Moral deliberation

Abstract

A practical decision is a decision as to what to do. The process of thinking that produces a practical decision is known as deliberation. At the start of a piece of deliberation, a person is undecided as to which of several courses of action to take. Where the selecting or non-selecting of one of those courses of action is seen as depending on moral considerations, the deliberation is moral deliberation (or ethical deliberation; we take the terms ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ to be interchangeable). Deliberation might be interrupted, or the person may just give up thinking about the problem; but if neither of these things happens then the deliberation ends with the selection of a course of action. The selected course of action might not be one of the ones originally considered; she might have rejected all of those and thought of another course of action altogether.