>"I'm curious how you would categorize, or what you think of, a kind of defense of consequentialism that I associate at least with Mill and Railton. It appeals to the idea that morality by definition is concerned with what is best from an impartial point of view. That seems essentially like a combination of your first…
>"I'm curious how you would categorize, or what you think of, a kind of defense of consequentialism that I associate at least with Mill and Railton. It appeals to the idea that morality by definition is concerned with what is best from an impartial point of view. That seems essentially like a combination of your first 2 above. But it doesn't focus first on why we should ultimately *care* about this. For Mill, that is a separate question (for Chpt. 3). Instead it is just an elucidation of the concept of morality and "moral point of view." This establishes objective facts about what is morally good; and then we later worry about whether anyone has reason to care about what is morally good."
My reply:
I'm skeptical that stipulative "definitions" can do fruitful philosophical work for us. One can certainly talk about objective constructions formed by aggregating everyone's preferences or happiness; there are any number of objective constructions we could choose to talk about (corresponding to slightly different theories of well-being and/or aggregation). But the interesting philosophical question is which such constructions have significant normative properties, and we can't answer that by stipulation.
Jim Skidmore writes:
>"I'm curious how you would categorize, or what you think of, a kind of defense of consequentialism that I associate at least with Mill and Railton. It appeals to the idea that morality by definition is concerned with what is best from an impartial point of view. That seems essentially like a combination of your first 2 above. But it doesn't focus first on why we should ultimately *care* about this. For Mill, that is a separate question (for Chpt. 3). Instead it is just an elucidation of the concept of morality and "moral point of view." This establishes objective facts about what is morally good; and then we later worry about whether anyone has reason to care about what is morally good."
My reply:
I'm skeptical that stipulative "definitions" can do fruitful philosophical work for us. One can certainly talk about objective constructions formed by aggregating everyone's preferences or happiness; there are any number of objective constructions we could choose to talk about (corresponding to slightly different theories of well-being and/or aggregation). But the interesting philosophical question is which such constructions have significant normative properties, and we can't answer that by stipulation.