PEA Soup

Three Senses of ‘End’

Ever since Aristotle, the terms that are translated ‘end’ (e.g. the Greek word telos and the Latin finis) have played a starring role in ethical theory. But in fact there are three crucially different things that can be meant by speaking of the “end for the sake of which” an agent is acting.

1. In one sense, this “end” is the ultimate goal or end result that the agent is trying or intending to bring about.
2. In a second sense, this “end” is the object of the fundamental wish or desire that motivated the action.
3. In a third sense, this “end” is a state of affairs that the agent believes to be good, such that the agent believes the goodness of this state of affairs to explain what is good about the action.

What is instrumental goodness?

In “Two Distinctions in Goodness” (Philosophical Review 1983), Christine Korsgaard argued that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness should not be conflated with the distinction between final and instrumental goods. As it happens, I believe that she is entirely right that these two distinctions are distinct from each other. Still, her account of the distinction between final and instrumental goods does not seem quite correct to me.

As she puts it, a final good is something that “is valued as an end or for its own sake”, while an instrumental good “is valued as a means or for the sake of something else” (p. 170). There are at least three problems with this account.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended"

We are pleased to present the latest installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from an issue of the journal. The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended."  We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood is providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.  His commentary begins below the fold.

Job at Oxford: Ethicists encouraged to apply

Tutorial Fellowship and University Lecturership in Philosophy (Corpus Christi College)

This is to replace John Tasioulas, who has now accepted the Quain Chair in Jurisprudence at University College London.

There are unknowable moral truths

Many philosophers doubt the possibility of unknowable moral truths. E.g. Thomas Nagel said (in The View from Nowhere, p. 139):

I do not believe that the truth about how we should live could extend radically beyond any capacity that we might have to discover it (apart from its dependence on nonevaluative facts that we might be unable to discover).

But in fact, there is a simple argument -- unsurprisingly, broadly Williamsonian in inspiration -- that shows that there must be unknowable moral truths.

Note (added on 10 August 2010): Jussi Suikkanen has correctly pointed out that he made what is in all essentials the very same argument on this blog over two years ago. The record also reveals that I read his post at that time (although I somehow now have no recollection of having done so). So it is Jussi, and not I, who should be regarded as the first to have presented this argument in public!

Brian Leiter's Nietzschean Argument for Moral Scepticism

Brian Leiter has posted a short essay developing a Nietzschean argument for moral scepticism on the web site of the National Humanities Center On the Human.

There are also replies to Leiter's Nietzschean argument by me and by Paul Katsafanas; there will soon be a reply by Mike Ridge as well. (My friends will probably not be surprised to hear that my reply contains a robust response to Leiter's argument for moral scepticism....)

How much do moral philosophers disagree?

At the end of this month, I am due to respond to Brian Leiter's essay "Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche", on the National Humanities Center's web site On the Human. In this essay, Leiter develops a Nietzsche-inspired argument, according to which moral scepticism is strongly supported by the kind of moral disagreement that exists among moral philosophers.

This made me wonder, To what extent do moral philosophers disagree about moral questions? Of course, they disagree about the abstract foundational principles of ethics: Aristotelians, Kantians, consequentialists, and the like, all have different answers to these foundational questions. But to what extent do they disagree in their moral verdicts on concrete cases or types of case?

Moral Obligation Applies to Act-Types, Not Act-Tokens

In a couple of conversations that I’ve had recently, I’ve been surprised to find that several moral philosophers believe that when we are morally obliged to do an act, this “act” that we’re obliged to do is an act-token, not an act-type. In my view, this is confused: the act that we’re obliged to do is always an act-type.

There are two main views of act-tokens out there:

1. Act-tokens are Davidsonian events, which are concrete particulars, individuated by their basic physical properties (including their position in the causal order).
2. Act-tokens are Kim-style entities corresponding to a trio consisting of an agent x, an act-type A, and a time t, such that the agent x does something of act-type A at time t.

On either view, the idea that moral obligation applies to act-tokens runs into grave problems.

Religion and Employment Discrimination

The Pope has recently launched an attack on the UK's anti-discrimination legislation.

The Pope seems to be referring to certain provisions in the government's Equality Bill which is currently being debated in Parliament -- specifically, the provisions that clarify the conditions in which an employer can lawfully refuse to hire someone because of their sex or marital status or sexual orientation. According to the bill, the principal conditions in which a religious organization may do this is when filling positions that "mainly involve (a) leading or assisting in the observance of liturgical or ritualistic practices, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others)."

According to the Pope, this "imposes ... unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs, [and] in some respects, ... violates natural law". I shall argue that on this point the UK government is basically right, and the Pope is wrong.

Scheffler's paradox: Persons vs. animals

“Scheffler’s paradox” is a puzzling feature of the moral beliefs of most deontologists. According to these beliefs, it is wrong for you to kill an innocent person even if your killing the innocent person is the only way to prevent five killings of innocent persons from being perpetrated by someone else. What could possibly explain this?

This feature of deontologists’ beliefs cannot be explained purely by their commitment to the moral importance of such distinctions as doing vs. allowing, intending vs. foreseeing, or the like. Most deontologists think that there are stronger reasons against doing harm to non-human animals than against allowing harm to animals; many also think that there are stronger reasons against acting with the intention of harming an animal than against causing such harm to an animal without intending it. But surely you could permissibly kill one bear if that is the only way for you to save five other bears from being killed by someone else. In general, it seems that Scheffler’s paradox does not really arise for killing non-human animals.

So what is the special feature of persons that lies behind Scheffler’s paradox?