Skip to main content

School of Philosophy

  • Home
  • People
  • Events
    • Event series
    • Conferences
      • Past conferences
    • Past events
  • News
    • Audio/Video Recordings
  • Research
  • Study with us
    • Prizes and scholarships
  • Visit us
  • Contact us

Centres & Projects

  • Centre for Consciousness
  • Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory
  • Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences
  • Humanising Machine Intelligence

Related Sites

  • Research School of Social Sciences
  • ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

Centre for Consciousness

Related Sites

Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory

Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences

School of Philosophy

Administrator

Breadcrumb

HomeUpcoming EventsMatthew Hammerton (ANU): A Defence of Agent-relative Value
Matthew Hammerton (ANU): A defence of agent-relative value

Suppose the Mafia makes a credible threat that they will murder three innocent people unless you kill an innocent person. Consequentialism appears to require you to kill the innocent person whereas commonsense morality appears to forbid it. Many take this to be a serious mark against consequentialist moral theories. In response some consequentialists posit that value can be agent-relative, which allows them to side with commonsense morality and forbid killing the one from within a consequentialist framework. One influential line of criticism against this move rejects the notion of agent-relative value because we have no pre-theoretical grasp of it and cannot justify it as a theoretical posit. I respond to this criticism by demonstrating that commonsense morality is already committed to agent-relative value. In particular, special duties and obligations to undo moral wrongs cannot be made sense of without postulating goods that are agent-relative. Hence, contrary to the critics, agent-relative value is part of pre-theoretical folk morality, and thus we have no reason to be suspicious of it as some kind of unmotivated theoretical construction.

Date & time

  • Tue 21 Oct 2014, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location

Sir Roland Wilson Theatrette 2.02

Event Series

Philsoc seminars