I don't understand why this proves that "state of affairs" consequentialism is true? Say I believe we should evaluate morality on an act-by-act basis, where certain types of acts like murder, assault, theft, etc. are verboten.
This is "complete" - when given a list of acts for a person to do, a moral being would look at the kind of act, determine if it falles into a category. If it does, then it is prohibited. If it does not, then we don't care.
It's transitive - if we look at acts A, B, and C, then we can say that if A is murder, B is assault, and C is theft, that Murder is always worse then assault is always worse then theft, and thus Murder is alwasy worse then theft as an act.
It also seems to, technically, be complete. That's because you aren't assigning "probabilities" at all. An act either is or is not murder, assault, theft, etc. So sure perhaps a 42% chance of assault is outweighed by a 100% chance of theft, but you will never actually get a "42% chance of assault" (though presumably committing 100 thefts is worse then 42 assaults)
It is also independent for substatially the same reason.
So a perfectly moral being looking at this acts based view would fall under your perview and not be a consequentialist?
It is complete over probabilities - you can have as an ethical axiom that an act which has a 42% chance of being assault is as bad as an act which is known to be theft. You can slaos say that there will never be a situation where an act has a 42% chance of being assault.
It's not consequentialist, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that. Under this ethical system, we don't care about the consequences of an act. We care about some sort of platonic description of what an act "is". Is it assault, is it theft, is it murder? If it can be categorized as one of those, then its bad.
Yes you have to look at what an act does to quantify what category it fits in, but I think *that* qualifys as consequentialism, then every ethical theory is "consequentialist"
You must have some coherent function which you're optimizing for if you rate "an act which has a 42% chance of being assault is as bad as an act which is known to be theft," and don't violate completeness in other instances. If you said that there will never be a 42% chance of assault that would be totally absurd -- we can imagine a hypothetical 100 sided die that would cause an assault if it was 1-42.
The thing you've described is still consequentialist -- it just has one relevant consequence be a feature of the act. As a result of being a consequentialist, this person would have to prefer one murder to prevent two other murders, for they rate two murders as being worse than only one. It's consequentialist because it's maximizing some single coherent, well-defined utility function.
I don't understand why this proves that "state of affairs" consequentialism is true? Say I believe we should evaluate morality on an act-by-act basis, where certain types of acts like murder, assault, theft, etc. are verboten.
This is "complete" - when given a list of acts for a person to do, a moral being would look at the kind of act, determine if it falles into a category. If it does, then it is prohibited. If it does not, then we don't care.
It's transitive - if we look at acts A, B, and C, then we can say that if A is murder, B is assault, and C is theft, that Murder is always worse then assault is always worse then theft, and thus Murder is alwasy worse then theft as an act.
It also seems to, technically, be complete. That's because you aren't assigning "probabilities" at all. An act either is or is not murder, assault, theft, etc. So sure perhaps a 42% chance of assault is outweighed by a 100% chance of theft, but you will never actually get a "42% chance of assault" (though presumably committing 100 thefts is worse then 42 assaults)
It is also independent for substatially the same reason.
So a perfectly moral being looking at this acts based view would fall under your perview and not be a consequentialist?
It's not complete over probabilities. Also, the view you describe is still consequentialist but takes into account rights.
I think both statemanet you just made are false.
It is complete over probabilities - you can have as an ethical axiom that an act which has a 42% chance of being assault is as bad as an act which is known to be theft. You can slaos say that there will never be a situation where an act has a 42% chance of being assault.
It's not consequentialist, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that. Under this ethical system, we don't care about the consequences of an act. We care about some sort of platonic description of what an act "is". Is it assault, is it theft, is it murder? If it can be categorized as one of those, then its bad.
Yes you have to look at what an act does to quantify what category it fits in, but I think *that* qualifys as consequentialism, then every ethical theory is "consequentialist"
You must have some coherent function which you're optimizing for if you rate "an act which has a 42% chance of being assault is as bad as an act which is known to be theft," and don't violate completeness in other instances. If you said that there will never be a 42% chance of assault that would be totally absurd -- we can imagine a hypothetical 100 sided die that would cause an assault if it was 1-42.
The thing you've described is still consequentialist -- it just has one relevant consequence be a feature of the act. As a result of being a consequentialist, this person would have to prefer one murder to prevent two other murders, for they rate two murders as being worse than only one. It's consequentialist because it's maximizing some single coherent, well-defined utility function.