The paradox of methods

Shelly Kagan
Additional contact information
Shelly Kagan: Yale University, USA

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2018, vol. 17, issue 2, 148-168

Abstract: Many proposed moral principles are such that it would be difficult or impossible to always correctly identify which act is required by that principle in a given situation. To deal with this problem, theorists typically offer various methods of determining what to do in the face of epistemic limitations, and we are then told that the right thing to do – given these limitations – is to perform the act identified by the given method. But since the method and the underlying principle can diverge, it would seem that in such cases we are being given contradictory advice: some particular act will be both right (since it is so identified by the favored method) and not right (since it does not conform to the underlying principle). Various attempts to resolve this apparent paradox are surveyed, but none are completely satisfactory.

Keywords: ethics; methods; moral principles; subjective ought; objective ought; subjective reasons; objective reasons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X17717737 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:17:y:2018:i:2:p:148-168

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X17717737

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().