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    Proximate consequentialism makes it easier for agents and... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
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    Proximate consequentialism makes it easier for agents and observers to justify moral judgments of acts.

    Consequentialism
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Proximate consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act is determined only by its proximate consequences.
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    • 2.Evaluating only proximate consequences removes the need to predict non-proximate consequences in distant times and places.
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    • 3.Predictions of distant consequences are epistemologically difficult and uncertain.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Restricting moral evaluation to proximate consequences severs the agent from responsibility for foreseeable downstream harms, violating core intuitions about moral accountability.
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    • 2.Mill and Sidgwick both argued that utilitarian calculation must extend to all foreseeable consequences, making epistemic difficulty a reason for better prediction, not truncated scope.
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    • 3.A justification framework that systematically ignores distal but foreseeable consequences does not make moral judgment easier—it makes it easier to be wrong while feeling justified.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The difficulty of predicting distant consequences is precisely what obligates agents to exercise greater deliberative care, not to exempt those consequences from moral consideration, as Parfit argues in Reasons and Persons regarding nuclear policy and future generations.
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    • 2.If epistemic difficulty justified moral truncation, agents could strategically exploit uncertainty about distant harms to license otherwise impermissible acts, producing a framework vulnerable to systematic abuse.
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    Consequentialism

    Related

    A justification framework that systematically ignores distal but foreseeable con...Evaluating only proximate consequences removes the need to predict non-proximate...If epistemic difficulty justified moral truncation, agents could strategically e...Mill and Sidgwick both argued that utilitarian calculation must extend to all fo...
    +4 moreShow less
    Predictions of distant consequences are epistemologically difficult and uncertai...Proximate consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act is determine...Restricting moral evaluation to proximate consequences severs the agent from res...The difficulty of predicting distant consequences is precisely what obligates ag...

    Similar

    Proximate consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act is...88%Actual consequentialism holds that actual consequences determine moral...87%Agent-relative consequentialism requires observers to adopt the agent'...85%Agent-relative consequentialism holds that an act is morally wrong if ...85%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: consequentialism
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    One final solution to these epistemological problems deploys the legal notion of proximate cause. If consequentialists define consequences in terms of what is caused (unlike Sosa 1993), then which future events count as consequences is affected by which notion of causation is used to define consequences. Suppose I give a set of steak knives to a friend. Unforeseeably, when she opens my present, the decorative pattern on the knives somehow reminds her of something horrible that her husband did. T
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit