Attila Tanyi

Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach

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 requirements and, on average, find more extreme demands less reasonable, the level of disagreement with consequentialism falls short of qualifying as a widely shared intuition, even when demands are the highest. The article then ends with a general discussion of possible objections to its methods and its findings.

God and eternal boredom

Abstract God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this article we argue that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williamss article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If Williams is right, then it follows that, if God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address several objections by examining possible differences between human and divine persons.

On the Intrinsic Value of Genetic Integrity

ATTILA TANYI University of Liverpool In their article Yasha Rohwer and Emma Marris (henceforth RM we will come back to it presently. Having put the main concepts on the table, R&M set as their target to show that there is in fact no prima facie obligation to preserve genetic integrity. Such an obligation can at best be derived from other possible duties: doing what preserves genetic integrity would then be a means for fulfilling these duties. In this commentary I do not take issue with the second part of R&M’s argument, but I do raise some problems concerning the first part. The strategy R&M employ in this part is to analyze one by one the possible grounds for establishing a prima facie duty to preserve genetic integrity. They identify four relevant and in the biologist literature actually deployed justifications, but I will only focus on one: the possibility that a pure genome is intrinsically valuable. At this point it becomes crucial to hear more about what genetic integrity really is: what that property is that would be lost ‘due to mixing of genes from another population.’ Unfortunately, R&M never clearly and explicitly answer this question. However, from their discussion it seems that their account of genetic integrity has two parts. One, genetic

Transoral laser surgery for laryngeal carcinoma: has Steiner achieved a genuine paradigm shift in oncological surgery?

ABSTRACT Transoral laser microsurgery applies to the piecemeal removal of malignant tumours of the upper aerodigestive tract using the CO2 laser under the operating microscope. This method of surgery is being increasingly popularised as a single modality treatment of choice in early laryngeal cancers (T1 and T2) and occasionally in the more advanced forms of the disease (T3 and T4), predominantly within the supraglottis. Thomas Kuhn, the American physicist turned philosopher and historian of science, coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that the arrival of the new and often incompatible idea forms the core of a new paradigm, the birth of an entirely new way of thinking. This article discusses whether Steiner and colleagues truly brought about a paradigm shift in oncological surgery. By rejecting the principle of en block resection and by replacing it with the belief that not only is it oncologically safe to cut through the substance of the tumour but in doing so one can actually achieve better results, Steiner was able to truly revolutionise the management of laryngeal cancer. Even though within this article the repercussions of his insight are limited to the upper aerodigestive tract oncological surgery, his willingness to question other peoples’ dogma makes his contribution truly a genuine paradigm shift.

Norm-expressivism and regress

This paper aims to investigate Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivist account of normativity. In particular, the aim is to see whether Gibbard’s theory is able to account for the normativity of reason-claims. For this purpose, I first describe how I come to targeting Gibbard’s theory by setting out the main tenets of quasi-realism cum expressivism. After this, I provide a detailed interpretation of the relevant parts of Gibbard’s theory. I argue that the best reading of his account is the one that takes normativity to be carried by a controlled, coherent, comprehensive set of norms. Finally, I present a potential obstacle to Gibbard’s approach: the regress problem. The idea is to examine the structure of the non-cognitive state expressed and find it inadequate due to the possibility of an infinite regress in the justification of the norms whose acceptance it contains. I then end the paper with some concluding remarks.

Introduction to the guest edited section: world government

ABSTRACT In this introduction, I first present the general problematic of the special section. Our world faces several existential challenges (climate change, threat of (nuclear) war, and global injustice) and some would argue (with even more disagreeing) that the only adequate answer to these challenges is setting up a world government. I then introduce the contributions that comprise the scholarly body of the special section: Andrić on global democracy; Hahn on global political reconciliation; Pinheiro Walla on Kant and world government; Miklós & Tanyi on institutional consequentialism and world governance. Lastly, I briefly describe the practical context in which the idea of the special section has arisen and in which the present contributions have taken shape.

Institutional consequentialism and global governance

ABSTRACT Elsewhere we have responded to the so-called demandingness objection to consequentialism – that consequentialism is excessively demanding and is therefore unacceptable as a moral theory – by introducing the theoretical position we call institutional consequentialism. This is a consequentialist view that, however, requires institutional systems, and not individuals, to follow the consequentialist principle. In this paper, we first introduce and explain the theory of institutional consequentialism and the main reasons that support it. In the remainder of the paper, we turn to the global dimension where the first and foremost challenge is to explain how institutional consequentialism can deal with unsolved global problems, such as poverty, war and climate change. In response, following the general idea of institutional consequentialism, we draw up three alternative routes: relying on existing national, transnational and supranational institutions; promoting gradual institutional reform; and advocating radical changes to the status quo. We evaluate these routes by describing normatively relevant properties of the existing global institutional system, as well as by showing what institutional consequentialism can say about alternatives to it: a world government; and multi-layered sovereignty/neo-medieval system.

How to Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects for a New Methodology

The concept of moral intuitions reflects the idea that there are moral truths and that people arrive at these truths not primarily by a process of reflection and reasoning but rather by a more immediate process somewhat akin to perception.1 This is crucial from a philosophical point of view: Intuitions matter for a philosopher because they are taken to have evidential value. Alvin Goldman’s (2007, p. 2, italics in original) remark on Gettier’s challenge to the account of knowledge as justified true belief well illustrates the point: It wasn’t the mere publication of Gettier’s two examples, or what he said about them. It was the fact that almost everybody who read Gettier’s examples shared the intuition that these were not instances of knowing. Had their intuitions been different, there would have been no discovery.