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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 Sanction utilitarianism does not face the problems that act utilitarianism faces regarding the fourfold moral distinction.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Sanction utilitarianism merely relocates the act-utilitarian calculus to the level of rules about punishment, preserving the same collapse of distinctions.
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    • 2.An act is obligatory under sanction utilitarianism if and only if failing to perform it warrants punishment, leaving no principled space for the supererogatory distinct from the merely non-punishable.
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    • 3.This replication of the fourfold problem at the sanction level was identified by Urmson (1958) as endemic to any consequentialist framework that grounds moral categories in outcomes.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Sanction utilitarianism's account of the permissible and the supererogatory depends on contingent facts about which sanctions it is utility-maximizing to enforce.
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    • 2.If social utility shifts, acts once classified as supererogatory become obligatory or forbidden, making the fourfold distinction unstable rather than genuinely preserved.
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    • 3.Scheffler's critique of agent-centered prerogatives shows that any system tying moral categories to externally justified sanctions cannot generate the agent-relative distinctions the fourfold scheme requires.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Sanction utilitarianism offers a distinct account of each moral category: the forbidden, the permissible, the obligatory, and the supererogatory.
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    • 2.Act utilitarianism collapses these distinctions, but sanction utilitarianism preserves them.
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