Tim Henning

Immanuel Kant and Henry Sidgwick are towering figures in the history of moral philosophy. Kant's views on ethics continue to be discussed and studied in detail not only in philosophy, but also theology, political science, and legal theory. Meanwhile, Sidgwick is emerging as the philosopher within the utilitarian tradition who merits the same meticulous treatment that Kant receives. As champions of deontology and consequentialism respectively, Kant and Sidgwick disagree on many important issues. However, close examination reveals a surprising amount of consensus on various topics including moral psychology, moral epistemology, and moral theology. This book presents points of agreement and disagreement in the writings of these two giants of philosophical ethics. The chapters will stimulate discussions among moral theorists and historians of philosophy by applying cutting-edge scholarship on each philosopher to shed light on some of the more perplexing arguments and views of the other, and by uncovering and examining points of agreement between Sidgwick and Kant as possible grounds for greater convergence in contemporary moral philosophy. This is the first full-length volume to investigate Sidgwick and Kant side by side. It will be of major interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy and its history.

Arguments for moral consequentialism often appeal to an alleged structural similarity between consequentialist reasoning in ethics and rational decision-making in everyday life. Ordinary rational decision-making is seen as a paradigmatic case of goal-oriented, teleological decision-making, since it allegedly aims at maximizing the goal of preference satisfaction. This chapter describes and discusses a neglected type of preference change, “predictable preference accommodation.” This phenomenon leads to a number of critical cases in which the rationality of a particular choice does not depend on features of the outcome of the chosen act. On the basis of these cases, it is argued that consequentialists cannot point to everyday decision-making as an uncontroversial example of consequentialist reasoning. On the contrary, it is suggested that an adequate account of rationality in prudential choice may need a Kantian notion of respect.

Moral realists can, and should, allow that the truth-conditional content of moral judgments is in part attitudinal. I develop a two-dimensional semantics that embraces attitudinal content while preserving realist convictions about the independence of moral facts from our attitudes. Relative to worlds “considered as counterfactual,” moral terms rigidly track objective, response-independent properties. But relative to different ways the actual world turns out to be, they nonrigidly track whatever properties turn out to be the objects of our relevant attitudes. This theory provides realists with a satisfactory account of Moral Twin Earth cases and an improved response to Blackburn’s supervenience argument.

Many authors in ethics, economics, and political science endorse the Lottery Requirement, that is, the following thesis: where different parties have equal moral claims to one indivisible good, it is morally obligatory to let a fair lottery decide which party is to receive the good. This article defends skepticism about the Lottery Requirement. It distinguishes three broad strategies of defending such a requirement: the surrogate satisfaction account, the procedural account, and the ideal consent account, and argues that none of these strategies succeed. The article then discusses and discharges some remaining grounds for resistance to these skeptical conclusions, as well as the possibility of defending a weaker version of a normative lottery principle. The conclusion is that we have no reason to believe that where equal claims conflict, we are morally required to hold a lottery, as opposed to simply picking one of the parties on more subjective grounds or out of pure whim. In addition to the practical consequences of this skeptical view, the article sketches some theoretical implications for debates about saving the greater number and about axiomatic utilitarianism

When we discuss normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, hypothetical imperatives (or “anankastic conditionals”), motivating reasons and so on, we often use verbs like “believe” and “want” to capture a relevant subject’s perspective. According to the received view about sentences involving these verbs, what they do is describe the subject’s mental states. Many puzzles concerning normative discourse have to do with the role that mental states consequently appear to play in this discourse. This book uses tools from formal semantics and the philosophy of language to develop an alternative account of sentences involving these verbs. According to this view, which is called parentheticalism (in honour of J. O. Urmson), we very commonly use these verbs in a parenthetical sense. Used with this sense, these verbs themselves express backgrounded side-remarks on the contents they embed, and these latter, embedded contents constitute the at-issue contents of our utterances. This means that instead of speaking about the subject’s mental states, we often use sentences involving “believe” and “want” to speak about the world in a way that, in the conversational background, relates our utterances to her point of view. This idea is made precise, and it is used to solve various puzzles concerning normative discourse. The final result is a new, unified understanding of normative discourse, which gets by without postulating conceptual breaks between objective and subjective normative reasons, or normative reasons and rationality, or indeed between the reasons we ascribe to an agent and the reasons she herself can be expected to cite. Instead of being connected to either subjective mental states or objective facts, all of these normative statuses can be adequately articulated by citing worldly considerations from the subject’s point of view.

This paper explores Kant’s views about the logical form of “I think”-judgments. It is shown that according to Kant, in an important class of cases the prefix “I think” does not contribute to the assertoric, truth-conditional content of judgments of the form “I think that P.” Thus, judgments of this type are often merely judgments that P. The prefix “I think” does mention the subject and his thought, but it does not make the complex judgment a judgment about the subject and his or her thought. Kant argues that there is a distinctive kind of self-consciousness that is adequately expressed by means of this non-assertoric “I think.” The paper explains that understanding Kant’s ideas on the logic of “I think”-judgments is fruitful both for discussions in contemporary analytic philosophy and for an adequate understanding of Kant’s philosophy

This article argues for the view that statements about normative reasons are context-sensitive. Specifically, they are sensitive to a contextual parameter specifying a relevant person's or group's body of information. The argument for normative reasons contextualism starts from the context-sensitivity of the normative “ought” and the further premise that reasons must be aligned with oughts. It is incoherent, I maintain, to suppose that someone normatively ought to φ but has most reason not to φ. So given that oughts depend on context, a parallel view about normative reasons is needed. It is shown that the resulting view solves notorious puzzles involving apparently conflicting but equally plausible claims about reasons. These puzzles arise especially in cases where agents have limited information or false beliefs. In these cases, we feel torn between reasons claims that take into account the limitations of the agent's perspective and apparently conflicting claims that are made from a more objective point of view. The contextualist account developed here accommodates both objectivist and subjectivist intuitions. It shows that all of the claims in question can be true, provided that they are relativized to different values of the relevant information parameter. Also, contextualism yields a fruitful approach to the debate about having reasons and the alleged failure of the so-called “factoring account”

This paper argues that a certain kind of alienation from labour can be analyzed and explained in the theoretical framework that is dominant in current economics. Given a neoclassical model of a labour market, the intrinsic value that different kinds of labour may have for people can be represented as a source of utility (in the technical sense). It can then be shown that in capitalist economies, basing one’s supply decisions on this intrinsic value is predictably costly. So in the long run, rational agents can be – and will be – expected to make their labour supply decisions based only on considerations of income and leisure time. In the resulting picture, rational agents are indifferent with regard to different qualitatively specific kinds of labour. I draw on the theory of efficiency wages to show that this picture lies at the root of contemporary problems like involuntary unemployment and injustice.