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Consequentialism is the view that right actions are those that maximise the amount of value in the world (or: "do most good"). Normally, consequentialists will define value, or good, in some fairly predictable manner, namely, largely concerning the welfare of humans and (probably) non-human animals.

One interesting consequence of such a view is that consequentialists have very little to offer on politics. Our response ought to be something like: "Go ask the economists, political scientists, or social scientists". These are the people who work out the exact effects of various policies.

It is only in other non-consequentialist camps that one finds views that treat certain prima facie relevant factual information as irrelevant. Some libertarians may hold that the effects of progressive taxation are irrelevant given the injustice of state-sponsored theft, some left-wing liberals may hold that the justifiability of positive-discrimination may be independent of its non-symbolic value, and so on. Consequentialists, on the other hand, take the social sciences to be the key to politics.

This isn't necessarily a reason to be consequentialist! But it is interesting to note that one of consequentialism's main implications may be a negative one: That ethics has little to contribute to politics beyond the obvious - "people's welfare matters".

The issue of free speech always kicks up huge disagreements. Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram and Harry Brighouse (in comments) recently defended the idea - in some sense - that speech restrictions might be justifiable aim of government. The comments section there, as it always is anywhere, is hugely complicated by the fact that numerous issues get rolled into one. Here are three I can think of:

1) Whether some forms of speech are morally more reprehensible than others.
2) Whether government could ever conceivably justifiably intefere with speech.
3) Whether actual governments could ever realistically interfere with speech effectively.

One can hold various combinations of views on these questions, and no doubt there are further questions still that I've missed out.

For what it's worth, it seems obvious to me that the answer to (1) is that they are - speech can cause severe harm, and severe harm is morally bad. The answer to (2) also seems like a yes to me - I don't see why governments couldn't pursue morally right aims, if they can do so effectively. (3) is the tricky one; I incline towards thinking that governments are ineffective at this task. But I don't have much knowledge of this; political scientists are no doubt better qualified than me to tell us what the answer is.

That's one point I wanted to make. The other I'll take up in a seperate post.

Philosophers often undersell themselves. They say things like "Moral philosophers do not have opinions on moral matters that are any more likely to be true than the layman's". They want to say that they are not better at knowing how to live than other people.

But if that's true, then we're terrible at our subject! Given that our subject matter is aiming at better knowledge of moral truths, it's either the case:
1) That we utterly fail to achieve the aims we have set ourselves, or,
2) That we're better moral judges than others.

Am I missing something?

A few qualifications:
1) Humility is often a good thing, and bragging about how much you know would be pretty innapropriate.
2) Many "real life" moral dilemmas rely on a lot of factual information that philosophers don't study. We shouldn't claim to know more about these facts, only the uniquely moral aspect of the dilemma.
3) Our knowledge may be better, but it's obviously not infallible, or even likely to be correct. It's just less bad.

I am stranded in the desert, desperate for an ice cold beer. The devil offers me one, in exchange for my child.
(Dancy quoting Temkin, p181 of Moral Reasons)

Do I have any reason to give up my child? This reason will certainly not be decisive. But is my desire for the beer outweighed, or silenced, in comparison to the idea of losing my child? Does my desire retain any force, or none at all?

I'm tempted by the idea that it's vastly outweighed, but retains some minimal force. What do others think?

"But can there be any difficulty in proving, that vice and virtue are not matters of fact, whose existence we can infer by reason? Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action" (Hume Book 3, Part I, Section I)

"But can there be any difficulty in proving, that whether something is a table is not a matter of fact, whose existence we can infer by reason? Take any object allow'd to be a table: This one, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call its being a table. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain shapes, sizes, textures and colours of its component parts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. Its being a table entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of respect-for-tableness, which arises in you, towards this object" (Dancy's Moral Reasons, p75)

The former argument can't be valid, given that the latter isn't. As Dancy points out, Hume assumes that the moral properties will be found amongst the other properties of the act, not resultant from them or constituted by them.

A table is a certain arrangement of other properties; tableness doesn't appear in addition to those properties. Similarly, moral properties are certain arrangements of other properties, not something in addition to them.

There's a common sense view on ethics, and a philosophical counterpart. The common sense view is that "What if everyone did that?" is a relevant comment/objection to someone's behaviour. The philosophical counterpart is some Kantian-esq view on universalisability.

Both are false. That one's behaviour would be bad if everyone did it, doesn't show that it is bad when everyone isn't doing it. Examples are easy to formulate: If everyone studied philosophy, we'd all starve and die. But studying philosophy may be valuable regardless, given that enough people are producing food. Morality doesn't require that we all do things that everyone could do.

One obvious real life example of this is peer to peer sharing on the internet. That the music/film/game/software industry would collapse if everyone pirated doesn't show that piracy is wrong. Not everyone does commit piracy, and so the industry won't collapse, or at least matters are not quite so straightforward. Piracy may be wrong, or right, for other reasons, but lack of universalisability isn't one.

Utility is a measure of how well-off a person is. But, notoriously, it is very difficult to provide any precise measure of this, in a single case, or worse still, across people. How do we decide if the resulting benefits of an action for one person outweigh the associated losses for someone else?

The following is a tentative partial solution, of sorts. A lecturer once put me on this track, so the credit(/blame) is unfortunately not all mine. I’m not sure about it, but here goes anyway. Note that the solution provides little to no guidance for practical purposes – the point is to show that utility comparisons are meaningful, not that they are easy to make in practice.

First, let’s get a well defined measure of utility for one person. Let us assume, that the normatively significant kind of utility is preference satisfaction (weak assumption #1). The following is possible, at a theoretical level. People can, under pressure, prioritize their preferences. Let’s imagine that after some thought, we get Bloggs to decide that his preference ordering is: A>B>C ….>X>Y>Z.

Next, we get him to sharpen up those preferences so that we know how much he prefers A to B, B to C, and so on. Without this, we don’t know if he will prefer B&C to A. We can do this by offering him probabilistic options for A-Z. If he prefers a 6/10 chance of A over a certain chance of B, but not a 4/10 chance of A instead of a certain chance of B, we can assume that he desires A twice as much as B. Using this method, we can get a total list of Blogg's desires, and how much each is preferred to the last.

All that remains now is a method to compare these lists inter-personally. Plausibly, all human beings who wish to continue living will desire a glass of water when they are dehydrated to degree X (where X is some scientifically measurable physical body state). And, it seems that we could also assume that all such people desire that water equally (weak assumption #2). Such desires are not a function of individual personality, but instead a function of hardwired biological necessity. If that’s true, then it’s at least somewhat plausible that we can assume that everyone desires a glass of water under conditions X equally, and can then use their pre-established preference orderings to establish how much each person desires the rest of A-Z in comparison to the water.

And there you have it. If I desire F twice as much as water in circumstance X, and you desire G three times as much as water in conditions X, then G is impersonally better than F.

It’s not perfect, but it is interesting.

First, there's a new political philosophy blog, Public Reason. It's noteworthy not only because it has the potential to be good, but also because of their policy on authorship. Whereas most group blogs work on a "invite-only" system, Public Reason, so far as I can see, lets pretty much anyone past PhD level to write.

It seems that several different blogging styles have arisen, at least in the philosophy-blogging world. There are individual authors, such as myself and Richard Chappell (links to all blogs in sidebar). Then there are group blogs like Crooked Timber, with a small number (15) of long-time regular bloggers. This gives the site a sort of recognisable feel: one gets to know the style and views of the individual authors. Finally, some larger group blogs are appearing, particuarly PEA-soup and now Public Reason, which have a very large number of authors. This can possibly make the site feel somewhat disjointed as every time you visit there's a new writing style and topic being discussed. But these can of course be positive things too, and the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. I shall be interested to see how Public Reason turns out.

On a related note, I see that Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, is now working on a different project, Citizendium. He's described it thus: "imagine Wikipedia done right". As far as I can tell, it differs from wikipedia in that greater weight is given to expertise, and articles are "approved" and so on. You could say that it's wikipedia but less bottom-up. It's easy to see the merits of this, but part of what made wikipedia superior to other encyclopedias was the input from a large variety of perspectives.

I'm intrigued to see what happens here. Either citizendium will become the new internet encyclopedia, or otherwise it will have to find a niche small enough that people will remember to check it rather than wikipedia. Is that likely?

As always, thoughts welcome.

I tend to think you can place moral theories[1] on a scale.

At one end would be theories which provide a sense of unity to morality and which dictate what we ought to do when faced with moral choices. Such unified theories are theoretically compelling, but often wildly at odds with common sense.

At the other end would be theories which coincide very closely with common sense. Intuitive objections to such theories would be few. Though this comes at a cost: Such theories often lack any sense of unity.

Theories that lean towards the former end of this scale are rejected for being too deeply opposed to common sense. Theries that lean towards the latter end are rejected for providing no analysis, no explanation, of morality at all, merely a description of what humans believe.

But here's the rub: The middle ground is likely to be objectionable on both counts. It won't explain enough to be compelling, and it will reject enough common sense to be declared absurd.

And there's also no reason to think that a theory could be imagined that fulfilled criteria of both unity and common-sense. Why can't common-sense be dis-unified?

And if that's true, we are in a bind. The important work to be done is not in adding more theories to this scale, but in deciding which criteria is the more important.

[1] Actually, I imagine this could be generalised much further.

I'm fairly sure there's a large established literature on regret that I'm unfamiliar with, so apologies if I'm rehashing old arguments.

In Moral Reasons (p121), Jonathan Dancy alludes to (but doesn't endorse) the following argument against utilitarianism:

1) Utilitarianism is not value-pluralist.

2) A theory must be value-pluralist in order to make regret rational.

Conclusion:
3) Utilitarianism cannot make sense of regret.

One response to this is to simply accept (3) and remain utilitarianism nonetheless. If regret and utilitarianism are incompatible, so much for regret.

But it seems to me that premise (1) is unsound anyway.

Utilitarians ought not to think that there is some individual giant bowl of utility that we may add to or take away from. The value of utility is not homogenous.

Instead, they ought to maintain that each person's utility has unique value. Utility maximisation is a result of this fact, not the fundamental aim. Utilitarians therefore seem to be able to make sense of regret in terms of the value that we could not realise for those who fail to benefit from any action. The value that we could've gained from an alternative action is therefore not value of the same kind that our current action did in fact produce. The alternative action produced alternative value - value for someone else.