| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 226 pages) : illustrations |
| Summary |
Very often we're uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We don't know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected. Philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. Moral Uncertainty argues that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions. It defends an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, arguing that the correct way to act in the face of moral uncertainty depends on whether the moral theories in which one has credence are merely ordinal, cardinal, or both cardinal and intertheoretically comparable. It tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretical comparisons, discussing potential solutions and the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Note |
Description based on print version record. |
| Contents |
Cover -- Moral Uncertainty -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Why We Should Take Moral Uncertainty Seriously -- Introduction -- I. Why We Should Be Morally Uncertain -- The Difficulty of Ethics -- Moral Disagreement -- Overconfidence -- II. The Motivation for Taking Moral Uncertainty Seriously -- III. Objections to Taking Moral Uncertainty Seriously -- The Fetishism Objection -- The Regress Objection -- The Blameworthiness Objection -- The Conscientiousness Objection -- Disanalogy with Prudential Reasoning -- Conclusion |
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Chapter 2: Maximizing Expected Choiceworthiness -- Introduction -- I. Against My Favorite Theory -- II. In Favour of Trade-offs -- III. In Favour of Treating Moral and Empirical Uncertainty Analogously -- IV. Two Objections to MEC -- Demandingness -- Supererogation -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3: Ordinal Theories and the Social Choice Analogy -- Introduction -- I. Intertheoretic Comparisons and Ordinal Theories -- II. Moral Uncertainty and the Social Choice Analogy -- III. Some Voting Systems -- IV. The Borda Rule -- Conclusion -- Chapter 4: Interval-Scale Theories and Variance Voting -- Introduction |
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I. Intertheoretic Incomparability -- II. Two Unsatisfactory Proposals -- III. Variance Voting -- IV. Two Arguments for Variance Voting -- Distance from the Uniform Theory -- The Expected Choice-Worthiness of Voting -- V. Option-Individuation and Measure -- VI. Broad vs Narrow -- VII. How to Act in Varying Informational Conditions -- Conclusion -- Chapter 5: Intertheoretic Comparisons of Choice-Worthiness -- Introduction -- I. Against Scepticism -- II. Structural Accounts -- III. Five Arguments against Structural Accounts -- Varied-Extension Cases -- Discontinuity with Universal Indifference |
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Incoherent Beliefs-Weighing Values -- Incoherent Beliefs-Too Much Comparability -- Amplified Theories -- IV. Non-structural Accounts -- V. Against Two Common Ground Accounts -- VI. Against Two Universal Scale Accounts -- VII. A Universal Scale Account -- VIII. The Metaphysical and Epistemic Questions -- Conclusion -- Chapter 6: Fanaticism and Incomparability -- Introduction -- I. Fanaticism -- II. Infectious Incomparability -- Conclusion -- Chapter 7: Metaethical Implications: Cognitivism versus Non-Cognitivism -- Introduction -- I. The Challenge for Non-cognitivism |
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II. Ecumenical Non-cognitivism -- III. Lenman's Version of Ecumenical Expressivism -- IV. Ridge's Version of Ecumenical Expressivism -- V. Initial Problems and Cross-Attitudinal Comparisons -- VI. A Dilemma -- VII. Sepielli's Account -- VIII. Problems for the Being For Account of Normative Certitude -- Gradability -- Cross-Attitudinal Comparisons -- Motivational Maladies -- The Wrong Kind of Reasons -- IX. Normalization of Being For -- Conclusion -- Chapter 8: Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty -- Introduction -- I. Implications for Normative Ethics -- Beneficence -- Partiality |
| Subject |
Decision making -- Moral and ethical aspects.
|
|
Uncertainty.
|
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
|
| Added Author |
Bykvist, Krister, author.
|
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Ord, Toby, 1979- author.
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| Other Form: |
Original 0198722273 9780198722274 (OCoLC)1122910618 |
| ISBN |
9780191033636 (electronic book) |
|
0191033634 (electronic book) |
|
0198722273 |
|
9780198722274 |
|
