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Threshold Deontology and Its Critique

EYAL ZAMIR and BARAK MEDINA

in Law, Economics, and Morality

This chapter discusses moderate (or threshold) deontology, its critique, and possible responses. Deontological theories prioritize values such as autonomy, human dignity, and keeping one's promises ... More

This chapter discusses moderate (or threshold) deontology, its critique, and possible responses. Deontological theories prioritize values such as autonomy, human dignity, and keeping one's promises over the promotion of good outcomes. In prohibiting the infliction of harm on other people, they resort to distinctions such as that between actively doing harm and merely allowing it, and between intending to do harm and merely foreseeing it. Moderate deontology holds that constraints (and options) have thresholds. A constraint may be overridden for the sake of furthering good outcomes or avoiding bad ones if enough good (or bad) is at stake; and an option not to promote the good may be overridden for the sake of attaining enough good or avoiding enough bad. The chapter analyzes the main critiques leveled against deontology in general and moderate deontology in particular. It concludes that threshold constraints (and options) are an indispensable part of any acceptable factoral moral theory, but that threshold deontology suffers from a lack of methodological rigor and precision.Less

The Fight Against Terrorism

EYAL ZAMIR and BARAK MEDINA

in Law, Economics, and Morality

This chapter presents a constrained cost-benefit analysis of measures taken in the fight against terrorism. It begins by characterizing and criticizing existing normative economic analysis of the ... More

This chapter presents a constrained cost-benefit analysis of measures taken in the fight against terrorism. It begins by characterizing and criticizing existing normative economic analysis of the fight against terrorism as reflecting a simplified ad-hoc balancing. It then presents the central deontological constraints pertaining to the fight on terror. The chapter discusses threshold functions that should be employed in order to determine the permissibility of such measures as targeted killings and torture. It discusses the factors affecting the evaluation of the act's relevant net benefit, and those determining the amount of net benefit required to justify an infringement. It argues that standard economic analysis fails to take into account critical distinctions. These include the distinction between different goals of anti-terrorist measures; the difference between harms the state inflicts through antiterrorist measures, and those resulting from unthwarted terrorist attacks; and the distinction between intended and unintended harm. Deontologically-constrained CBA, which incorporates all of these distinctions, is shown to be methodically workable and normatively superior.Less

Introduction

EYAL ZAMIR and BARAK MEDINA

in Law, Economics, and Morality

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's motivation and goals, and describes the structure of the discussion.

Torture and the Balance of Evils

Michael Moore

in Placing Blame: A Theory of the Criminal Law

If (as the last chapter argues) criminal legislation should prima facie aim at prohibiting all and only moral wrongdoing, then the actual reach of the criminal law will depend on the nature of moral ... More

If (as the last chapter argues) criminal legislation should prima facie aim at prohibiting all and only moral wrongdoing, then the actual reach of the criminal law will depend on the nature of moral wrongdoing. Is it deontological or consequentialist in nature, for example? The general shape of our moral obligations and thus of their breach, wrongdoing, is approached in this chapter through what is known in criminal law as the issue of general justification, sometimes called ‘necessity’ or ‘balance of evils.’ This justification exists whenever the evil prevented by the doing of some act is greater than the evil of doing that act, considered by itself. The contours of this most general form of justification is taken to reveal the general shape of the wrongs that can be thus justified. A complex deontological form for moral wrongdoing is elucidated in this way, a form allowing thresholds over which consequences govern, exceptions, and limited scope, to moral ‘absolutes’ such as, ‘never torture.’Less

Agent-Relative Principles

Jeffrey Brand-Ballard

in Limits of Legality: The Ethics of Lawless Judging

This chapter examines four agent-relative principles that, if true, entail that systemic effects do not give Group O (the group of judges with correct moral judgment) any reason to adhere to the law ... More

This chapter examines four agent-relative principles that, if true, entail that systemic effects do not give Group O (the group of judges with correct moral judgment) any reason to adhere to the law in suboptimal-result cases, even if additional deviation will push the system past its deviation density threshold (see chapter 11). The principles that entail this result are ones that assign moral significance to intention, means, spatiotemporal proximity, and intervening agency. The chapter argues that we must abandon, qualify, or demote all of these principles if we wish to support the principle that judges have moral reasons to obey a nonpermissive rule. Adjudication theory should be foundationally agent-neutral.Less

Why Desperate Times (But Only Desperate Times) Call for Consequentialism

Chelsea Rosenthal

in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level—that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce ... More

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level—that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide justifications for it that aren’t ad hoc. This chapter develops a new, non-ad hoc justification, by showing that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad. The argument of the chapter draws on a broader account of moral uncertainty under which we have a moral responsibility to use good procedures for being moral (“procedural oughts”), alongside ordinary, first-order moral responsibilities (“substantive oughts”).Less

Introduction I: Moral Conflicts and Deontology

Matthew H. Kramer

in Torture and Moral Integrity: A Philosophical Enquiry

After briefly adumbrating the structure of the book as a whole, this chapter addresses some important matters in the more abstract reaches of moral philosophy. It disambiguates several key concepts ... More

After briefly adumbrating the structure of the book as a whole, this chapter addresses some important matters in the more abstract reaches of moral philosophy. It disambiguates several key concepts in order to clarify the import of moral conflicts, and it elucidates the distinction between deontological obligations and consequentialist obligations. It repels a number of arguments propounded by philosophers who have maintained that moral conflicts are not genuinely possible. It proceeds to delineate the general structure of morality, with reference to the deontology/consequentialism distinction and the other distinctions that have been highlighted earlier in the chapter. The author's absolutist position is pitted against Michael Moore's threshold deontology, which deems the perpetration of interrogational torture to be permissible in circumstances of desperation.Less

Putting the Mechanics of Claims in Perspective

Alec D. Walen

in The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War

This chapter covers two basic themes. First, it argues that the mechanics of claims is substantively preferable to the infringement model in two ways. First, it considers the main reason to adopt the ... More

This chapter covers two basic themes. First, it argues that the mechanics of claims is substantively preferable to the infringement model in two ways. First, it considers the main reason to adopt the infringement model: its account of the duty to compensate those who are “rightfully wronged.” This model is inferior to the account of compensation that one can articulate using the mechanics of claims. Second, it reviews four other problems that are particularly telling against the infringement model. Then it turns to the second theme, acknowledging the limits of the mechanics of claims and the need for some notion of threshold deontology. But it also explains how threshold deontology can complement the mechanics of claims.Less

Necessity Knows No Law1

Alon Harel

in Why Law Matters

This chapter establishes that some decisions must be performed by private individuals. The argument is based on a normative distinction between acts performed under the direction of rules and ... More

This chapter establishes that some decisions must be performed by private individuals. The argument is based on a normative distinction between acts performed under the direction of rules and unprincipled, context-generated acts—acts performed under the force of circumstances. Using rules in exceptional cases presupposes the commensurability of human lives: some human lives have to be sacrificed for the sake of protecting others. But, as human life has value but no price, no such exchange value can be fixed and, consequently, the use of rule-based reasoning is impermissible. Dignity requires that sacrificing the lives of one person for the sake of others is permissible only when it is unprincipled. To establish this claim use is made of a decision of the German Constitutional Court, in which the Court declared that a provision authorizing the Minister of Defence to order that a passenger airplane be shot down in cases of emergency was void.Less

Humean Pluralism and Moral Justification

Michael B. Gill

in Humean Moral Pluralism

Moral monists claim that pluralism must be rejected because it implies that our moral judgments are arbitrary, or completely unjustified. But in fact moral pluralism can accommodate moral ... More

Moral monists claim that pluralism must be rejected because it implies that our moral judgments are arbitrary, or completely unjustified. But in fact moral pluralism can accommodate moral justification—up to a point. It cannot accommodate all of the elements of moral justification that some kinds of monistic theories aspire to, but that does not mean it cannot accommodate any moral justification at all. There are many circumstances in which pluralism narrows the range of justified courses of action to a single action or to a proper subset of all available actions. And even in cases in which two ultimate moral ends conflict, pluralism can accommodate justificatory reasons for choosing one over the other—as an examination of “threshold deontology” reveals. The amount of justification pluralism can accommodate, moreover, matches the amount of moral justification we should expect there to be if moral judgments are based in sentiment (as Humeans maintain).Less