Moral Uncertainty by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191033643
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

I. Against Scepticism

The first two arguments in favour of scepticism appealed to specific cases, where either there were no intuitive comparisons to be made, or where the natural comparison would lead to swamping, which was taken to be an implausible result.

However, one can only draw a limited conclusion by appealing to specific cases. At most, one can show that sometimes intertheoretic comparisons do not hold between two theories. One cannot, thereby, show that they (almost) never hold between two theories, or that they are impossible. Usually, the appeal to cases and swamping arguments have been made in the context of arguing against MEC. A presupposition has been that if intertheoretic comparisons of choice-worthiness differences are sometimes impossible, then MEC cannot be a perfectly general account of what to do under normative uncertainty. But that presupposition is false; as we have seen in the previous chapters, by using Borda and variance voting we can apply a modified form of MEC even in conditions of intertheoretic comparability and even in conditions of merely ordinal theories.

Moreover, there are also many cases where two different moral views intuitively do seem comparable. We describe three classes of cases.

The first class of cases is the most compelling cases of MEC-style reasoning, where the two moral viewpoints differ with respect to only one moral issue. Consider, for example, the following statements.9

If animals have rights in the way that humans do, then killing animals is a much more severe wrongdoing than if they don’t.

If Singer is right about our duties to the poor, then our obligation to give to development charities is much stronger than if he’s wrong.

These are cases where we’re not really comparing two different complete theories, considered in the abstract. We’re comparing two different moral views that differ with respect to just one moral issue. In these cases, the intertheoretic comparison seems obvious: namely, that choice-worthiness differences are the same between the two views with respect to all moral issues other than the one on which they differ.

The second class is variable-extension cases: unlike the former, these are cases involving complete theories, considered in the abstract.10 Consider, for example, two forms of utilitarianism. They both have exactly the same hedonistic conception of welfare, and they both agree on all situations involving only humans: they agree that one should maximize the sum total of human welfare. They only disagree on the extension of bearers of value. One view places moral weight on animals; the other places no moral weight on animals, and they therefore disagree in situations where animals will be affected. Between these two theories, the intertheoretic comparison seems obvious: they both agree on how to treat humans, and therefore it seems clear that the choice-worthiness difference of saving one human life compared to saving no human lives is the same on both theories. Other similar examples can be given. If we consider a form of utilitarianism that claims that only presently existing people have moral weight and we should maximize the sum of their

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.