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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Vegetarianism And Virtue: Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?, Nathan Nobis Mar 2015

Vegetarianism And Virtue: Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

The article discusses the moral aspects of vegetarianism. This will make vegetarians more compassionate and caring for animals and will result in better health and less finances. The virtue theory or the vegetarian justifying principle connotes that one should not support even symbolically bad practices to animals when good alternatives are readily available. Becoming a vegetarian is a way of attesting to the depth and sincerity of one's belief in the wrongness of how we treat animals and its consequence to humans. Consequentialism does not demand too little because it requires that one conforms his behavior to the vegetarian justifying …


How To Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects For A New Methodology, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder Dec 2013

How To Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects For A New Methodology, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

Examining folk intuitions about philosophical questions lies at the core of experimental philosophy. This requires both a good account of what intuitions are and methods allowing to assess them. We propose to combine philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of intuitions by focusing on three of their features: immediacy, lack of inferential relations, and stability. Once this account of intuition is at hand, we move on to propose a methodology that can test all three characteristics without eliminating any of them. In the final part of the paper, we propose implementations of the new methodology as applied to the experimental investigation of …


Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder Dec 2013

Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

According to act-consequentialism the right action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impersonal perspective. Some claim that this requirement is unreasonably demanding and therefore consequentialism is unacceptable as a moral theory. The article breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. Instead of focusing on theoretical responses, it empirically investigates whether there exists a widely shared intuition that consequentialist demands are unreasonable. This discussion takes the form of examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In two experiments, the article finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist …


Consequentialism And Its Demands: A Representative Study, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder Dec 2013

Consequentialism And Its Demands: A Representative Study, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

An influential objection to act-consequentialism holds that the theory is unduly demanding. This paper is an attempt to approach this critique of act-consequentialism – the Overdemandingness Objection – from a different, so far undiscussed, angle. First, the paper argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, in order to investigate the existence of the intuition, the paper reports empirical evidence of how people see the normative significance of consequentialist requirements.. In a scenario …


The Case For Authority, Attila Tanyi Dec 2011

The Case For Authority, Attila Tanyi

Attila Tanyi

The paper deals with a charge that is often made against consequentialist moral theories: that they are unacceptably demanding. This is called the Overdemandingness Objection. The paper first distinguishes three interpretations of the Objection as based on the three dimensions of moral demands: scope, content, and authority. It is then argued that neither the scope, nor the content-based understanding of the Objection is viable. Constraining the scope of consequentialism is neither helpful, nor justified, hence the pervasiveness of consequentialism cannot be the ground for the Objection. Although recent approaches interpret the Objection as a claim about the excessively demanding content …


Dimensionalising Cultural Implications Of The Multinationals In The Niger Delta: A Consequentialist Approach For Resistance, Uzoechi Nwagbara Nov 2011

Dimensionalising Cultural Implications Of The Multinationals In The Niger Delta: A Consequentialist Approach For Resistance, Uzoechi Nwagbara

Dr Uzoechi Nwagbara

The presence of multinational oil corporations in Nigeria – which include Agip, Chevron, Elf, Mobil, Shell, and Total among others have come with heavy consequences to the nation’s cultural heritage and identity in the global marketplace. This is particularly the case in the Niger delta region of Nigeria considered as the goose that lays the golden egg, that is, oil, which has been described in many quarters as a major source of the nation’s malaise. The cultural and environmental damage of oil exploration as well as the pauperisation of the locals is inextricably linked to the ruse of global capitalism, …