Running risks morally

Weatherson, Brian

doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0227-2

Cited by 69 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…3 It is only fair to mention that this insistence on ''guidance'' in the face of uncertainty introduces the threat of a regress. This is noted in passing in Sepielli 2012 andin Weatherson (2014). I sketch a solution to this regress problem in Sepielli 2014b and (ms).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Moral uncertainty and fetishistic motivation

Sepielli

2016

Philos Stud

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Sometimes it's not certain which of several mutually exclusive moral views is correct. Like almost everyone, I think that there's some sense in which what one should do depends on which of these theories is correct, plus the way the world is nonmorally. But I also think there's an important sense in which what one should do depends upon the probabilities of each of these views being correct. Call this second claim ''moral uncertaintism''. In this paper, I want to address an argument against moral uncertaintism offered in the pages of this journal by Brian Weatherson, and seconded elsewhere by Brian Hedden, the crucial premises of which are: (1) that acting on moral uncertaintist norms necessarily involves motivation by reasons or rightness as such, and (2) that such motivation is bad. I will argue that (1) and (2) are false, and that at any rate, the quality of an agent's motivation is not pertinent to the truth or falsity of moral uncertaintism in the way that Weatherson's and Hedden's arguments require.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Moral uncertainty and fetishistic motivation

Sepielli

2016

Philos Stud

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“…It seems to me that the solution to this undermining worry, if there is one, must involve taking the relevant principle of rational requirement – a dominance principle like GDoT* or some stronger principle from which it can be derived – to have ‘external’ normative force, in the sense given by Weatherson (). An external norm is one to which an agent is subject regardless of her beliefs and evidence, i.e.…”

Section: Moral Nihilismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rejecting Supererogationism

Tarsney

2018

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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Even if I think it very likely that some morally good act is supererogatory rather than obligatory, I may nonetheless be rationally required to perform that act. This claim follows from an apparently straightforward dominance argument, which parallels Jacob Ross's argument for 'rejecting' moral nihilism. These arguments face analogous pairs of objections that illustrate general challenges for dominance reasoning under normative uncertainty, but (I argue) these objections can be largely overcome. This has practical consequences for the ethics of philanthropy -in particular, it means that donors are often rationally required to maximize the positive impact of their donations.

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“…Such uncertainty can arise from uncertainty about the empirical facts: for instance, is this substance that I am about to put in my friend's coffee sweetener, or is it arsenic (Weatherson 2014)? It can also arise from uncertainty about basic moral principles-what we might call "purely moral" uncertainty: for instance, given some specification of all the relevant empirical facts, is it permissible to tell my friend a white lie about his new haircut?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note, moreover, that the appeal to stochastic dominance rather than expectational reasoning gives us a principled way of avoiding one of the chief pitfalls of absolutism, namely, the risk of 12 The apparent continuity between these two kinds of cases casts doubt on the idea that subjective normative principles should make a basic distinction between uncertainty about empirical facts and uncertainty about basic normative principles, an idea that has recently been advanced by Weatherson (2014), Harman (2015), and Hedden (2016), inter alia. I elaborate this point in Tarsney (2018b).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

Tarsney

2018

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? One common response to this challenge proposes a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: where does the threshold come from, and why should it take any one value rather than another? Threshold views also seem to violate "ought" agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). The stochastic dominance approach also allows a principled, albeit intuitively imperfect, response to the agglomeration problem. Thus, I argue, deontologists are better equipped than many critics have supposed to address the problems of decision-making under uncertainty.

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Running risks morally

Cited by 69 publications

References 13 publications

Moral uncertainty and fetishistic motivation

Moral uncertainty and fetishistic motivation

Rejecting Supererogationism

Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

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