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