1 'Utilitarianism for a Broken World'
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Paradox of Happiness Ben Eggleston
1 Paradox of Happiness Ben Eggleston The paradox of happiness is the puzzling but apparently inescapable fact that regarding happiness as the sole ultimately valuable end or objective, and acting accordingly, often results in less happiness than results from regarding other goods as ultimately valuable (and acting accordingly). That is, in many circumstances, happiness is more effectively achieved when other objectives are regarded as worth pursuing for their own sakes than when happiness alone is regarded as worth pursuing for its own sake (see happiness; hedonism; intrinsic value). These other objectives might be regarded as ultimately valuable instead of happiness, or merely in addition to happiness; but they must be valued for their own sakes, and not merely as means to the achievement of happiness. These other objectives may include loving family relationships and friendships, meaningful professional relationships, immersion in rewarding work, the exercise of skills and abilities, accomplishments and triumphs, participation in religion or a large cause or movement, and contributions to one’s culture or nation. The paradox of happiness can be understood as applying to people individually or in groups. With respect to people individually, the paradox of happiness is the fact that any given individual is likely to be less happy if happiness is her sole ultimate objective than she would be if other goods were among her ultimate objectives. With respect to groups of people, the paradox of happiness is the fact that any given group of people, such as a community or a society, is likely to be less happy, collectively, if happiness is its sole collective ultimate objective than it would be if other goods were among its collective ultimate objectives. -
Mechanism Design: Lecture 4 Fair Division
Mechanism Design: lecture 4 Fair Division Fedor Sandomirskiy March 27, 2021 Higher School of Economics, St.Petersburg e-mail: [email protected] 1 Motivation Auctions = simple and efficient way to distribute resources. Why do we need something else? Monetary transactions may be ruled out by • ethical reasons. Bias towards richest ) repugnant Examples: government programs (education, social housing), charity, organ transplants • institutional reasons. Who is auctioneer? Examples: division of a common property (partners dissolving their partnership, inheritance), allocation of tasks or resources within the firm (office space, IT facilities, bonuses), division of a common surplus among business-partners How to distribute resources if we can't auction them? What is fairness and how to take it into account? 2 Motivation Auctions = simple and efficient way to distribute resources. Why do we need something else? Monetary transactions may be ruled out by • ethical reasons. Bias towards richest ) repugnant Examples: government programs (education, social housing), charity, organ transplants • institutional reasons. Who is auctioneer? Examples: division of a common property (partners dissolving their partnership, inheritance), allocation of tasks or resources within the firm (office space, IT facilities, bonuses), division of a common surplus among business-partners How to distribute resources if we can't auction them? What is fairness and how to take it into account? 2 Motivation Auctions = simple and efficient way to distribute resources. Why do we need -
Perspectives on Ethical Leadership: an Overview Drs Ir Sophia Viet MTD
Perspectives on ethical leadership: an overview drs ir Sophia Viet MTD Paper submitted to the International Congress on Public and Political Leadership 2016 Draft version. Do not site or quote without the author’s permission Abstract There is a growing scientific interest in ethical leadership of organizations as public confidence in organizational leaders continues to decline. Among scholarly communities there is considerable disagreement on the appropriate way to conceptualize, define and study ethical leadership. This disagreement is partly due to the ontological and epistemological differences between the scholarly communities, resulting in different views of organizations, on the role of organizational leadership in general, and on ethical leadership of organizations in particular. Because of the differences in their ontological and epistemological assumptions scholars endlessly debate the concept of ethical leadership. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the academic concepts of ethical leadership by classifying these concepts in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions and views of organizations into the modern, symbolic and the critical perspectives of postmodernism and communitarianism. Each category represents a particular set of perspectives on organizations, business ethics, and ethical leadership. The overview can serve as a guide to decode the academic debate and to determine the positions of the scholars participating in the debate. In addition it can serve as a multi-perspective-framework to study lay concepts of ethical leadership of (executive) directors of contemporary organizations. In this article the overview serves as a guide of how to classify some of the most common concepts in the debate on ethical leadership. Introduction There is a growing scientific interest in ethical leadership of organizations as public confidence in organizational leaders continues to decline. -
Satisficing Consequentialism Author(S): Michael Slote and Philip Pettit Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol
Satisficing Consequentialism Author(s): Michael Slote and Philip Pettit Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 58 (1984), pp. 139-163+165-176 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4106846 Accessed: 15/10/2008 09:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Aristotelian Society and Blackwell Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes. -
Consequentialism and Respect: Two Strategies for Justifying Act Utilitarianism
Utilitas (2020), 32,1–18 doi:10.1017/S0953820819000086 ARTICLE Consequentialism and Respect: Two Strategies for Justifying Act Utilitarianism Ben Eggleston* University of Kansas *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (First published online 23 April 2019) Abstract Most arguments in support of act utilitarianism are elaborations of one of two basic strat- egies. One is the consequentialist strategy. This strategy relies on the consequentialist premise that an act is right if and only if it produces the best possible consequences and the welfarist premise that the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its overall amount of well-being. The other strategy is based on the idea of treating indivi- duals respectfully and resolving conflicts among individuals in whatever way best con- forms to that idea. Although both of these strategies can be used to argue for the principle of act utilitarianism, they are significantly different from each other, and these differences cause them to have different strengths and weaknesses. It emerges that which argumentative strategy is chosen by a proponent of act utilitarianism has a large impact on which virtues her view has and which objections it is vulnerable to. I. Introduction Act utilitarianism is one of the most heavily debated views in moral philosophy, and the arguments that can be given in support of it are remarkably diverse. But most of them are elaborations of one of two basic strategies. These two strategies are significantly dif- ferent from each other, and these differences cause them to have different strengths and weaknesses. In this article, I describe the two strategies and explore their advantages and disadvantages. -
Epistemology After the Modal Turn Traditionally
Philosophy 513/Topics in Recent and Contemporary Philosophy: Epistemology after the Modal Turn Princeton University Spring 2019 Tuesdays 7-9:50 Marx 201 Professor Thomas Kelly 221 1879 Hall [email protected] Traditionally, philosophers have often given a starring role to notions like evidence and reasons for belief when theorizing about knowledge. However, in the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twentieth-first, this traditional paradigm has been largely supplanted by alternative approaches. There are at least two complementary sources for this relatively recent, radical break with tradition. First, Edmund Gettier’s apparent refutation of “the traditional analysis of knowledge,” along with the failure of early, theoretically conservative attempts to “patch” that analysis, loosened the hold of the traditional paradigm on the philosophical imagination and created a demand for novel theoretical frameworks. More constructively, that demand for innovative approaches was met when the modal revolution, which had first entered analytic philosophy through logic and metaphysics (think Kripke, Lewis) hit epistemology. When epistemology took the modal turn, the result was an entirely new set of intriguing frameworks and powerful conceptual tools for theorizing about knowledge and related notions. Among these are the ideas that that we should think of knowledge in terms of the elimination of contextually salient possibilities (Lewis), that it consists in tracking facts (Nozick, Roush), and the increasingly influential picture of knowledge as safe belief (Williamson, Sosa). We will critically examine this currently flourishing tradition, beginning with seminal accounts by Lewis and Nozick, and continuing up to some of the latest developments. -
Freedom and Determinism (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)
1 Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know John Earman 1 Introduction The purpose of this essay is to give a brief survey of the implications of the theories of modern physics for the doctrine of determinism. The survey will reveal a curious feature of determinism: in some respects it is fragile, re- quiring a number of enabling assumptions to give it a fighting chance; but in other respects it is quite robust and very difficult to kill. The survey will also aim to show that, apart from its own intrinsic interest, determinism is an excellent device for probing the foundations of classical, relativistic, and quantum physics. The survey is conducted under three major presuppositions. First, I take a realistic attitude toward scientific theories in that I assume that to give an interpretation of a theory is, at a minimum, to specify what the world would have to be like in order for the theory to be true. But we will see that the demand for a deterministic interpretation of a theory can force us to abandon a naively realistic reading of the theory. Second, I reject the “no laws” view of science and assume that the field equations or laws of motion of the most fundamental theories of current physics represent science’s best guesses as to the form of the basic laws of nature. Third, I take deter- minism to be an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about the temporal evo- lution of the world. This ontological doctrine must not be confused with predictability, which is an epistemological doctrine, the failure of which need not entail a failure of determinism. -
The Case for Utilitarian Voting
Hillinger, Claude: The Case for Utilitarian Voting Munich Discussion Paper No. 2005-11 Department of Economics University of Munich Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Online at https://doi.org/10.5282/ubm/epub.653 THE CASE FOR UTILITARIAN VOTING Claude Hillinger* ABSTRACT Utilitarian voting (UV) is defined in this paper as any voting rule that allows the voter to rank all of the alternatives by means of the scores permitted under a given voting scale. Specific UV rules that have been proposed are approval voting, allowing the scores 0, 1; range voting, allowing all numbers in an interval as scores; evaluative voting, allowing the scores -1, 0, 1. The paper deals extensively with Arrow’s impossibility theorem that has been interpreted as precluding a satisfactory voting mechanism. I challenge the relevance of the ordinal framework in which that theorem is expressed and argue that instead utilitarian, i.e. cardinal social choice theory is relevant for voting. I show that justifications of both utilitarian social choice and of majority rule can be modified to derive UV. The most elementary derivation of UV is based on the view that no justification exists for restricting voters’ freedom to rank the alternatives on a given scale. JEL Classification: D71, D72 May 2005 Key words: approval voting, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, cardinal collective choice, evaluative voting, majority rule, range voting, utilitarian voting *SEMECON University of Munich Ludwigstr. 33/IV D-80539 Munich Germany E-mail: [email protected] 2 1. INTRODUCTION Under utilitarian voting (UV) a voter can score each alternative with one of the scores permitted by a given voting scale. -
The Utilitarian Approach
Confirming Pages CHAPTER 7 The Utilitarian Approach The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. Jeremy Bentham, COLLECTED WORKS (1843) 7.1. The Revolution in Ethics The late 18th and 19th centuries witnessed an astonishing series of upheavals: The modern nation-state emerged from the French Revolution and the wreckage of the Napoleonic empire; the revolutions of 1848 showed the transforming power of the ideas of “liberty, equality, and fraternity”; in the New World, America was born, sporting a new kind of consti- tution; and the American Civil War (1861–1865) would finish off slavery in Western civilization. All the while, the Indus- trial Revolution was bringing about a complete restructuring of society. It is not surprising that new ideas about ethics emerged during this era. In particular, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) made a powerful argument for a novel conception of morality. Morality, he urged, is not about pleasing God, nor is it about being faithful to abstract rules. Rather, morality is about mak- ing the world as happy as possible. Bentham believed in one ultimate moral principle, namely, the Principle of Utility. This principle requires us, in all circumstances, to produce the most happiness that we can. Bentham was the leader of a group of philosophical radicals whose aim was to reform the laws and institutions of England along utilitarian lines. One of his followers was James Mill, the distinguished Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist. James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), would become the leading advocate of utilitarian moral theory. -
6. Railton's “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality”
6. Railton’s “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality” Martín Abreu Zavaleta July 14, 2015 Railton is addressing one kind of problem that we raised. In class, we discussed the case of a parent who is offered a choice between saving the life of her own child or saving the life of another child. Saving the life of the other child would produce overall more utility than saving the life of her own, so utilitarian consequentialism claims that she should save the life of the other child. To many people, this seems to be the wrong result: surely, they think, whatever duty she has to save the life of the other child is overridden by her duties and obligations to save the life of her own child. Samuel Scheffler presents us with a less tragic, but related problem for consequentialism. Schef- fler observes that consequentialism demands that we don’t buy new shoes if we can spend that money in ways that will help other people more, or that we don’t watch TV if instead we could be doing more utility maximizing things. These two cases point to one important problem for consequentialism (here, under the guise of utilitarianism). Consequentialism seems to alienate us from the people we love and from things that make our lives richer. By focusing solely on the maximization of utility, it seems to ignore the value that other things bring into our lives: things like friendship, the love for one’s family, entertainment, art appreciation, etc. A life lived in line with consequentialist demands seems to be a very impoverished life, enslaved to the maximization of utility. -
Approaching Contemporary Philosophy Historically
APPROACHING CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS HISTORICALLY: On IDEALISMS, REALISMS, and PRAGMATISMS, Combining Undergraduate Teaching & Research Cinzia Ferrini University of Trieste [email protected] Abstract: As guest editor of this special issue of Esercizi Filosofici, the author introduces Kenneth R. Westphal’s and Paolo Parrini’s position papers on pragmatism, idealism and realism by elucidating the background and rationale of the workshop she organized on 29 April, 2015 at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, within the frame- work of her undergraduate course in «History of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy». The Appendix lists questions posed by students and by the audience, to which the invited speakers replied in discussion following the presentations; their respective replies follow their main papers. Key Words: Teaching systematic philosophy historically; research and teaching for under- graduates; contemporary issues and modern philosophy; pragmatism. 1. Background The workshop, «A Real Dialogue on an Ideal Topic», with Kenneth R. Westphal1 and Paolo Parrini2 on idealism, realism and pragmatism took 1 Kenneth Westphal has held (full) professorships in philosophy in England (Norwich, Canterbury), visiting professorships at Northwestern University and at the Martin Luther Universität Halle (a.d.Salle), and research fellowships in Heidelberg, Bielefeld (twice) and Göttingen. He has now settled in Istanbul as Professor of Philosophy at Boðaziçi Üniversi- tesi. The main focus of his research is on the character -
5. Immanuel Kant and Critical Idealism Robert L
Contemporary Civilization (Ideas and Institutions Section XII: The osP t-Enlightenment Period of Western Man) 1958 5. Immanuel Kant and Critical Idealism Robert L. Bloom Gettysburg College Basil L. Crapster Gettysburg College Harold A. Dunkelberger Gettysburg College See next page for additional authors Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/contemporary_sec12 Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, History Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Bloom, Robert L. et al. "5. Immanuel Kant and Critical Idealism. Pt XII: The osP t-Enlightenment Period." Ideas and Institutions of Western Man (Gettysburg College, 1958), 53-69. This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution. Cupola permanent link: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ contemporary_sec12/5 This open access book chapter is brought to you by The uC pola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The uC pola. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 5. Immanuel Kant and Critical Idealism Abstract The ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) are significant enough to be compared to a watershed in Western thought. In his mind were gathered up the major interests of the Enlightenment: science, epistemology, and ethics; and all of these were given a new direction which he himself described as another Copernican revolution. As Copernicus had shown that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth, so Kant showed that the knowing subject played an active and creative role in the production of his world picture, rather than the static and passive role which the early Enlightenment had assigned him.