I think if you are a pure consequentialist then it is just a fact of the matter that there is a goodness ordering of the three options, and IIA seems compelling again. Perhaps IIA potentially breaks down a bit when one strays from pure consequentialism, I’d like to think about that a bit more.
Yeah, for sure. There are definitely plausible views (like pure consequentialism) that will reject these moral judgments and hold on to IIA.
But just to get clear on the dialectic, I wasn’t taking the salient question to be whether holding on to IIA is tenable. (Since there are plausible views that entail it, I think we can both agree it is!)
Rather, I was taking the salient question to be whether conflicting with IIA is itself a mark against a theory. And I take Pete’s example to tell against this thought, since upon reflection it seems like our ordinary moral judgments violate the IIA. And so, upon reflection, IIA is something we would need to be argued into accepting, not something that we should assume is true by default.
Taking a step back: on one way of looking at your initial post against person-affecting views, you can see the argument as boiling down to the fact that person-affecting views violate IIA. (I take this to be the thrust of Michael’s comment, above.) But if violating IIA isn’t a mark against a theory, then it’s not clear that this is a bad thing. (There might be plenty of other bad things about such views, of course, like the fact that they yield implausible verdicts in cases X, Y and Z. But if so, those would be the reasons for rejecting the view, not the fact that it violates IIA.)
Thanks, this is an interesting example!
I think if you are a pure consequentialist then it is just a fact of the matter that there is a goodness ordering of the three options, and IIA seems compelling again. Perhaps IIA potentially breaks down a bit when one strays from pure consequentialism, I’d like to think about that a bit more.
Yeah, for sure. There are definitely plausible views (like pure consequentialism) that will reject these moral judgments and hold on to IIA.
But just to get clear on the dialectic, I wasn’t taking the salient question to be whether holding on to IIA is tenable. (Since there are plausible views that entail it, I think we can both agree it is!)
Rather, I was taking the salient question to be whether conflicting with IIA is itself a mark against a theory. And I take Pete’s example to tell against this thought, since upon reflection it seems like our ordinary moral judgments violate the IIA. And so, upon reflection, IIA is something we would need to be argued into accepting, not something that we should assume is true by default.
Taking a step back: on one way of looking at your initial post against person-affecting views, you can see the argument as boiling down to the fact that person-affecting views violate IIA. (I take this to be the thrust of Michael’s comment, above.) But if violating IIA isn’t a mark against a theory, then it’s not clear that this is a bad thing. (There might be plenty of other bad things about such views, of course, like the fact that they yield implausible verdicts in cases X, Y and Z. But if so, those would be the reasons for rejecting the view, not the fact that it violates IIA.)