The great positive point for utilitarianism is … it is consequentialist. I do not see how any ethic can be rational if it is not consequentialist. In Star Wars Yoda understands this. It is precisely why he says that there is, for a jedi, no “try.” Either a consequence comes about, or it does not. But the great negative point for utilitarianism is … it has a monistic view of the way consequences are to be evaluated. And this is true quite generally. Whether your preferred form of util is hedonistic, or based on a more abstract notion of satisfaction, whether you evaluate an act or a rule … utilitarianism posits some quality of the consequences of an action-or-rule, X, and says that more of X is always better than less of X. But there is no X. Valuation is pluralistic. In the end we can’t say anything about those things that are good in themselves except that they are good in themselves. Friendship, and more intimate relations, and bonding moments that make them or flow from them, ...
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Yesterday we discussed how HOMELAND ended. Today I want to comment on the philosophical implications of it. I hereby repeat my SPOILER ALERT. Although the spoilers will be less blatant in this discussion than they were in yesterday's, I'M NOT GOING TO TRY TO DANCE AROUND THE ENDING. The writers characteristically make the stakes very high, so that we can be routing for Carrie even as we recoil at the awfulness of some of the things she has to do. For a moment, we may even suspect that she has killed Saul. (She hasn't, but she lies both to his sister and in effect to us about this.) The Evil of Two Lessers The implicit ethical point is that if one is trying to prevent something as awful as a nuclear exchange, anything less awful than that is permitted. But of course this raises the issue of whether such consequentialist thinking is what got the world into such a state. Carrie and Saul had a good deal to do, in the world of the series, with shaping the relations ...
At the end of August I wrote here about Francesco Orsi's 2015 book, simply titled VALUE THEORY. Here is a quote from the book, from a chapter called "Personal Value." "The agent-relativized structure can make sense of a range of situations where we think it morally significant that the agent was involved. I need to repay my debt to my creditor, but I learn that I could help B repaying her higher debts to her creditors . But if I do this, I will be unable to pay my debts.... I have an overriding duty to repay my debt. According to agent-relative consequentialism, this is because repaying my debt is better relative to me than repaying others' debts. Analogous examples can be multiplied at will." This makes sense to me. How sympathetic do we have to make B's distressed circumstances in order to release the agent relativity here? Of course, as Orsi also says, this must be understood with a "ceteris paribus" clause. He doesn't expand...