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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Proximate consequentialism makes it easier for agents and observers to justify moral judgments of acts.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 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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