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No Hands, No Paradox

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in John M. Robson, ed., Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill vol. 10, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    1969). For an overview, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Consequentialism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/consequentialism/>.

  2. See, most famously, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For an overview, see Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, "Deontological Ethics," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ethics-deontological/>.

  3. See, e.g., 1) Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1973): 160–180. 2) C.A.J. Coady, "The Problem of Dirty Hands," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/dirty-hands/>.

  4. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 267–268.

  5. This example is found in Walzer, op. cit., pp. 166–167.

  6. Besides the works discussed throughout the present article, see, e.g., 1) Bernard Williams, “Politics and Moral Character,” in Stuart Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 55–73. 2) C.A.J. Coady, “Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands,” in Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). pp. 373–383. 3) Paul Rynard and David P. Shugarman, eds., Cruelty and Deception: The Controversy over Dirty Hands in Politics (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).

  7. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 165.

  8. Samuel Scheffler, “Agent-Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues,” Mind 94 (1985), p 409. The argument against these is made most fully in Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  9. Such as Coady 2014, op. cit.

  10. Simon Blackburn, “How To Be An Ethical Anti-Realist,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1988), pp. 363, 371.

  11. See, e.g., 1) Michael Walzer, “Emergency Ethics,” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 2) John M. Parrish, Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3) Coady 2014, op. cit.

  12. 1) R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes, 3rd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1. 2) Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge 2007), pp. 141–4.

  13. Sainsbury, op. cit., p. 1.

  14. Sainsbury, op. cit., p. 27.

  15. Nagel, op. cit., p. 179.

  16. Perhaps a patient-centric deontological account of Description 2 could be provided. However, see Alexander and Moore, op. cit., for a concern that patient-centric deontological positions, when pushed, must be interpreted as agency-centric after all.

  17. 1) Andrew Sneddon, “Normative Ethics and the Prospects of an Empirical Contribution to Assessment of Moral Disagreement and Moral Realism,” Journal of Value Inquiry Vol. 43 (2009):447–455. 2) Andrew Sneddon, Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011).

  18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machineThere are lots of images of Rube Goldberg machines online. I’m partial to the device for breaking a hard-boiled egg.

  19. Joel Feinberg, “Action and Responsibility,” In Max Black, ed., Philosophy in America (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1964). See also 1) J.E. Atwell, “The Accordion-Effect Thesis,” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 77 (1969), pp. 337–342. 2) Donald Davidson, “Agency,” In Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  20. For an overview of issues raised by causal deviance in the philosophy of action, see Rowland Stout, “Deviant Causal Chains,” In Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Malden, Mass: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), pp. 159–165.

  21. See Alison McIntyre, "Doctrine of Double Effect," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/double-effect/.

  22. See, e.g., 1) Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review, 5 (1967), pp. 5–15. 2) Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” The Yale Law Journal, 94 (1985), pp. 1395–1415.

  23. See 1) Suzanne Uniacke, “Responsibility: Intention and Consequence,” In John Skorupski, ed., The Routledge Companion to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 596–606. 2) Michael J. Zimmerman,“Responsibility: Act and Omission,” In John Skorupski, ed., The Routledge Companion to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 607–616.

  24. See, e.g., Cheshire Calhoun, “Standing for Something,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 92, No. 5 (1995), p. 255, both on these criticisms and on at least one way of construing integrity that avoids them.

  25. From Walzer 1977, op. cit., pp. 267–268.

  26. Noble Frankland and Charles Webster, 1961. The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, Volume II: Endeavour, Part 4 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1961), pp. 260–261.

  27. Compare this with Walzer 1973, op. cit., p. 172, note 16.

  28. Jennifer Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian INGOs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 87–88.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier Ave East, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, ON, Canada

    Andrew Sneddon

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Appendix

Appendix

The various interpretations of the nature and significance of the hands-value are represented as lines on graphs in this section.

Figure 1
figure 1

The bottom left-hand corner represents neutral antecedent value, no exercise of agency

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Figure 2
figure 2

The bottom left-hand corner represents neutral antecedent value, no exercise of agency

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Figure 3
figure 3

The bottom left-hand corner represents neutral antecedent value, no exercise of agency

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Figure 4
figure 4

The bottom left-hand corner represents neutral antecedent value, no exercise of agency. Notes: a) This graph is limited in focus to disvalue (badness, wrongness). b) I have chosen to modify Figure 3 for present purposes, but the other graphs could be modified in the same way.

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Sneddon, A. No Hands, No Paradox. J Value Inquiry 53, 125–144 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9643-z

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