Title: oxford / 103 ethics

Front: meta-ethical theories

Front: strong cognitivism
Back: A strong cognitivist theory is one which holds that moral judgements
(a) are apt for evaluation in terms of truth and falsity, and (b) canbe the
upshot of cognitively accessing the facts which render them true.
A weak cognitivist theory is one which holds that moral judgements (a)
are apt for evaluation in terms of truth and falsity, but (b) cannot be the
upshot of cognitive access to moral properties and states of affairs.

Front: moral realism
Back: moral realists: they
think that there really are moral facts and moral properties, and that
the existence of these moral facts and instantiation of these moral
properties is constitutively independent of human opinion.

Front: internalism
Back: Internalism: the claim that there is an internal and necessary or conceptual connection between sincerely making a moral judgement and being motivated to act in the manner prescribed by that judgement.
Externalism: the connection between judgement and motivation is only external and
contingent.

Front: humeanism about motivation
Back: Humean theory of motivation: the claim that motivation always involves the pre-
sence of both beliefs and desires
anti-Humean theory of motivation: the claim that beliefs themselves can be intrinsically motivating.

Front: open question argument
Back: Moore's open question argument against naturalism
Take whichever naturalist account you will — say, one according to which to be good is to be pleasant — and then consider whether a person who understands the terms involved might nonetheless intelligibly ask whether something she acknowledges to be pleasant is good. It seems she could. And it seems too that in asking the question she would not then be revealing any kind of conceptual confusion or incompetence. The question is, as Moore put it, a genuinely open one.

Front: replies to open question argument
Back: non-cognitivist reply: The Open Question is always open, they argue, not because we are, in making a moral judgment, attributing some non-natural property to things, but because we are not attributing any property at all.
cognitivist naturalist reply: argue that, while Moore's argument shows that thinking something is good is different than thinking it is pleasant, it does not show that being good is different from being pleasant (or the object of a desire, or such as to conform to some norm that is in force). It is in fact possible to be mistaken about which questions are open. After all, they point out, thinking that some liquid is H_2O is different from thinking it is water and one might intelligibly wonder whether what one grants to be water really is H_2O. Yet that does not show that being water is anything other than being H_20.

Front: argument from queerness
Back: Mackie's argument from queerness that there are no objective moral facts.
His reasons for claiming this are metaphysical and epistemological.
Metaphysical argument
The metaphysical problem with objective
values is that: 'If there were objective values, then they
would be entities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different
from anything else in the universe'.
The obtaining of a moral state of affairs would be the obtaining of a
situation 'with a demand for such and such an action somehow
built into it'; the states of affairs which we find in the world do not
have such demands built into them, they are 'normatively inert', as
it were.
Epistemological argument
The epistemological problem concerns the difficulty of accounting for our knowledge of moral facts. To explain knowledge of moral facts, we need to posit implausible forms of moral perception and intuition. These faculties are left unexplained.

Front: frege-geach problem
Back: A problem for non-cognitivist views in accounting for the following valid inference:
(8) Murder is wrong.
(9) If murder is wrong, then getting your little brother to murder
people is wrong.
Therefore:
(10) Getting your little brother to murder people is wrong.
non-cognitivists believe: (8)  "boo murder"
but (9) cannot be "if boo Murder then boo getting your little brother to murder"
For that (allegedly) does not make any sense.
So, non-cognitivists must believe that someone arguing in
this way simply guilty of equivocation. In order for the argument to
be valid, the occurrence of 'murder is wrong' in (8) has to mean the
same thing as the occurrence of 'murder is wrong' in (9).

Front: psychological egoism
Back: Psychological egoism claims that each person has but one ultimate aim: her own welfare.
Say a soldier throws himself on a grenade to prevent others from being killed. It does not seem that the soldier is pursuing his perceived self-interest. The soldier would have said that he threw himself on the grenade because he wanted to save the lives of others or because it was his duty.
The psychological egoist might reply: the soldier did what he most wanted to do, and so must have been pursuing his perceived self-interest.
In one sense, this is true. If self-interest is identified with the satisfaction of all of one's preferences, then all intentional action is self-interested (at least if intentional actions are always explained by citing preferences, as most believe). Psychological egoism turns out to be trivially true.
But this is just not now we ordinarily use the terms "egosim" and "altruism": We ordinarily think there is a significant difference in selfishness between the soldier's action and that of another soldier who, say, pushes someone onto the grenade to avoid being blown up himself. We think the former is acting unselfishly while the latter is acting selfishly. According to the trivial version of psychological egoism, both soldiers are equally selfish, since both are doing what they most desire.
Another example: The mother who chooses that her children’s lives go well while she is tricked into believing she made the opposite choice, rather than vice versa

Front: how one might convince an egoist to act morally
Back: Alice's actions can be in three sets:
BSI. Actions Alice believes are in her self-interest
SI. Actions that are in Alice’s self-interest
M. Actions that are moral (if you think there is no such thing, define M as ‘actions you morally prefer’)
Laying this down explicitly helps us immediately to clarify two points.
(i)                  When Alice intends to act in her own self-interest, she will do things in BSI, not SI; and SI and BSI are not identical
(ii)                BSI and SI both almost certainly have some overlap with M.
Clarification: This is not about whether an egoist with normal psychology would actually be convinced. Rather, we are concerned with whether we could provide a good argument by the lights of rationality.
Alice could have a few different reasons for acting self-interestedly:
(A)  She believes each person ought to act in her own self-interest, that is, she ought to behave self-interestedly towards others, and others ought to behave self-interestedly towards her.
(B)   She believes she ought to act in her own self-interest, and other people ought to act in her (Alice’s) self-interest.
(C)  She merely intends to do what she wants, no ‘oughts’ about it!
I will focus on (C).
There is one obvious way to convince her to act morally:
1.       Change Alice’s BSI, making it overlap more with M.
(1) appears promising.
* Telling Alice false empirical facts about what is in her self-interest, like saying she will be rewarded in heaven, probably cannot count as a rational argument.
* However, if Alice is like most people, she probably has false beliefs about what is in her own interest, and some of these could be rectified in a way which would convince her to act morally. For instance, most people overestimate how happy they will be to have more money, or how unhappy they will be to lose the use of a limb. If Alice cared about being happy, and was on the fence about whether or not to do a moral act that would require giving up money, or a limb, showing her facts about human psychology may be a way to convince her to act morally in some cases.
* But this would still not be an argument for always acting morally.
* Similarly, I could tell inform Alice about the police, who will sometimes catch her if she acts imorally.
* However, it’s very unlikely that I’ll truly be able to catch Alice every time she acts immorally, so again this will not be an argument for always acting morally.
Logically, it seems like if we don’t use (1) we must use (2):
1.       Convincing Alice to act more morally than she intends to act (without changing her BSI)
But this is a flat-out contradiction: acting against your own intentions is irrational, and there can be no rational argument for doing so.

Front: William's argument to the egoist
Back: Williams says the egoist Alice, when she desires to act morally and nurse her mother “has the notion of doing something for somebody. […] Even if [she] helps [her mother] because [she] wants to, or because [she] likes [her], and for no other reason, what [she] wants to do is to help [her] in their need.” Alice “is capable of thinking in terms of others' interests, and [her] failure to be a moral agent lies (partly) in the fact that [she] is only intermittently and capriciously disposed to do so.” We could then “extend [Alice’s] sympathies” by getting her to “consider” the situation of people other than her mother.

Front: act-consequentialism
Back: the doctrine that the moral rightness of an act is determined solely by the goodness of the act’s consequences.
Maximizing versions of consequentialism – the most common sort – hold that an evaluand (act, motive, etc.) is morally right if and only if it produces the best consequences of those evaluands available to the agent. Satisficing consequentialism holds that an evaluand is morally right if and only if it produces enough good consequences on balance.
A few versions of consequentialism are agent-relative: that is, they give each agent different aims, so that different agents’ aims may conflict. For instance, egoistic consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act for an agent depends solely on the goodness of its consequences for him or her. However, the vast majority of consequentialist theories have been agent-neutral (and consequentialism is often defined in a more restrictive way so that agent-relative versions do not count as consequentialist).
Note that Parfit bakes maximisation into the definition of consequentialism.

Front: self-defeat objection to consequentialism
Back: Consequentialism is often said to be self-defeating in some damaging way. For example:
(i) making decisions by means of consequentialist calculation might lead to a sort of “alienation” between one’s affections and one’s deliberative self – one that in turn leads to a sense of loneliness and emptiness, and is destructive to valuable relationships.
(ii) making decisions by means of consequentialist calculation might lead to paralysis
Hence even a consequentialist should not, by his own lights, desire that people make decisions by explicit appeal to consequentialist reasoning. Hence Bernard Williams writes “Utilitarianism’s fate is to usher itself from the scene” (‘A critique of utilitarianism’, p.134).

Front: The structure of theories which involve axiologies

Front: Parfit's definitions and distinctions about consequentialism
Back: C's central claim is
(C1) There is one ultimate moral aim: that outcomes be as good as possible.
C applies to everything. Applied to acts, C claims both
(C2) What each of us ought to do is whatever would make the outcome best, and
(C3) If someone does what he believes will make the outcome worse, he is acting wrongly.
We must now distinguish between what is objectively and subjectively right or wrong. This distinction has nothing to do with whether moral theories can be objectively true. The distinction is between what some theory implies, given (i) what are or would have been the effects of what some person does or could have done, and (ii) what this person believes, or ought to believe, about these effects.
To cover risky cases, C claims
(C4) What we ought subjectively to do is the act whose outcome has the greatest expected goodness.

Front: Fitch's paradox of knowability [proof]
Back: a logical result suggesting that, necessarily, if all truths are knowable in principle then all truths are in fact known.
(Knowability Paradox) ∀p(p → ◊Kp) ⊢ ∀p(p → Kp).
The proof:
Suppose the knowability principle (KP)—that all truths are knowable by somebody at some time:
(KP) ∀p(p → ◊Kp).
And suppose that collectively we are non-omniscient, that there is an unknown truth:
(NonO) ∃p(p ∧ ¬Kp).
If this existential claim is true, then so is an instance of it:
(1) p ∧ ¬Kp.
Now consider the instance of KP substituting line 1 for the variable p in KP:
(2) (p ∧ ¬Kp) → ◊K(p ∧ ¬Kp)
It follows trivially that it is possible to know the conjunction expressed at line 1:
(3) ◊K(p ∧ ¬Kp)
However, it can be shown independently that line 3 is false.
The independent result presupposes two very modest epistemic principles: first, knowing a conjunction entails knowing each of the conjuncts. Second, knowledge entails truth. Respectively,
(A)K(p ∧ q) ⊢ Kp ∧ Kq
(B)Kp ⊢ p
Also presupposed are two modest modal principles: first, all theorems are necessary. Second, necessarily ¬ p entails that p is impossible. Respectively,
(C)If ⊢ p, then ⊢□p.
(D)□¬p ⊢ ¬◊p.
From A,B,C,D it follows:
(9)¬◊K(p ∧ ¬Kp)
9 is intuitive enough.
So a contradiction follows from KP and NonO. The advocate of KP must deny that we are non-omniscient:
(10) ¬∃p(p ∧ ¬Kp).
And it follows from that that all truths are actually known:
(11) ∀p(p → Kp).

Front: MacAskill's six arguments for utilitarianism
Back: (1) and (6) are specifically arguments for hedonistic utilitarianism.
(2)-(5) are arguments for consequentialism.
1. Track record
2. Personal identity
3. Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem
4. Harsanyi's aggregation theorem
5. Generalise from golden rule
6. Argument from queerness

Front: MacAskill argument (1)
Back: 1. Track record
We can look at what the moral predictions, the bold claims that were going against common sense at the time, that Bentham and Kant made.
Bentham:
1. Campaigned and argued for women’s right to vote and the importance of women getting a good education
2. Homosexuality OK
3. Don't hurt animals
4. Races are equal
Kant:
1. suicide is wrong
2. masturbation is even more wrong than suicide
3. organ donation is impermissible, and even that cutting your hair off to give it to someone else is not without some degree of moral error
4. women have no place in civil society
5. a ranking in the moral worth of different races

Front: MacAskill's argument (2)
Back: 2. Personal identity
Structure of the argument:
1. Takes a strong moral intuition (that many opponents of consequentialism share).
2. Shows that the intuition, when combined with the reductionist view, lends plausiblity to consequentialism.
The egalitarian intuition: certain distributions of good accross people are morally preferable, but within a person accross time the distribution does not matter. We should not inflict more suffering on someone so that the suffering may be more spread out it time.
The deontological intuition: It cannot be right to burden someone merely to benefit someone else. But it can be justified to impose burdens on a child fore his own greater benefit later in his life.
Both these intuitions give great moral significance to the boundaries between lives. But, given reductionism, identity cannot ground this moral significance. We can abandon the significance of ther boundaries (Parfit's "extreme claim") or ground the boundaries in relation R instead ("moderate claim").
The extreme claim will give strong support to consequentialism. Even the moderate claim will provide some support for consequentialism, since relation R comes in degrees.

Front: MacAskill argument (3)
Back: 3. Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem
Formalised version of veil of ignorance; a very basic expected utility result.
[latex]
A society of individuals $I$ has to choose among social policies, each of which induces a probability distribution or lottery $L$ over social outcomes $X$ \\
\\
Each individual has preferences over these lotteries. The prefereces are known, and they differ.\\
\\
The impartial observer faces not only a real lottery $L$ over $X$, but also a hypothetical lottery $Z$ over which identity she will assume, a lottery over $I$.\\
\\
Setting $Z$ to be equiprobable between identities, if the impartial observer is utility-maximising, she will choose the lotteries according to consequentialism.\\
\\
More formally, over all extended lotteries $(L,Z)$ in which the $Z$ and $L$ are independently distributed, and in which $Z$ is unformly distributed, the impartial observer's preferences admit a representation of the form:
$$V(Z,L) =\sum_{i \in I} U_i(L)$$
where $U_i (L) = \int_{x  \in X} u_i (x) L dx$ is person $i$'s von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility for the outcome lottery $L$.
[/latex]

Front: Macaskill argument (4)
Back: 4. Harsanyi's aggregation theorem
Individual preferences over lotteries are assumed to follow vNM axioms.
Now there is a social preference function over lotteries (also vNM), and we ask: what are its properties?
One nice property is strong Pareto preference: For all lotteries A,B, if everyone weakly prefers A to B, and furthermore, at least one person strongly prefers A to B, then the social preference function strongly prefers A to B.
Harsanyi (1955, 1977) establishes that strong Pareto preference is necessary and sufficient for the social preference function to be representable as maximising the expected weighted sum of individual utilities, where the weights are all positive.

Front: MacAskill argument (5)
Back: 5. Generalise from golden rule
What I want: for my life to go as well as possible. (I don't just want to not be murdered).
Hence, in the spirit of the golden rule: make others' lives go as well as possible.

Front: MacAskill argument (6)
Back: 6. Queerness
For someone with pre-existing commitments to naturalist realism, Hedonism is a better theory of the good than others. Pleasurable experiences (on which the good supervenes) are a lot less queer than e.g. 'the moral law'.

Front: how to precisify error theory
Back: # In existential terms
One might think that at least some moral claims must be true:
If "incest is wrong" is false, then "incest is not wrong" must be true.
This is confused. By analogy to definite descriptions:
If "present king of France is bald" is false, then "present king of France is not bald" must be true.
It's possible to be an error theorist about moral discourse in the same way that one can be an error theorist about present King of France discourse. On this picture, we would express the error theory in negative existential terms: as the view that X doesn't exist.
Some qualifications may be necessary depending on whether X is taken to be an object or a property.
Object -> Not clear which object
Property -> Does she deny that the property exists, or deny that it is instantiated at the actual world? Both seem unsatisfactory.
# In terms of atomic moral sentences
Just as we obviously don't think that every sentence containing the word “phlogiston” is untrue (consider “Phlogiston doesn't exist” and “17th-century chemists believed in phlogiston”), nor does the moral error theorist hold that every sentence containing a moral term is untrue.
Rather, the error theorist focuses on a proper subset of sentences containing the problematic terms: those that imply or presuppose the instantiation of a moral property. Let us call such sentences “atomic moral sentences.” The error theorist is typically characterized as holding that all atomic moral sentences are false.