Moral Principles and Trolleyology (Kagan, Foot, Thomson)
Two moral factors recognized by the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE).
Whether the effect of the act is sufficiently valuable relative to the harm.
Whether the harm is directly or obliquely intended.Intentional
If doing something is wrong unless there's a compelling rebuttal, then we'd use this term.
Prima facie.
McPherson thinks that it's okay to make an animal suffer if it would save their life. This is what he thinks explains it.
That the animal's life has value.
This is established by the fact that the people who will come to exist if we adopt the Risky Policy are different from the people who would come to exist if we adopt the Safe Policy.
It's possible to cause terrible things to happen without actually making anyone worse off than they might have been.
You are driving a trolley when you lose control over it. Ahead of you there's five people tied up. You could switch to a different track off to the side, where there's one person tied up. These are the kinds of duties you have.
Negative duties (You have a negative duty not to run people over because you lost control of your trolley and another negative duty not to run over another person by turning towards them!)
The "central puzzle" Nelkin's and Rickless's paper tries to address.
The inconsistency in how intentions matter to legal culpability and punishment in criminal law.
Marquis starts with a theory that explains this in general, and then applies it to fetuses.
Why killing is prima facie wrong.
Budolfson thinks these types of moral considerations don't support a requirement to refrain from eating factory farmed meat.
Utilitarian considerations.
This is true of motivating reasons, but not normative reasons.
They explain why you did what you did. (Sometimes your motivating reasons might also be normative reasons, but not always!)
Quong thinks this is a problem for the Argument from Moral Responsibility.
Sometimes it's justified to kill someone who hasn't given up their right to be killed (consider some trolley cases pp. 510--511).
Thomson assumes this for the sake of argument in her paper on abortion.
That a fetus has a right to life.
Part of why McPherson thinks it's wrong to kill animals is that it's prima facie wrong to make them suffer, but it's okay to make them suffer if doing so would save their lives. There's another consideration that he gives for why it's wrong to kill animals.
Their future of value.
Objections based on sincerely held discriminatory beliefs (p. 19).
Objections based on sincerely believed but empirically baseless claims (p. 19).
Objections based on harm to the provider, where there would be greater harm to the patient (p. 20).
When we say that it's right to assign some moral status to something, what kind of support should that claim have?
Rational support through arguments and reasons.
A non-consequentialist reason to kill or not kill (multiple answers accepted).
Your child is in danger and killing will save them.
The death would be intentional.
That the potential victim as a right to not be killed.
The victim wouldn't understand why they're being killed.
Bonus: What would be a consequentialist reason?
This type of samaritanship isn't required by justice, but by considerations of virtue.
Minimally decent samaritanship.
Budolfson believes consuming these kinds of products is not morally wrong, even though producing them involves terrible harms.
Products of factory farms.
Parfit challenges this claim with an example involving testing pregnant mothers for conditions X or Y.
What is the distinction between avoiding injury and bringing aid?
If killing in self-defense is justified by someone giving up their right not to be killed, then you could only defensively kill this one of Quong's four characters.
A Villainous Aggressor.
Thomson thinks this is what's wrong with the "standard argument" against abortion (where the fetus's right to life is why abortion is impermissible).
Conflating the right to life with the right to use someone else's body.
Threshold effects: If 2000 or more people stop eating meat, then 1 factory farm will close. If fewer than 2000 people stop, nothing will happen.
Budolfson thinks we can say this about the effect that one person in a group of 2500 people quitting meat would have.
Nothing unless we know if they're the 2000th person.
Motivating