Abstract
Rightness and wrongness come in degrees that vary on a continuous scale. Examples in which agents have many options that morally differ from each other demonstrate this. I suggest ways to develop scalar consequentialism, which treats the rightness and wrongness of actions as matters of degree, and explains them in terms of the value of the actions’ consequences. Scalar consequentialism has a variety of linguistic resources for understanding unsuffixed “right.” It also has advantages over some deontological theories in accounting for rightness.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Robbie Williams and Mitchell Yoshitaka Erlewine for help with the semantics of gradable adjectives, Tomislav Janović and Matej Susnik for teaching me about Croatian grammar, Derek Baker for raising the issue of binary guidance, Peter Murphy for suggesting the notion of continuous right-making parameters, John Tilley for help with Hume, Samuel Kahn for help with Kant, and Daniel Muñoz for help with twentieth century British ethics scholarship. I also thank audiences at the University of Waikato, Massey University, Colorado State University, the University of Akron, Cleveland State University, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the University of Surrey, and the University of Oslo for helpful feedback.
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Sinhababu, N. Scalar consequentialism the right way. Philos Stud 175, 3131–3144 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0998-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0998-y