Moral Teleology by Hanno Sauer

Author:Hanno Sauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In some cases, the respective demoralisanda will simply be due to evolutionary “hangovers”, behavioral norms that used to make sense but no longer do. In other cases, dysfunctional or harmful moral norms continue to garner acceptance because they benefit small but powerful groups in society. Sometimes, such norms have failed to unravel earlier because the people subject to them are either unaware that others would rather get rid of those norms as well, or because there is a “first mover” problem that disincentivizes being the first to defect.

Demoralization will usually be a good thing, but it can also have costs that are difficult to appreciate, such as when, by removing its moral flavor from an action, useful social scaffolding of individual behavior is removed as well. Sometimes, the moralization of an issue can provide a helpful external social context supporting one’s autonomous decision-making about drugs, crime, or socially and individually irresponsible behavior more generally. Demoralizing an issue, then, can put more of that burden on individual decision-making. Under conditions of demoralization, people can no longer benefit from the formal and informal sanctions imposed by society to discipline their behavior when contemplating the use of drugs (which can often be prudent). This is also an issue of social inequality, because if some people have, for whatever reasons, better capacities to make autonomous decisions without the social scaffolding supplied by the soft coercion of moral norms, removing that scaffolding will differentially affect those who are already comparatively disadvantaged in terms of their agential and deliberative capacities (Heath, forthcoming b).

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