Inconsistency in Ethics (original) (raw)
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Moral Dilemmas and Consistency in Ethics
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Recently it has been argued that there are genuine moral dilemmas and that any theory which does not account for this fact is an unrealistic one. This represents a challenge to an assumption that most moral theorists have held: an adequate ethical theory must not allow for genuine moral quandaries. John Stuart Mill, for example, in the last paragraph of the second chapter of Utilitarianism, seems to be committed to such an assumption. Many others have also assented to this view. The consensus among those who hold this view seems to be that if a theory allows for moral dilemmas then there is some sense in which it is incoherent or inconsistent. Yet, oddly enough, the sense in which such a view would be incoherent is rarely, if ever, spelled out. Put another way, there seem to be no arguments for the belief that genuine moral dilemmas must be ruled out.
Disagreement: Ethics and Elsewhere
Erkenntnis, 2014
According to a traditional argument against moral realism, the existence of objective moral facts is hard to reconcile with the existence of radical disagreement over moral issues. An increasingly popular response to this argument is to insist that it generalizes too easily. Thus, it has been argued that if one rejects moral realism on the basis of disagreement then one is committed to similar views about epistemology and meta-ethics itself, since the disagreements that arise in those areas are just as deep as the moral ones. This in turn is taken to show that a moral anti-realist should seek another basis for her position. For, if she extends her anti-realism also to epistemology and meta-ethics, then she is no longer in a position to say that her meta-ethical position is (objectively) true or that it is a fact that we have reason to accept it. She therefore seems left with a position that hardly even seems to be a position. The purpose of the paper is to challenge this response and in particular the claim that the argument from disagreement applies equally well to epistemology and meta-ethics as it does to ethics. It is argued that, despite contrary appearances, there are crucial differences between the disagreements that occur in ethics compared to those that arise in the other areas. Moreover, even granted that the disagreements are just as deep, there are other differences between the areas that nevertheless justify drawing different conclusions about their status from the existence of those disagreements.
Learning from moral inconsistency
Cognition
Moral inconsistency is an understudied phenomenon in cognitive moral psychology and deserves in depth empirical study. Moral inconsistency, as understood here, is not formal inconsistency but inconsistency in moral emotion and belief in response to particular cases. It occurs when persons treat cases as morally different that are really morally the same, even from their moral perspective. Learning to recognize and avoid such moral inconsistency in non-trivial but is a form of moral learning that complements and enhances other psychological and social mechanisms through which persons learn how to apply shared moral norms when their applications are uncertain and threaten to lapse into moral inconsistency. The same psychological process also can function to revise current moral norms when their straightforward applications are morally inconsistent with more basic moral commitments. Through this moral learning and related kinds, people can learn how to identify issues of moral priority when moral norms conflict and, when necessary, how to revise their moral norms. The recent revolution in dominant moral norms around gay sex and gay marriage in Europe and North America provides a possible illustration. When coupled with other modes of moral learning in the context of ambiguous but deeply rooted moral norms, such as those of sanctity and authority, reflection on moral inconsistency can help to justify this large-scale moral change, even among those who find gay sex, by its nature, morally repugnant.
Moral Conflicts and Moral Awareness
Philosophy, 2011
By making use of Aurel Kolnai's ethical writings I want to offer a more adequate understanding of moral conflicts and moral dilemmas. Insisting on Kolnai's phenomenological method, in particular, focussing on the agent's moral awareness (or conscience) and his deliberation, results in an understanding of moral conflicts as moments of moral choice rather than anomalies of moral theory. In this way, I argue that one can account for Bernard Williams's phenomenological description of moral conflicts without having to accept his anti-realist conclusions. Moreover, this approach indicates the adequacy of ordinary moral reasoning for decision-making and action guidance. Lastly and importantly, the essay illustrates the relevance of Kolnai's writings to contemporary moral philosophy.
2011
3 to be–there is a gap between 'is' and 'ought'. Thus, the fact that we disagree about what right and wrong does not imply that different moral views are equally true or that we are permitted to do different things, and, relevant to this context, the existence of individual differences in moral cognition is not a sufficient reason to support moral relativism or toleration. On the other hand, it is not really clear how broad this gap is, and what exactly does or does not follow from it.
Inescapable Wrongdoing and the Coherence of Morality: An Examination of Moral Dilemmas
2009
In this thesis, I propose an argument against the possibility of moral dilemmas, which I construe as situations in which moral wrongdoing is inescapable. The first chapter addresses some terminological matters and attempts to sort out the main issues of contention between proponents and opponents of moral dilemmas. The second chapter lays out my argument, which I dub the "Argument from Action-Guidingness," against proponents of moral dilemmas. Negative moral judgments of the sort "X is wrong" typically carry with them the implication that X ought not to be done. If judgments of wrongness always have this action-guiding force, then moral dilemmas, which say that all courses of action available to the agent are morally wrong, threaten morality with incoherence. To avoid this problem, proponents of dilemmas will be forced to abandon the action-guiding implications of negative moral judgments when dilemmas arise. But this move is not without its own difficulties, which I elucidate. The final chapter identifies flaws in two prominent arguments in favor of dilemmas: the argument from moral distress and the argument from incommensurable values. The latter half of the chapter examines Sayre-McCord's "fairness argument" against dilemmas, and contrasts it with the argument from actionguidingness.
Do Moral Dilemmas Tell Against the Consistency of a Given Moral System?
Reason Papers, 2011
In this article I shall look at the issue of moral dilemmas and attempt to analyze its implications for the structure of normative moral systems. My contention is that the phenomenon of moral dilemmas, though real and capable of placing us under two or more jointly unsatisfiable obligations (or duties, moral requirements, etc.), should not be considered a defect of rationality that requires eradication, but, on the contrary, can and should be accepted as an integral part of the application of moral systems, a part oftentimes capable of playing an important corrective role.
Virtues and Moral Disagreement
In this paper, on the assumptions of eudemonistic virtue ethical account (EVEA), I initiate an alternative view (a neutralist theory about EVEA) from Mackie and Hursthouse. In my view, the beliefs about which ways of life enable us to achieve HWB are neutral, namely, they are based on our inference to (and preference about) direct experience, which is neutrally real. Thus, in moral disagreements, we confront each other with how we objectify (and subjectify) the direct experience. According to this account, while conflicting moral judgments can be about one and the same reality, none of these judgments are true. Nonetheless, moral judgments can be used to develop our knowledge of how to interact with each other in our environment.