Wednesday, January 04, 2023

Moral Views

Astral Codex Ten is doing its yearly survey of who its readers are.  One of the questions is a multiple choice of what type of moral approach we favored. I have never seen such a question on a reader survey and was impressed for that alone. The choices were

Consequentialism 

 Deontology

Virtue Ethics 

Natural Law

Contractualism

I like them all myself, just being happy these days if anyone has anything going, and seeing some advantage in each approach.  I was surprised that utilitarianism was not on the list, but I think it might be out of intellectual favor these days. I like to keep it in the mix even though I think it has serious problems, largely because I think it is what most of us use as a shortcut 90% of the time for everyday use if a question doesn't catch our attention as difficult, even if we say we subscribe to one of the others.

3 comments:

  1. Utilitarianism is a sub-type of consequentialism because it focuses on the outcome -- the final utility -- of an act to determine whether it's a good act.

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  2. Yes, that's right. Hedonism is an other subtype of consequentialism; some critics of utilitarianism suggest the overlap is nearly complete.

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  3. What surprises me more is to see "Natural Law" broken out from "Virtue Ethics" and "Deontology." Both of those have a claim to natural law; virtue ethics has a claim to be the root of natural law theory.

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