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    Rule consequentialists should ask 'What would happen if e... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
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    Rule consequentialists should ask 'What would happen if everybody were permitted to do that?' rather than 'What would happen if everybody did that?'

    Consequentialism
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The 'what would everybody do' formulation yields implausible results (e.g., condemning childlessness as wrong)
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    • 2.The 'permitted to do' formulation avoids these counterexamples because enough people voluntarily choose to have children, so permitting childlessness does not threaten species survival
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Brad Hooker's canonical formulation of rule consequentialism uses internalization by the majority, not universal permission, as the relevant test case.
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    • 2.The 'permitted to do' standard conflates the legal-political question of what society should allow with the moral question of what rules agents should internalize.
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    • 3.This conflation causes rule consequentialism to collapse into a theory of legitimate governance rather than a theory of individual moral obligation.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.The 'permitted to do' formulation smuggles in a prior normative framework to determine what counts as permissible, making rule consequentialism circular.
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    • 2.If we need non-consequentialist criteria to fix the reference class of permissions, rule consequentialism loses its claim to be a self-standing moral theory.
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    Topics

    Consequentialism

    Notable Defenders

    Philip PettitcontemporaryPettit 1997

    Related

    Brad Hooker's canonical formulation of rule consequentialism uses internalizatio...If we need non-consequentialist criteria to fix the reference class of permissio...The 'permitted to do' formulation avoids these counterexamples because enough pe...The 'permitted to do' formulation smuggles in a prior normative framework to det...
    +3 moreShow less
    The 'permitted to do' standard conflates the legal-political question of what so...The 'what would everybody do' formulation yields implausible results (e.g., cond...This conflation causes rule consequentialism to collapse into a theory of legiti...

    Similar

    The 'what would happen if everybody did that?' formulation of rule con...90%Most consequentialists are willing to give up consequentialism as a di...78%Act-consequentialism holds that an act is permissible if and only if i...76%Proximate consequentialism holds that the moral rightness of an act is...75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: consequentialism
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    The most common indirect consequentialism is rule consequentialism, which makes the moral rightness of an act depend on the consequences of a rule (Singer 1961). Since a rule is an abstract entity, a rule by itself strictly has no consequences. Still, obedience rule consequentialists can ask what would happen if everybody obeyed a rule or what would happen if everybody violated a rule. They might argue, for example, that theft is morally wrong because it would be disastrous if everybody broke a
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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