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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Moore's consequentialist thesis that one ought always to perform the best action possible is internally inconsistent with Moore's own moral conservatism.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Moore holds that one ought to perform the best action possible.
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    • 2.Moore also holds that there are cases where breaking an established moral rule would be the best course of action.
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    • 3.Moore holds that we can never know which cases those are, and therefore we ought never to break established moral rules.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Moore's epistemic humility argument collapses into a two-tier normative system where act-consequentialism governs ideal agents and rule-following governs actual agents.
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    • 2.A genuinely unified consequentialist theory cannot generate conflicting obligations depending solely on an agent's epistemic position without producing action-guidance contradictions.
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    • 3.If 'ought' implies 'can know what to do', then Moore's unknowability claim does not resolve the contradiction but instead reveals that his framework lacks a coherent single standard of rightness.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Sidgwick demonstrated in Methods of Ethics that any consequentialist theory must maintain extensional equivalence between its criterion of rightness and its decision procedure, or else explicitly bifurcate them as distinct normative levels.
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    • 2.Moore nowhere explicitly bifurcates his theory into a criterion level and a decision-procedure level, yet his conservatism functionally requires exactly this distinction to avoid contradiction.
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    • 3.An implicit bifurcation that Moore never acknowledges or defends is not a solution to inconsistency but is itself evidence of the inconsistency, since the two levels generate conflicting verdicts on the same action.
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