Gustafsson, Johan orcid.org/0000-0002-9618-577X (2016) Consequentialism with Wrongness Depending on the Difficulty of Doing Better. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy. 108–118. ISSN 2161-2234
Abstract
Moral wrongness comes in degrees. On a consequentialist view of ethics, the wrongness of an act should depend, I argue, in part on how much worse the act's consequences are compared with those of its alternatives and in part on how difficult it is to perform the alternatives with better consequences. I extend act consequentialism to take this into account, and I defend three conditions on consequentialist theories. The first is consequentialist dominance, which says that, if an act has better consequences than some alternative act, then it is not more wrong than the alternative act. The second is consequentialist supervenience, which says that, if two acts have equally good consequences in a situation, then they have the same deontic status in the situation. And the third is consequentialist continuity, which says that, for every act and for any difference in wrongness δ greater than zero, there is an arbitrarily small improvement of the consequences of the act which would, other things being equal, not change the wrongness of that act or any alternative by more than δ. I defend a proposal that satisfies these conditions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc and the Northern Institute of Philosophy. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details |
Keywords: | consequentialism,consequentialist continuity,consequentialist dominance,consequentialist supervenience,degrees of wrongness,difficulty,easiness |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Philosophy (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 28 Jul 2016 11:59 |
Last Modified: | 08 Feb 2025 00:19 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/tht3.200 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/tht3.200 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:103082 |
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