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Demandingness Objection
The demandingness objection is a common argument raised against utilitarianism and other consequentialist ethical theories. The consequentialist requirement that we maximize the good impartially seems to this objection to require us to perform acts that we would normally consider optional. For example, if our resources maximize utility through charitable contributions rather than spending them on ourselves, we are, according to utilitarianism, morally required to do so. The objection holds that this clashes with our intuitions about morality, since we would normally consider such acts to be "supererogatory" (praiseworthy but not obligatory). It is argued that because consequentialism appears to demand more than common-sense morality, it ought to be revised or rejected. Singer's premise Peter Singer famously made the case for his demanding form of consequentialism in " Famine, Affluence, and Morality" . Here is the thrust of Singer's argument: *"Suffering and death from lack of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utilitarianism
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described ''utility'' as: That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... rto prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, utilitarianism considers the interests of all sentient beings equally. Pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consequentialist
In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative ethics, normative, Teleology, teleological ethical theories that holds that the wikt:consequence, consequences of one's Action (philosophy), conduct are the ultimate basis for judgment about the Morality, rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (or omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of Intrinsic value (ethics), intrinsic value.Teleological Ethics " ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. via ''Encyclopedia.com.'' 28 May 2020. Retrieved 2 J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: # Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined; # Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action; # Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supererogation
Supererogation (Late Latin: ''supererogatio'' "payment beyond what is needed or asked", from ''super'' "beyond" and ''erogare'' "to pay out, expend", itself from ''ex'' "out" and ''rogare'' "to ask") is the performance of more than is asked for; the action of doing more than duty requires. In ethics, an act is supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be done. It refers to an act that is more than is necessary, when another course of action—involving less—would still be an acceptable action. It differs from a duty, which is an act wrong not to do, and from acts morally neutral. Supererogation may be considered as performing above and beyond a normative course of duty to further benefits and functionality. Some philosophers have proposed a corresponding concept of suberogation – whereas supererogatory acts are praiseworthy but not morally required, suberogatory acts are morally discouraged but not prohibited. However, the concept is controversial; with some dis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book '' Animal Liberation'' (1975), in which he argues in favour of veganism, and his essay " Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argues in favour of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he stated in ''The Point of View of the Universe'' (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognised as the Australian Humanist of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Famine, Affluence, And Morality
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is an essay written by Peter Singer in 1971 and published in ''Philosophy & Public Affairs'' in 1972. It argues that affluent persons are morally obligated to donate far more resources to humanitarian causes than is considered normal in Western cultures. The essay was inspired by the starvation of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and uses their situation as an example, although Singer's argument is general in scope and not limited to the example of Bangladesh. The essay is anthologized widely as an example of Western ethical thinking. Summary One of the core arguments of this essay is that, if one can use one's wealth to reduce suffering—for example, by aiding famine-relief efforts—without any significant reduction in the well-being of oneself or others, it is immoral not to do so. Singer introduces the "drowning child" argument: According to Singer, inaction is clearly immoral if a child is drowning in a shallow pond and someone ''can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kantianism
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The term ''Kantianism'' or ''Kantian'' is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Ethics Kantian ethics are deontological, revolving entirely around duty rather than emotions or end goals. All actions are performed in accordance with some underlying maxim or principle, which are vastly different from each other; it is according to this that the moral worth of any action is judged. Kant's ethics are founded on his view of rationality as the ultimate good and his belief that all people are fundamentally rational beings. This led to the most important part of Kant's ethics, the formulation of the categorical imperative, which is the criterion for whether a maxim is good or bad. Simply put, this criterion amounts to a thought experiment: to attempt to universalize the maxim (by imagining a worl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ought Implies Can
"Ought implies can" is an ethical formula ascribed to Immanuel Kant that claims an agent, if morally obliged to perform a certain action, must logically be able to perform it: Kant believed this principle was a categorical freedom, bound only by the free will as opposed to the Humean hypothetical freedom ("Free to do otherwise if I had so chosen"). There are several ways of deriving the formula—for example, the argument that it is wrong to blame people for things that they cannot control (essentially phrasing the formula as the contrapositive "'cannot' implies 'has no duty to'"). This ethical formula can be expressed in deontic logic with the multimodal axiom: OA \to \Diamond A , where the deontic operator O means "It's obligatory that..." and the alethic operator \Diamond means "It's possible that...". However, in practical situations, obligations are usually assigned in anticipation of future events, in which case alethic possibilities can be hard to judge; Therefore, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Pettit
Philip Noel Pettit (born 1945) is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Education and career Pettit was educated at Garbally College, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA, LPh, MA) and Queen's University, Belfast (PhD). He has been a lecturer at University College, Dublin, a research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and professor at the University of Bradford. He was for many years professorial fellow in social and political theory at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University before becoming a visiting professor of philosophy at Columbia University for five years, then moving to Princeton. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He was keynote speak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bystander Effect
The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present. First proposed in 1964, much research, mostly in the lab, has focused on increasingly varied factors, such as the number of bystanders, ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial. If a single individual is asked to complete the task alone, the sense of responsibility will be strong, and there will be a positive response; however, if a group is required to complete the task together, each individual in the group will have a weak sense of responsibility, and will often shrink back in the face of difficulties or responsibilities. The theory was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese about which it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively. Recent research has focused on "real world" events captured on security cameras, and the coherency a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay " What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in ''The Possibility of Altruism'' (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in ''Mind and Cosmos'' (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. Life and career Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to German Jewish refugees Carolyn (Baer) and Walter Nagel. He arrived in the US in 1939, and was raised in and around New York. He had no religious upbringing, but regards himself as a Jew. N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shelly Kagan
Shelly Kagan () (born 1956) is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He is best known for his writings about moral philosophy and normative ethics. In 2007, Kagan's course about death was offered for free online, and was very popular. This led to him publishing a book on the subject in 2012. Kagan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. Education and career A native of Skokie, Illinois, Skokie, Illinois, Kagan received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1981 until 1986, and at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1986 until 1995, before taking a position at Yale."Shelly Kagan named Clark Professor of Philosophy" , ''Yale Bulle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
