PEA Soup

What’s So Compelling about Act-Consequentialism and So Puzzling about Non-Act-Consequentialism

It seems to me that there are not only reasons for action, but also reasons for belief and even reasons for having certain feelings and attitudes. But even if you don’t accept that there are non-instrumental normative reasons to want something or to prefer one thing to another, let’s just grant, for the sake of argument, that there are. If we grant this, it seems that we should also grant that a complete moral theory should tells us not only how we morally ought to act but also what we morally ought to feel, desire, prefer, etc. If this is so, we should, I think, distinguish act-consequentialism from its rivals according to how they prioritize the following two questions:

Q1  Morally speaking, which of the available outcomes (i.e., those which an agent can actualize through her action or inaction) should an agent prefer to which others? Or, in other words, which of the available outcomes should an agent rank above which others in terms of the moral desirability of their obtaining.

Q2  Morally speaking, which of the available acts should an agent perform?

"Dear moral expert ..."

If there are moral experts, this would seem to have important implications for a number of issues in philosophical ethics.  So who is a moral expert?  Here are some thoughts of my own.

[1] A moral expert is someone to whom one could go for sound moral advice.  The moral expert is an expert about morality in the sense that a physician is an expert about health, not in the way that (say) an historian  is an expert about a particular field or period in history.  That is to say, moral expertise is a kind of practical expertise.

On the vagaries of moral attention

If (like me) you think that it's more important to making the world a better place that people pay attention to the right things (rather than, say, that they hold the right beliefs), then you have to be struck by the differential in media attention to two stories over the past week.  The first is the efforts to resuce seven Russian sailors trapped in a submarine in the Pacific Ocean. They were rescued this morning with the help of U.S. and British military resuce teams.

The other is the ongoing drought and widespread starvation in Niger.  Niger frequently has difficulty feeding its population, but this year inadequate rains have placed 3.6 million people in danger of starvation, including large numbers of children.

The Russian sub story was the top story on CNN and other major media outlets for the past three days.  Niger made front page appearances in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times late last week, along with stories on CNN, but quickly faded from view, being consigned to the more obscure 'international' pages of the newspapers