Matthew Adelstein kindly invited me & Michael Huemer to hash out our disagreements about utilitarianism over on his YouTube channel. The resulting discussion was fun and wide-ranging. In this post, I just want to highlight a couple of major themes that seemed fairly central to our dispute: (1) which intuitions we place the most weight on, and (2) the inferential role of wrongness.| Philosophy, et cetera
Those put-off by the putative counterexamples to Act Consequentialism may consider Rule Consequentialism a more appealing alternative. Michael Huemer goes so far as to suggest that it is "not a crazy view." In this post, I'll explain why I think Rule Consequentialism is not well-supported -- and, at least as standardly formulated, may even be crazy.| Philosophy, et cetera
In 'Why I Am Not a Utilitarian', Michael Huemer objects that "there are so many counter-examples, and the intuitions about these examples are strong and widespread, it’s hard to see how utilitarianism could be justified overall." But I think it's actually much easier to bring utilitarianism (or something close to it) into reflective equilibrium with common sense intuitions than it would be for any competing deontological view. That's because I think the clash between utilitarianism and...| Philosophy, et cetera
Ethical theories are typically formulated as centrally concerning the concept of right action. Introductory ethics classes may define competing theories as offering different completions of the sentence: "An act is right iff...". And that probably works well enough for deontological theories, which are centrally concerned with delineating the boundaries of permissibility and obligation. But I think it's very misleading to treat consequentialist theories as seeking to answer this questi...| Philosophy, et cetera
Back in July, I mentioned our new introduction to population ethics. Since then, I've also added a chapter on Theories of Well-being, and -- brand new as of today -- Arguments for Utilitarianism.| Philosophy, et cetera
One fundamental reason for favouring consequentialism is the basic teleological intuition that the primary purpose of agency is to realize preferable outcomes. If you have a choice between a better state of affairs and a worse one, it's very natural to think that the better state of affairs would be the better option to choose.| Philosophy, et cetera
In 'The Means and the Good' (Analysis, forthcoming) Matthew Oliver argues that pluralist consequentialists can accommodate intuitions against using others as a means, on the model of how they can accommodate intuitions about desert:| Philosophy, et cetera