Are you looking for a causal history or a theoretical justification...? Meh, I’ll just summarize both together.
Trying to unite my desiderata into a single theory that doesn’t eat itself proved a good means of reconciling or prioritizing my intuitions where they conflicted. (For instance, I had warring intuitions over whether to privilege the null action or commit myself to moral luck, and chose the former because my intuition against moral luck was stronger than my wariness of the doing-allowing distinction.) I find having reconciled/prioritized desiderata more comfortable and actionable, and codifying them into a decision procedure makes them easier to act on consistently.
I found all the theories I’d run across in academic puttering around to be deeply unsatisfactory in one or more ways; no authority figures I respected enough to consider emulating put forth coherent theories of their own. (One of my undergrad professors, I admired enough that I might have considered doing this, explicitly or just implicitly by letting him argue it to me in real time before I was equipped to argue back very well, but he didn’t talk about his personal views during ethics class and didn’t specialize in the field so I never found a paper on it by him or anything.) That meant I had to either not have one (which would lead to awkward silences when people in grad school asked me for my ethical opinions, and an uncomfortable lack of opinion when writing ethics papers, and no decision procedure to follow when I was uncertain of some real-life choice’s moral status), or make up my own. To make one up with “the best anticipated effect” would presuppose consequentialism, which I rejected pretty much as soon as I heard it. I wanted the ethical theory that would lead to me giving the right answers according to me, in a principled way, to ethical dilemmas where I already had a right answer in mind (e.g. let’s not murder homeless people for their organs thankyouverymuch), and let me pick my way through murkier cases in a way that felt right.
Thanks for the explanation. I was looking more for theoretical justification (if theoretical justification played a part for you in deciding how to choose an ethical theory). What I had in mind was, if you were going to try to convince other people that they should choose an ethical theory for the same reasons that you chose yours and should adopt the same theory you did, what would be the arguments that you would use to persuade them (limited to good-faith arguments that you actually believe rather than rhetorical strategies aimed primarily at convincing)? And there’s a little of that in your answer here. Thanks for your time.
Are you looking for a causal history or a theoretical justification...? Meh, I’ll just summarize both together.
Trying to unite my desiderata into a single theory that doesn’t eat itself proved a good means of reconciling or prioritizing my intuitions where they conflicted. (For instance, I had warring intuitions over whether to privilege the null action or commit myself to moral luck, and chose the former because my intuition against moral luck was stronger than my wariness of the doing-allowing distinction.) I find having reconciled/prioritized desiderata more comfortable and actionable, and codifying them into a decision procedure makes them easier to act on consistently.
I found all the theories I’d run across in academic puttering around to be deeply unsatisfactory in one or more ways; no authority figures I respected enough to consider emulating put forth coherent theories of their own. (One of my undergrad professors, I admired enough that I might have considered doing this, explicitly or just implicitly by letting him argue it to me in real time before I was equipped to argue back very well, but he didn’t talk about his personal views during ethics class and didn’t specialize in the field so I never found a paper on it by him or anything.) That meant I had to either not have one (which would lead to awkward silences when people in grad school asked me for my ethical opinions, and an uncomfortable lack of opinion when writing ethics papers, and no decision procedure to follow when I was uncertain of some real-life choice’s moral status), or make up my own. To make one up with “the best anticipated effect” would presuppose consequentialism, which I rejected pretty much as soon as I heard it. I wanted the ethical theory that would lead to me giving the right answers according to me, in a principled way, to ethical dilemmas where I already had a right answer in mind (e.g. let’s not murder homeless people for their organs thankyouverymuch), and let me pick my way through murkier cases in a way that felt right.
Thanks for the explanation. I was looking more for theoretical justification (if theoretical justification played a part for you in deciding how to choose an ethical theory). What I had in mind was, if you were going to try to convince other people that they should choose an ethical theory for the same reasons that you chose yours and should adopt the same theory you did, what would be the arguments that you would use to persuade them (limited to good-faith arguments that you actually believe rather than rhetorical strategies aimed primarily at convincing)? And there’s a little of that in your answer here. Thanks for your time.