Don't have an account? Consequentialism has since its inception faced persistent challenges of excess: it is, critics charge, too demanding, too confining, and too alienating to offer a plausible alternative moral theory.
This chapter argues that the deeper challenge confronting consequentialism is not one of excess but of defect; in particular, of defects along precisely these dimensions upon which it is taken to be excessive. Developing a line of thought introduced in Chapter 1, the arguments in this chapter draw upon the work of Shelly Kagan and others to demonstrate that consequentialism, as it is typically presented, is a theory of exacting moral standards, but not of decisive reasons for agents to conform to these standards.
As a result, this theory of exacting moral standards can, with perfect consistency, be incorporated within an overall account upon which there are few, if any, rational demands upon agents to heed such standards. These challenges of defect confronting consequentialism are far more formidable than the traditional challenges of excess. Keywords: demandingness , confinement , Kagan , moral reasons , moral standards , impersonal standpoint.
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This negative utilitarianism implies that the government should provide contraceptives, since that program reduces pain and other disvalues , even though it also decreases total net pleasure or good. Unfortunately, negative utilitarianism also seems to imply that the government should painlessly kill everyone it can, since dead people feel no pain and have no false beliefs, diseases, or disabilities — though killing them does cause loss of ability.
A more popular response is average utilitarianism, which says that the best consequences are those with the highest average utility cf. Rawls , — The average utility would be higher with the contraceptive program than without it, so average utilitarianism yields the more plausible result—that the government should adopt the contraceptive program.
Critics sometimes charge that the average utility could also be increased by killing the worst off, but this claim is not at all clear, because such killing would put everyone in danger since, after the worst off are killed, another group becomes the worst off, and then they might be killed next.
In any case, all maximizing consequentialists, whether or not they are pluralists, must decide whether moral rightness depends on maximizing total good or average good.
On this view, it is senseless to call something good unless this means that it is good for someone or in some respect or for some use or at some activity or as an instance of some kind. Consequentialists are supposed to violate this restriction when they say that the total or average consequences or the world as a whole is good without any such qualification.
A second set of problems for classic utilitarianism is epistemological. Classic utilitarianism seems to require that agents calculate all consequences of each act for every person for all time. This objection rests on a misinterpretation. These critics assume that the principle of utility is supposed to be used as a decision procedure or guide , that is, as a method that agents consciously apply to acts in advance to help them make decisions.
However, most classic and contemporary utilitarians and consequentialists do not propose their principles as decision procedures. IV, Sec. II, Par. Instead, most consequentialists claim that overall utility is the criterion or standard of what is morally right or morally ought to be done. Their theories are intended to spell out the necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to be morally right, regardless of whether the agent can tell in advance whether those conditions are met.
Just as the laws of physics govern golf ball flight, but golfers need not calculate physical forces while planning shots; so overall utility can determine which decisions are morally right, even if agents need not calculate utilities while making decisions.
If the principle of utility is used as a criterion of the right rather than as a decision procedure, then classical utilitarianism does not require that anyone know the total consequences of anything before making a decision. Furthermore, a utilitarian criterion of right implies that it would not be morally right to use the principle of utility as a decision procedure in cases where it would not maximize utility to try to calculate utilities before acting.
Utilitarians regularly argue that most people in most circumstances ought not to try to calculate utilities, because they are too likely to make serious miscalculations that will lead them to perform actions that reduce utility. It is even possible to hold that most agents usually ought to follow their moral intuitions, because these intuitions evolved to lead us to perform acts that maximize utility, at least in likely circumstances Hare , 46— Some utilitarians Sidgwick , —90 suggest that a utilitarian decision procedure may be adopted as an esoteric morality by an elite group that is better at calculating utilities, but utilitarians can, instead, hold that nobody should use the principle of utility as a decision procedure.
This move is supposed to make consequentialism self-refuting, according to some opponents. Similar distinctions apply in other normative realms. The criterion of a good stock investment is its total return, but the best decision procedure still might be to reduce risk by buying an index fund or blue-chip stocks. Criteria can, thus, be self-effacing without being self-refuting Parfit , chs. Others object that this move takes the force out of consequentialism, because it leads agents to ignore consequentialism when they make real decisions.
However, a criterion of the right can be useful at a higher level by helping us choose among available decision procedures and refine our decision procedures as circumstances change and we gain more experience and knowledge. Hence, most consequentialists do not mind giving up consequentialism as a direct decision procedure as long as consequences remain the criterion of rightness but see Chappell If overall utility is the criterion of moral rightness, then it might seem that nobody could know what is morally right.
If so, classical utilitarianism leads to moral skepticism. However, utilitarians insist that we can have strong reasons to believe that certain acts reduce utility, even if we have not yet inspected or predicted every consequence of those acts.
For example, in normal circumstances, if someone were to torture and kill his children, it is possible that this would maximize utility, but that is very unlikely. Maybe they would have grown up to be mass murders, but it is at least as likely that they would grow up to cure serious diseases or do other great things, and it is much more likely that they would have led normally happy or at least not destructive lives.
So observers as well as agents have adequate reasons to believe that such acts are morally wrong, according to act utilitarianism. In many other cases, it will still be hard to tell whether an act will maximize utility, but that shows only that there are severe limits to our knowledge of what is morally right. That should be neither surprising nor problematic for utilitarians. If utilitarians want their theory to allow more moral knowledge, they can make a different kind of move by turning from actual consequences to expected or expectable consequences.
Suppose that Alice finds a runaway teenager who asks for money to get home. Alice wants to help and reasonably believes that buying a bus ticket home for this runaway will help, so she buys a bus ticket and puts the runaway on the bus. Unfortunately, the bus is involved in a freak accident, and the runaway is killed. If actual consequences are what determine moral wrongness, then it was morally wrong for Alice to buy the bus ticket for this runaway.
Opponents claim that this result is absurd enough to refute classic utilitarianism. Since this theory makes actual consequences determine moral rightness, it can be called actual consequentialism.
Other responses claim that moral rightness depends on foreseen, foreseeable, intended, or likely consequences, rather than actual ones. Imagine that Bob does not in fact foresee a bad consequence that would make his act wrong if he did foresee it, but that Bob could easily have foreseen this bad consequence if he had been paying attention.
Maybe he does not notice the rot on the hamburger he feeds to his kids which makes them sick. If Don feeds the rotten meat to his little sister, and it makes her sick, then the bad consequences are not intended, foreseen, or even foreseeable by Don, but those bad results are still objectively likely or probable , unlike the case of Alice. Some philosophers deny that probability can be fully objective, but at least the consequences here are foreseeable by others who are more informed than Don can be at the time.
For Don to feed the rotten meat to his sister is, therefore, morally wrong if likely consequences are what matter, but not morally wrong if what matter are foreseen or foreseeable or intended consequences. Consequentialist moral theories that focus on actual or objectively probable consequences are often described as objective consequentialism Railton In contrast, consequentialist moral theories that focus on intended or foreseen consequences are usually described as subjective consequentialism.
One final solution to these epistemological problems deploys the legal notion of proximate cause. If consequentialists define consequences in terms of what is caused unlike Sosa , then which future events count as consequences is affected by which notion of causation is used to define consequences. Suppose I give a set of steak knives to a friend.
Unforeseeably, when she opens my present, the decorative pattern on the knives somehow reminds her of something horrible that her husband did. This memory makes her so angry that she voluntarily stabs and kills him with one of the knives. She would not have killed her husband if I had given her spoons instead of knives.
Most people and the law would say that the cause was her act, not mine. Moreover, even if she did not voluntarily kill him, but instead she slipped and fell on the knives, thereby killing herself, my gift would still not be a cause of her death, because the coincidence of her falling intervened between my act and her death. Now, if we assume that an act must be such a proximate cause of a harm in order for that harm to be a consequence of that act, then consequentialists can claim that the moral rightness of that act is determined only by such proximate consequences.
This position, which might be called proximate consequentialism , makes it much easier for agents and observers to justify moral judgments of acts because it obviates the need to predict non-proximate consequences in distant times and places. Hence, this move is worth considering, even though it has never been developed as far as I know and deviates far from traditional consequentialism, which counts not only proximate consequences but all upshots — that is, everything for which the act is a causally necessary condition.
Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant.
Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily for them, not for him!
There is no other way to save any of the other five patients Foot , Thomson ; compare related cases in Carritt and McCloskey If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. Utilitarians can bite the bullet, again. Of course, doctors still should not cut up their patients in anything close to normal circumstances, but this example is so abnormal and unrealistic that we should not expect our normal moral rules to apply, and we should not trust our moral intuitions, which evolved to fit normal situations Sprigge Many utilitarians are happy to reject common moral intuitions in this case, like many others cf.
Singer , Unger , Norcross Most utilitarians lack such strong stomachs or teeth , so they modify utilitarianism to bring it in line with common moral intuitions, including the intuition that doctors should not cut up innocent patients. One attempt claims that a killing is worse than a death. If one killing is worse than five deaths that do not involve killing, then the world that results from the doctor performing the transplant is worse than the world that results from the doctor not performing the transplant.
A modified example still seems problematic. Just suppose that the five patients need a kidney, a lung, a heart, and so forth because they were all victims of murder attempts. Then the world will contain the five killings of them if they die, but not if they do not die. But most people still think it would be morally wrong for the doctor to kill the one to prevent the five killings.
In this view, the doctor is not required to promote life or decrease death or even decrease killing by other people. The doctor is, instead, required to honor the value of life by not causing loss of life cf. Pettit This kind of case leads some consequentialists to introduce agent-relativity into their theory of value Sen , Broome , Portmore , To apply a consequentialist moral theory, we need to compare the world with the transplant to the world without the transplant.
If this comparative evaluation must be agent-neutral, then, if an observer judges that the world with the transplant is better, the agent must make the same judgment, or else one of them is mistaken. However, if such evaluations can be agent-relative, then it could be legitimate for an observer to judge that the world with the transplant is better since it contains fewer killings by anyone , while it is also legitimate for the doctor as agent to judge that the world with the transplant is worse because it includes a killing by him.
This kind of agent-relative consequentialism is then supposed to capture commonsense moral intuitions in such cases. Agent-relativity is also supposed to solve other problems. Ross , 34—35 argued that, if breaking a promise created only slightly more happiness overall than keeping the promise, then the agent morally ought to break the promise according to classic utilitarianism.
This supposed counterexample cannot be avoided simply by claiming that keeping promises has agent-neutral value, since keeping one promise might prevent someone else from keeping another promise. In this way, agent-relative consequentialists can explain why agents morally ought not to break their promises in just the kind of case that Ross raised.
Similarly, critics of utilitarianism often argue that utilitarians cannot be good friends, because a good friend places more weight on the welfare of his or her friends than on the welfare of strangers, but utilitarianism requires impartiality among all people. In this way, consequentialists try to capture common moral intuitions about the duties of friendship see also Jackson One final variation still causes trouble. Imagine that the doctor herself wounded the five people who need organs.
If the doctor does not save their lives, then she will have killed them herself. In this case, even if the doctor can disvalue killings by herself more than killings by other people, the world still seems better from her own perspective if she performs the transplant. Critics will object that it is, nonetheless, morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant.
Many people will not find this intuition as clear as in the other cases, but those who do find it immoral for the doctor to perform the transplant even in this case will want to modify consequentialism in some other way in order to yield the desired judgment.
This problem cannot be solved by building rights or fairness or desert into the theory of value. The five do not deserve to die, and they do deserve their lives, just as much as the one does.
So consequentialists need more than just new values if they want to avoid endorsing this transplant. One option is to go indirect. A direct consequentialist holds that the moral qualities of something depend only on the consequences of that very thing. Thus, a direct consequentialist about motives holds that the moral qualities of a motive depend on the consequences of that motive.
A direct consequentialist about virtues holds that the moral qualities of a character trait such as whether or not it is a moral virtue depend on the consequences of that trait Driver a, Hurka , Jamieson , Bradley A direct consequentialist about acts holds that the moral qualities of an act depend on the consequences of that act. Someone who adopts direct consequentialism about everything is a global direct consequentialist Pettit and Smith , Driver In contrast, an indirect consequentialist holds that the moral qualities of something depend on the consequences of something else.
One indirect version of consequentialism is motive consequentialism , which claims that the moral qualities of an act depend on the consequences of the motive of that act compare Adams and Sverdlik Another indirect version is virtue consequentialism , which holds that whether an act is morally right depends on whether it stems from or expresses a state of character that maximizes good consequences and, hence, is a virtue.
The most common indirect consequentialism is rule consequentialism , which makes the moral rightness of an act depend on the consequences of a rule Singer Since a rule is an abstract entity, a rule by itself strictly has no consequences. Still, obedience rule consequentialists can ask what would happen if everybody obeyed a rule or what would happen if everybody violated a rule. They might argue, for example, that theft is morally wrong because it would be disastrous if everybody broke a rule against theft.
Often, however, it does not seem morally wrong to break a rule even though it would cause disaster if everybody broke it. Luckily, our species will not die out if everyone is permitted not to have children, since enough people want to have children. Such acceptance rule consequentialists then claim that an act is morally wrong if and only if it violates a rule whose acceptance has better consequences than the acceptance of any incompatible rule.
In some accounts, a rule is accepted when it is built into individual consciences Brandt Other rule utilitarians, however, require that moral rules be publicly known Gert ; cf. Sinnott-Armstrong b or built into public institutions Rawls Then they hold what can be called public acceptance rule consequentialism : an act is morally wrong if and only if it violates a rule whose public acceptance maximizes the good.
The indirectness of such rule utilitarianism provides a way to remain consequentialist and yet capture the common moral intuition that it is immoral to perform the transplant in the above situation.
Suppose people generally accepted a rule that allows a doctor to transplant organs from a healthy person without consent when the doctor believes that this transplant will maximize utility. Widely accepting this rule would lead to many transplants that do not maximize utility, since doctors like most people are prone to errors in predicting consequences and weighing utilities.
Moreover, if the rule is publicly known, then patients will fear that they might be used as organ sources, so they would be less likely to go to a doctor when they need one. The medical profession depends on trust that this public rule would undermine. For such reasons, some rule utilitarians conclude that it would not maximize utility for people generally to accept a rule that allows doctors to transplant organs from unwilling donors.
Common moral intuition is thereby preserved. Rule utilitarianism faces several potential counterexamples such as whether public rules allowing slavery could sometimes maximize utility and needs to be formulated more precisely particularly in order to avoid collapsing into act-utilitarianism; cf.
Lyons Such details are discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia see Hooker on rule-consequentialism.
Here I just want to point out that direct consequentialists find it convoluted and implausible to judge a particular act by the consequences of something else Smart Rule consequentialists can respond that we should not claim special rights or permissions that we are not willing to grant to every other person, and that it is arrogant to think we are less prone to mistakes than other people are.
However, this doctor can reply that he is willing to give everyone the right to violate the usual rules in the rare cases when they do know for sure that violating those rules really maximizes utility. Anyway, even if rule utilitarianism accords with some common substantive moral intuitions, it still seems counterintuitive in other ways.
This makes it worthwhile to consider how direct consequentialists can bring their views in line with common moral intuitions, and whether they need to do so. Another popular charge is that classic utilitarianism demands too much, because it requires us to do acts that are or should be moral options neither obligatory nor forbidden.
If it is morally wrong to do anything other than what maximizes utility, then it is morally wrong for me to buy the shoes. But buying the shoes does not seem morally wrong. It might be morally better to give the money to charity, but such contributions seem supererogatory, that is, above and beyond the call of duty. Of course, there are many more cases like this. When I watch television, I always or almost always could do more good by helping others, but it does not seem morally wrong to watch television.
When I choose to teach philosophy rather than working for CARE or the Peace Corps, my choice probably fails to maximize utility overall. If we were required to maximize utility, then we would have to make very different choices in many areas of our lives.
The requirement to maximize utility, thus, strikes many people as too demanding because it interferes with the personal decisions that most of us feel should be left up to the individual. Some utilitarians respond by arguing that we really are morally required to change our lives so as to do a lot more to increase overall utility see Kagan , P. Singer , and Unger Such hard-liners claim that most of what most people do is morally wrong, because most people rarely maximize utility.
Some such wrongdoing might be blameless when agents act from innocent or even desirable motives, but it is still supposed to be moral wrongdoing.
Opponents of utilitarianism find this claim implausible, but it is not obvious that their counter-utilitarian intuitions are reliable or well-grounded Murphy , chs. Mulgan , Singer , Greene Other utilitarians blunt the force of the demandingness objection by limiting direct utilitarianism to what people morally ought to do. Even if we morally ought to maximize utility, it need not be morally wrong to fail to maximize utility. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that an act is morally wrong only when both it fails to maximize utility and its agent is liable to punishment for the failure Mill It does not always maximize utility to punish people for failing to maximize utility.
Thus, on this view, it is not always morally wrong to fail to do what one morally ought to do. If Mill is correct about this, then utilitarians can say that we ought to give much more to charity, but we are not required or obliged to do so, and failing to do so is not morally wrong cf. Sinnott-Armstrong Many utilitarians still want to avoid the claim that we morally ought to give so much to charity. One way around this claim uses a rule-utilitarian theory of what we morally ought to do.
If it costs too much to internalize rules implying that we ought to give so much to charity, then, according to such rule-utilitarianism, it is not true that we ought to give so much to charity Hooker , ch. Another route follows an agent-relative theory of value. A problem is that such consequentialism would seem to imply that we morally ought not to contribute those resources to charity, although such contributions seem at least permissible.
More personal leeway could also be allowed by deploying the legal notion of proximate causation. Thus, if an act is morally right when it includes the most net good in its proximate consequences, then it might not be morally wrong either to contribute to the charity or to fail to do so.
This potential position, as mentioned above, has not yet been developed, as far as I know. Yet another way to reach this conclusion is to give up maximization and to hold instead that we morally ought to do what creates enough utility.
This position is often described as satisficing consequentialism Slote According to satisficing consequentialism, it is not morally wrong to fail to contribute to a charity if one contributes enough to other charities and if the money or time that one could contribute does create enough good, so it is not just wasted. Remove from this list Direct download 7 more. After all, giving to overseas charities often comes with such risks.
I argue that plausible non-consequentialist criteria imply that it is not wrong to give to at least some of the charities that Singer and other effective altruists recommend. Harm in Applied Ethics in Applied Ethics. We emerge from certain activities with an altered sense of self. Since projects can be more or less morally obligatory But sacrifices of self pose a special difficulty for any such accounting, precisely because of their transformative nature.
Unlike most other sacrifices, they cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of wellbeing. Using real-world case studies and examples, I argue for the existence of two types of sacrifice of self, involving changes in identity and moral agency. I argue that sacrifices of self require particular attention because they may be extra difficult to compare with other costs and with moral gains.
Ethics in Value Theory, Miscellaneous. Remove from this list Direct download 2 more. I argue that even according to common-sense morality, the demands faced by particular agents depend on a variety of contingent factors. These include the general circumstances, the compliance of others, the Moral Luck in Normative Ethics.
Starting from the typical case of utilitarianism, I distinguish three ways a moral theory may be deemed over- demanding: practical, epistemic, and cognitive. I focus on the latter, whose specific nature has been overlooked. Taking animal ethics as a case study, I argue that knowledge of human cognition is critical to spelling out moral theories including their implications that are accessible and acceptable to the greatest number of agents. In a nutshell: knowing more about our cognitive apparatus with a view to This meta-theoretical suggestion, however, differs from a classical objection drawn from the intuition that a given theory demands too much.
Animal Ethics in Applied Ethics. Ethics and Cognitive Science in Normative Ethics. Remove from this list Direct download 2 more Translate. Morality is demanding; this is a platitude. It is thus no surprise when we find that moral theories too, when we look into what they require, turn out to be demanding.
However, there is at least one moral theory — consequentialism — that is said to be beset by this demandingness problem. This calls for an explanation: Why only consequentialism? This then leads to related questions: What is the demandingness problematic about?
What exactly does it claim? Finally, there is the The present chapter sets out to answer these questions or at least point to how they could be answered. Alienation in Normative Ethics. Moral Psychology, Misc in Normative Ethics.
Pratical Reason, Misc in Philosophy of Action. Utilitarianism, Misc in Normative Ethics. This volume responds to the growing interest in finding explanations for why moral claims may lose their validity based on what they ask of their addressees. Two main ideas relate to that question: the moral demandingness objection and the principle "ought implies can. The aim of this collection is to provide a focused and comprehensive Chapters engage with contemporary discussions surrounding "ought implies can" as well as current debates on moral demandingness, and argue that applying the moral demandingness objection to the entire range of normative ethical theories also calls for an analysis of its presuppositions.
The contributions to this volume are at the leading edge of ethical theory, and have implications for moral theorists, philosophers of action, and those working in metaethics, theoretical ethics and applied ethics. Moral Normativity, Misc in Meta-Ethics. Moral Principles, Misc in Meta-Ethics. Values and Norms in Normative Ethics. Consequentialism is often criticized for rendering morality too pervasive.
One somewhat neglected manifestation of this pervasiveness is the obligatory self-benefit objection. According to this objection, act-consequentialism has the counterintuitive result that certain self-benefitting actions turn out, ceteris paribus, to be morally obligatory rather than morally optional. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, I consider and reject four strategies with which consequentialists might answer the obligatory self-benefit objection.
Despite the apparent consequentialist credentials of these answers, none of these strategies Second, I argue that no plausible consequentialist response to this objection is forthcoming because consequentialism denies the central axiological fact propelling this objection, namely, that the self possesses a normative architecture relating the self as agent and self as patient.
This architecture, I propose, justifies the option not to benefit oneself. Remove from this list Direct download 4 more. There is virtually no philosophical consensus on what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect duties should satisfy.
Using beneficence as a leading example, I suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have trouble meeting those criteria.
I then propose a new approach: thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that this proposal can Collective Responsibility in Meta-Ethics.
Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are — for good reasons — conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases.
This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince.
While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter.
Climate Change in Applied Ethics. Responsibility in Applied Ethics in Applied Ethics. An influential objection to act-consequentialism holds that the theory is unduly demanding. This paper is an attempt to approach this critique of act-consequentialism — the Overdemandingness Objection — from a different, so far undiscussed, angle.
First, the paper argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, in order to investigate the existence of the In a scenario study that recruited a sample which is representative of the German population in key characteristics, it finds that there is no widely shared intuition as to the excessive demandingness of consequentialist requirements, although people do find higher demands less reasonable.
Apart from contributing in this way to the debate concerning the Overdemandingness Objection, the paper also more directly speaks to the basic discussion concerning the status and role of intuitions in moral philosophy.
It discusses methodological questions relevant to the role of intuitions and ends with proposing an improved methodology to investigate intuitions that connects them to emotions in a particular way and also proposes a role for virtue. Experimental Philosophy: Folk Morality in Metaphilosophy. Virtue Ethics, Misc in Normative Ethics. Examining folk intuitions about philosophical questions lies at the core of experimental philosophy.
This requires both a good account of what intuitions are and methods allowing to assess them. We propose to combine philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of intuitions by focusing on three of their features: immediacy, lack of inferential relations, and stability.
Once this account of intuition is at hand, we move on to propose a methodology that can test all three characteristics without eliminating any of them. In the Dogged resistance to demanding moral views frequently takes the form of The Demandingness Objection.
Premise 1 : Moral view V demands too much of us. Premise 2 : If a moral view demands too much of us, then it is mistaken. Conclusion: Therefore, moral view V is mistaken.
Objections of this form harass major theories in normative ethics as well as prominent moral views in applied ethics and political philosophy. The present paper does the following: i it clarifies and distinguishes between various Epistemology of Intuition in Epistemology. Moral Intuition in Normative Ethics. Knowledge is necessary for certain moral obligations. In learning something new, one sometimes triggers a moral obligation.
This paper argues that the existence of these knowledge-based obligations poses a problem for the view that we are not only free to choose the course of our own lives, including our careers and personal projects, but also free to change our minds and quit at any time to pursue something else.
For if our choice of life path has generated knowledge-based moral obligations To resolve this tension, this paper proposes a relatively demanding set of conditions under which it is permissible to swap one career or life project for another. The resulting compromise reconciles the moral force of knowledge-based obligations with the basic freedom to choose less-than-optimal careers and projects.
The paper begins with a detailed discussion of the Overdemandingness Objection to consequentialism. It argues that the best interpretation of the Objection is the one that focuses on reasons: consequentialism is overdemanding because it demands us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to do. After this, the paper goes on to offer three — so far in the literature unpursued — responses to the Objection. The first puts forward a constitutive role of What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do.
Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of
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