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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 Sanction utilitarianism is preferable to act utilitarianism

    ?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 makes wrongness depend on the existence of social practices of punishment, which are contingent and often unjust.
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    • 2.An act can be genuinely wrong even when no optimal system of sanctions exists or would sanction it, as Brandt's rule utilitarianism demonstrates.
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    • 3.Grounding moral wrongness in sanctionability collapses normative ethics into a form of social enforcement theory, losing action-guidance for novel moral situations.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The distinction between duty and expediency in sanction utilitarianism reintroduces a non-consequentialist standard to determine which sanctions are 'optimal'.
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    • 2.If optimality of sanctions is itself judged by consequences, sanction utilitarianism regresses into act utilitarianism at the level of sanction-evaluation, as Smart argued.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Sanction utilitarianism provides a more plausible account of the relation among different deontic categories
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    • 2.Sanction utilitarianism allows a distinction between duty and expediency
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    • 3.Under sanction utilitarianism, not all inexpedient acts are wrong — only those it is good or optimal to sanction
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