the rightness of a particular act depends on the goodness / badness of its
consequences
- Indirect (or rule rule) consequentialism: the rightness of a particular act does not depend on the goodness / badness of
the consequences of the act itself, but on the goodness / badness of the consequences of the rule which permits it.
- The debate surrounding this is whether rule consequentialism can avoid collapse into act – seems it does.
Actualism vs. probabilism:
- Actualist consequentialism: the rightness of an act depends on whether the agent in fact brings about the best
outcome, regardless of whether or not the outcome was foreseeable.
o PROBLEM – Makes morality so contingent on luck that it no longer seems to describe morality. The key
question of normative ethics is what we should do – to tell us we acted wrongly where we did what rationally
seemed the best option seems perverse.
- Probabilist consequentialism: the rightness of an act depends on whether the expected value is at least as great as that
of any other available action (calculated by multiplying each possible outcome by its probability and then summing all
of these individual outcome values).
- Some consequentialist theories accept both kinds of ‘rightness’ – an act is objectively right if it in fact brings about the
best outcome, and subjectively right if it is expected to bring about the best outcome.
o Utilitarianism deals with this by distinguishing between the rightness of an act, and the rightness of praising it
– only praise acts which are subjectively right.
Average vs total
- On the average view, an outcome is better than another if it contains a higher average amount of good, whereas on the
total view, it is really obvious.
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