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Why
Common Sense Morality is Not Collectively
Self-Defeating
Piotr Bo³tuæ
University of Illinois at Springfield
Abstract.
The
so-called Common Sense Morality (C) is any moral theory that allows, or
requires, an agent to accept special, non-instrumental reasons to give
advantage to certain other persons, usually the agent’s friends or kin,
over the interests of others. Opponents charge C with violating the
requirement of impartiality defined as independence on positional
characteristics of moral agents and moral patients. Advocates of C claim
that C is impartial, but only in a positional manner in which every moral
agent would acquire the same relational characteristics if that agent was
in a certain relationship to the given moral patient. The opponents of C
reply that a theory that allows for positional characteristics is
self-defeating; it violates the requirement of prescriptivity due to its
inability to provide moral recommendations what should happen all
things considered. Advocates of C retort that a moral theory should be
prescriptive by telling every agent what to do, not what should the joint
outcome of those activities be. In this paper I analyze the last two moves
of this debate: the objection that C is self-defeating and the reply that
there is a plausible moral theory (C) that accommodates positional
characteristics of special moral reasons.
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