I’m confused about how you’re dividing up the three ethical paradigms. I know you said your categories were excessively simplistic. But I’m not sure they even roughly approximate my background knowledge of the three systems, and they don’t seem like places you’d want to draw the boundaries in any case.
For example, my reading of Kant, a major deontological thinker, is that one identifies a maxim by asking about the effect on society if that maxim were universalized. That seems to be looking at an action at time T1, and evaluating the effects at times after T1 should that action be considered morally permissible and therefore repeated. That doesn’t seem to be a process of looking “causally upstream” of the act.
When I’ve seen references to virtue ethics, they usually seem to involve arbitrating the morality of the act via some sort of organic discussion within one’s moral community. I don’t think most virtue ethicists would think that if we could hook somebody up to a brain scrambler that changed their psychological state to something more or less tasteful immediately before the act, that this could somehow make the act more or less moral. I don’t buy that virtue ethicists judge actions based on how you were feeling right before you did it.
And of course, we do have rule utilitarianism, which doesn’t judge individual actions by their downstream consequences, but rules for actions.
Honestly, I’ve never quite understood the idea that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are carving morality at the joints. That’s a strong assertion to make, and it seems like you have to bend these moral traditions to the categorization scheme. I haven’t seen a natural categorization scheme that fits them like a glove and yet beating distinguishes one from the other.
You’re absolutely right to criticize that section! It’s just not good. I will add more warning labels/caveats to it ASAP. This is always the pitfall of doing YAABINE.
That said, I do think the three families can be divided up based on what they take to be explanatorily fundamental. That’s what I was trying to do (even though I probably failed). The slogan goes like this: VE is “all about” what kind of person we should be, DE is “all about” what duties we have, and Consequentialism is “all about” the consequences of our actions. Character, duty, consequences – three key moral terms. (And natural joints? Who knows). Theories from each family will have something to say about all three terms, but each family of theory takes a different term to be explanatorily fundamental.
So you’re absolutely right that, in their judgments of particular cases, they can all appeal to facts up and down the causal stream (e.g. there is no reason consequentialists can’t refer to promises made earlier when trying to determine the consequences of an action). Maybe another way to put this: the decision procedures proposed by the various theories take all sorts of facts as inputs. You give a number of examples of this. But ultimately, what sorts of facts unify those various judgments under a common explanation according to each family of theory? That’s what I was trying to point at. I thought one way to divvy those explanatorily fundamental facts was by there position along the causal stream but maybe I was wrong. I’m really not sure!
Unrelated reply:
I don’t buy that virtue ethicists judge actions based on how you were feeling right before you did it.
I completely agree that actual virtue ethicists would not do so, but the theory many of them are implicitly attached to (“do as the virtuous agent would do, for all the reasons the virtuous agent would do it”) does seem to judge people based on how you were feeling/what you were thinking right before you did it.
The big distinction I think needs to be made is between offering a guide to extant consensus on moral paradigms, and proposing your own view on how moral paradigms ought to be divided up. It might not really be possible to give an appropriate summary of moral paradigms in the space you’ve allotted to yourself, just as I wouldn’t want to try and sum up, say, “indigenous vs Western environmentalist paradigms” in the space of a couple paragraphs.
I’m confused about how you’re dividing up the three ethical paradigms. I know you said your categories were excessively simplistic. But I’m not sure they even roughly approximate my background knowledge of the three systems, and they don’t seem like places you’d want to draw the boundaries in any case.
For example, my reading of Kant, a major deontological thinker, is that one identifies a maxim by asking about the effect on society if that maxim were universalized. That seems to be looking at an action at time T1, and evaluating the effects at times after T1 should that action be considered morally permissible and therefore repeated. That doesn’t seem to be a process of looking “causally upstream” of the act.
When I’ve seen references to virtue ethics, they usually seem to involve arbitrating the morality of the act via some sort of organic discussion within one’s moral community. I don’t think most virtue ethicists would think that if we could hook somebody up to a brain scrambler that changed their psychological state to something more or less tasteful immediately before the act, that this could somehow make the act more or less moral. I don’t buy that virtue ethicists judge actions based on how you were feeling right before you did it.
And of course, we do have rule utilitarianism, which doesn’t judge individual actions by their downstream consequences, but rules for actions.
Honestly, I’ve never quite understood the idea that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are carving morality at the joints. That’s a strong assertion to make, and it seems like you have to bend these moral traditions to the categorization scheme. I haven’t seen a natural categorization scheme that fits them like a glove and yet beating distinguishes one from the other.
You’re absolutely right to criticize that section! It’s just not good. I will add more warning labels/caveats to it ASAP. This is always the pitfall of doing YAABINE.
That said, I do think the three families can be divided up based on what they take to be explanatorily fundamental. That’s what I was trying to do (even though I probably failed). The slogan goes like this: VE is “all about” what kind of person we should be, DE is “all about” what duties we have, and Consequentialism is “all about” the consequences of our actions. Character, duty, consequences – three key moral terms. (And natural joints? Who knows). Theories from each family will have something to say about all three terms, but each family of theory takes a different term to be explanatorily fundamental.
So you’re absolutely right that, in their judgments of particular cases, they can all appeal to facts up and down the causal stream (e.g. there is no reason consequentialists can’t refer to promises made earlier when trying to determine the consequences of an action). Maybe another way to put this: the decision procedures proposed by the various theories take all sorts of facts as inputs. You give a number of examples of this. But ultimately, what sorts of facts unify those various judgments under a common explanation according to each family of theory? That’s what I was trying to point at. I thought one way to divvy those explanatorily fundamental facts was by there position along the causal stream but maybe I was wrong. I’m really not sure!
Unrelated reply:
I completely agree that actual virtue ethicists would not do so, but the theory many of them are implicitly attached to (“do as the virtuous agent would do, for all the reasons the virtuous agent would do it”) does seem to judge people based on how you were feeling/what you were thinking right before you did it.
Thanks for clarifying!
The big distinction I think needs to be made is between offering a guide to extant consensus on moral paradigms, and proposing your own view on how moral paradigms ought to be divided up. It might not really be possible to give an appropriate summary of moral paradigms in the space you’ve allotted to yourself, just as I wouldn’t want to try and sum up, say, “indigenous vs Western environmentalist paradigms” in the space of a couple paragraphs.