Utilitarianism

""Some ethical theories tolerate or require aggregation -- a trade-off between benefits to a group of individuals and losses to another group of individuals. Since aggregation is an essential feature of utilitarianism, many critics of utilitarianism -- including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, and others -- rule out aggregation from their proposed theories. However, critics encounter what has become known as the number problem-the problem that non-aggregative theories are insensitive to the number of people affected by actions even in the cases where the number of people is clearly relevant to what we ought to do.

In this book, Iwao Hirose elucidates the theoretical nature of interpersonal and intra-personal aggregation and defends a form of aggregation, formal aggregation, as distinguished from substantive aggregation in utilitarianism. Substantive aggregation combines the morally relevant factors that are determined prior to, and independently of, aggregative process, and identifies the goal to be pursued. In contrast, formal aggregation represents the overall ethical judgment in terms of individuals' morally relevant factors and gives a structure to our ethical thinking.

Hirose's view of formal aggregation is broader than substantive aggregation and avoids problems for utilitarianism. Furthermore, formal aggregation can satisfy the demands of critics of the conventional understanding of aggregation, thus being more attractive than substantive aggregation and the unqualified rejection of aggregation. Hirose's analysis thus elucidates the far-reaching scope of aggregation and offers a new insight to one of the fundamental elements in ethical theory.""

""The article is a reductio ad absurdum of assumptions which are shared by a large number of followers of the animal welfare movement and utilitarianism. I argue that even if we accept the main ethical arguments for a negative moral assessment of eating meat we should not promote vegetarianism but rather beefism (eating only meat from beef cattle). I also argue that some forms of vegetarianism, i.e. ichtivegetarianism, can be much more morally worse than normal meat diet. In order to justify
these thesis I show that there are significant moral differences in the consumption of animal products from different species.""

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

The phrase “Ariadne’s thread” refers to the solution of some problem or dilemma for which there are numerous methods of resolution and within which one finds the solution through an exhaustive application of logic to every possible route. I argue that while the dilemma between recognition and oppression/domination/reduction is often presented as a maze, as a problem with a potential solution relative to the problem’s framework, this approach is ultimately self-defeating for liberatory projects that shun identity politics. Although excluded groups indeed seek recognition within existing orders (political, discursive, etc.), the very conferral of such recognition levels that group to being the “same” as all other groups. This dilemma, then, is not one of Ariadne’s thread but is rather an aporia–an impasse in which all exits are barred. In the same way that the inability of utilitarians such as Peter Singer to imagine the value of disabled lives is itself a threat to the very existence of those lives, the problematic of recognition is one that cannot be resolved by exhausting the theoretical options already on the table. I conclude by suggesting some normative criteria—such as the corporeal variability of the body—that might provide a qualitatively better framework for these issues.

Imagine both that (1) S1 is deliberating at t about whether or not to x at t' and that (2) although S1’s x-ing at t' would not itself have good consequences, good consequences would ensue if both S1 x's at t' and S2 y's at t", where S1 may or may not be identical to S2 and where t < t' ≤ t". In this paper, I consider how consequentialists should treat S2 and the possibility that S2 will y at t". At one end of the spectrum, consequentialists would hold that, in deciding whether or not to x at t', S1 should always treat S2 as a force of nature over which she has no control and, thus, treat the possibility that S2 will y at t" as she would the possibility that a hurricane will take a certain path. On this view, S1 is to predict whether or not S2 will y and act accordingly. At the other end of the spectrum, consequentialists would hold that S1 should always treat S2 as someone available for mutual cooperation and, thus, treat the possibility that S2 will y at t" as something to be relied upon. On this view, S1 is to rely on S2’s cooperation and so play her part in the best cooperative scheme involving the two of them. A third and intermediate position would be to hold that whether S1 should treat S2 as a force of nature or as someone available for mutual cooperation depends on whether S1 can see to it that S2 will y at t" by, say, having the right set attitudes. I’ll argue for this third position. As we’ll see, an important implication of this view is that consequentialists should be concerned not just with an agent’s voluntary actions but also with their involuntary acquisitions of various mental attitudes, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Indeed, I will argue that consequentialists should hold both that (1) an agent’s most fundamental duty is to have all those attitudes that she has decisive reason to have and only those attitudes that she has sufficient reason to have and that (2) she has a derivative duty to perform an act x if and only if her fulfilling this fundamental duty ensures that she x’s. Thus, I argue (as Donald Regan did before me) that consequentialism should not be exclusively act-orientated – that it should require agents not only to perform certain voluntary actions but also to have certain attitudes. (The latest version of this paper can always be found at: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14740340/Consequentialism%20and%20Coordination%20Problems.pdf)