Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
3 - Reply to McMichael
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
Summary
Deontic conditionals, whether those of ordinary discourse or the simplified versions invented by intensional logicians, are ethically neutral. You can apply them to state any ethical doctrine you please. The results will be only as acceptable as the doctrines that went into them.
Radical utilitarianism, stark and unqualified, is not a commonsensical view. Agreement with our ordinary ethical thought is not its strong point. It is no easy thing to accept the strange doctrine that nothing at all matters to what ought to be the case except the total balance of good and evil – that any sort or amount of evil can be neutralized, as if it had never been, by enough countervailing good – and that the balancing evil and good may be entirely unrelated, as when the harm I do to you is cancelled out by the kindness of one Martian to another.
Accept this strange doctrine, and what should follow? Exactly the strange consequences that McMichael complains of! Never mind the semantics of deontic conditionals. If you really think that only the total matters, then surely you ought also to think that little is obligatory (there are always alternative ways to reach a high total) and that much is permissible (no evil is so bad that it cannot be neutralized). It is not in the radical utilitarian spirit to believe in outright ethical requirements or prohibitions.
Order the worlds on radically utilitarian principles; then apply the semantics for deontic conditionals that I gave in Counterfactuals; and the results are as McMichael says they are.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy , pp. 34 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999