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.
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.