![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirisutogomenLast year right after my allergy season ended I got this brutal cold that bronchitised and lasted for 43 days. Now this year that seems to be repeating; it's only seven days so far, but blerg.
So naturally I decided that my semi-lucid state with occasional detours into delirium would be perfect for
Sorry, the phone rang, and now I don't remember what I was going to say, so instead I'll do
Some background stuff first. Some theories of morality are centered on personal character -- what it is to be a good person, what it is to be a bad person. These theories were popular with the ancient Greeks, and they remain popular today but not so much with the people who actually study ethics.
Then there are deontic theories of morality. These are about actions and their motivations and consequences. Broadly these theories fall into deontological theories, in which the action and the intent behind it are the subject of moral judgment, and consequentialist theories, in which the action and its consequences are the subject of moral judgment.
Then there are other theories that I'm not going to talk about right now, although they're worth talking about. Right now I'm just going to talk about moral theories that take as their unit of analysis an act by some sort of moral agent (usually a human).
Usually any discussion of deontology has to start with Immanuel Kant. His take on morality is that right and wrong are fundamentally inherent to our intent. So if I give a bunch of money to a nice charity, and then before the nice charity can use it to feed poor people or rescue orphaned puppies some guy busts in and steals the money and buys an AK-47 with it that he uses to kill a busload of nurses, my intent was good, even if the outcome was bad, so it was a good act. Unless, that is, I knew that the guy was going to do that and I was making sure that he had enough money to get a really reliable rifle, in which case I get zero ethical credit for giving money to nice charities and instead get a wheelbarrow full of ethical demerits.
Ah, but here's another thing. I have to be giving the money because I think that it is the right thing to do. If actually I get supreme sexual satisfaction from watching orphaned puppies get rescued, and that is the only reason I gave the nice charity the money, such that if my sexual predilections were to suddenly change and now I got off on being immersed in transmission fluid and as a result I wouldn't give the money to charity because I'd have spent it all on a swimming pool plus 50,000 gallons of transmission fluid, then I do not get any points for giving money to charity for puppy-rescue, even if the puppies do in fact get rescued. The act can't be motivated by me actually enjoying it; it needs to be the result of my knowledge of my moral obligations.
Well, my drugs seem to be wearing off, so I'm going to cut this short right here
So naturally I decided that my semi-lucid state with occasional detours into delirium would be perfect for
Sorry, the phone rang, and now I don't remember what I was going to say, so instead I'll do
Some background stuff first. Some theories of morality are centered on personal character -- what it is to be a good person, what it is to be a bad person. These theories were popular with the ancient Greeks, and they remain popular today but not so much with the people who actually study ethics.
Then there are deontic theories of morality. These are about actions and their motivations and consequences. Broadly these theories fall into deontological theories, in which the action and the intent behind it are the subject of moral judgment, and consequentialist theories, in which the action and its consequences are the subject of moral judgment.
Then there are other theories that I'm not going to talk about right now, although they're worth talking about. Right now I'm just going to talk about moral theories that take as their unit of analysis an act by some sort of moral agent (usually a human).
Usually any discussion of deontology has to start with Immanuel Kant. His take on morality is that right and wrong are fundamentally inherent to our intent. So if I give a bunch of money to a nice charity, and then before the nice charity can use it to feed poor people or rescue orphaned puppies some guy busts in and steals the money and buys an AK-47 with it that he uses to kill a busload of nurses, my intent was good, even if the outcome was bad, so it was a good act. Unless, that is, I knew that the guy was going to do that and I was making sure that he had enough money to get a really reliable rifle, in which case I get zero ethical credit for giving money to nice charities and instead get a wheelbarrow full of ethical demerits.
Ah, but here's another thing. I have to be giving the money because I think that it is the right thing to do. If actually I get supreme sexual satisfaction from watching orphaned puppies get rescued, and that is the only reason I gave the nice charity the money, such that if my sexual predilections were to suddenly change and now I got off on being immersed in transmission fluid and as a result I wouldn't give the money to charity because I'd have spent it all on a swimming pool plus 50,000 gallons of transmission fluid, then I do not get any points for giving money to charity for puppy-rescue, even if the puppies do in fact get rescued. The act can't be motivated by me actually enjoying it; it needs to be the result of my knowledge of my moral obligations.
Well, my drugs seem to be wearing off, so I'm going to cut this short right here
