Common Principled Arguments

By Lucie Slamova & Rhys Steele

1. Common Non-utilitarian Claims

a. Human beings as ‘ends in themselves’ - the Kantian Claim
i. Stands in opposition to the utilitarian claim that humans are ‘merely a means to an end’
ii. Intuition Pumps:
1. Organ harvesting
2. John Gardner on the Wrongness of Rape(not suggested to use)
iii. The organ harvesting intuition pump:
1. Assume an individual goes to surgery and is under anesthesia. Would a doctor
be morally justified in transplanting a kidney from this individual to another
patient, who is desperately in need of the transplant?
2. By an utilitarian metric, this action is a net positive, but by a deontological metric,
the patient’s bodily autonomy & trust are violated, and that this is a moral wrong
on a principled level
iv. Applicability/Common Arguments:
1. Vulnerability/Trust/Violation of consent in special relationships:
a. Intuition Pump: Organ Harvesting
b. Application: Doctors/The State etc.
c. Importance: They are performing a definitive moral wrong
2. Analyzing the importance of trust:
a. By making a promise you are setting expectations that inform how people
will act in the future in order to maximize their preferences
b. You are doing them a harm by limiting their ability to exercise this agency,
and it is a fundamental breach of whatever they consented to
c. Violation of this consent is then effectively an affront to human dignity
b. Reparatory Duties:
i. Standard Structure:
1. Reparative obligations exist(intuition)
a. Ex: Victims of theft or criminal negligence
2. There has been a past injustice
3. This injustice still affects the present
4. This creates continued culpability
5. Redress for which is created through motion adoption
ii. Application:
1. Reparation motions, obligations of the state
iii. Crucially it is important to establish that if the perpetrators are dead, then their
descendants might still be the beneficiaries of their crimes, and therefore owe redress.
iv. Note however that the reparatory principle is only applicable if a moral wrong exists, and
not just harmed or made unhappy.
1. Ex: Taking money from a criminal is justified, but taking money from an innocent
person is unjust
v. Most mensurate good-
1. In general principles, what is owed is the closest equivalent to what was taken
 vi. Potential Responses:
1. Competing Obligations:
a. Ex: THW pay reparations to descendants of slaves
i. Would reparations be equivalent to what was taken? Will formerly
wealthy slaves be compensated more than poorer ones?
ii. At a principled level it should be established that the idea that we
were on some ‘correct’ moral track from which we were directed
was unlikely to be true in the first place- that other obligations such
as generally helping the poor and vulnerable exist.
c. Experience vs Meaning:
i. Intuition Pump: Experience Machine
1. Assume a machine exists that can perfectly simulate an ideal reality. Should you
plug yourself in?
2. Intuitively the answer would be no, because this experience is not real.
3. i.e. pleasure or happiness are not valuable independent of context -> it is only a
byproduct of more valuable things that only become valuable because the human
will wills them -> given that nothing is valuable unless assigned value by the
human will -> the human will is the only thing that has a fundamental value
ii. Application: Protection of autonomy(on the expense of utilitarian benefits)
iii. Potential Responses:
1. Incompleteness: The fact that the human will has the capacity to assign value to
other things does not imply that it has a fundamental value
2. Social Conditioning affects preference formation -> do we actually choose what
we assign value to?
2. Applications:
a. Justifying Democracy
i. Preference Aggregation:
1. e.g. THBT all decisions on economic policy in times of crisis should be made by
an independent panel of experts
2. Government can claim that the panel knows the objectively ‘correct’ decision
a. It becomes hard to defend claims that democracy is better on this
objective front.
3. Opposition Response: These decisions are fundamentally moral decisions(e.g.
Austerity vs. stimulus -> future vs current)
4. There is no reason why a panel of experts has a superior knowledge of what the
correct moral decision is, i.e. democracy is a way to find out what the human will
values
ii. Procedural Justification:
1. Using a reparatory principle:
a. The state is a coercive agent & limits your autonomy, therefore there is an
obligation to restore it
b. The state has this obligation equally to all of its citizens
c. Therefore it has to do its best to give everyone an equal say over the
state's actions, through a vote
b. Obligations to future generations:
i. Nature of obligations is preference dependent
1. Therefore we can safely assume certain preferences(e.g. survival)
ii. Nature of obligations is character(preference) dependent:
 1. Moral obligations differ based on the moral character(e.g. I do not have
obligations towards [some terrible person], as future generations do not yet exist,
we do not know that we have moral obligations towards them)
iii. The non-identity problem:
1. Assume two potential future worlds A & B. A is a world where we continue to
pollute. B is a world that is the result of the status quo choosing to stop polluting.
2. Our choice now affects who will be born into world A.
3. If we stop polluting, and end up in world B, then the future generations of world A
would not exist at all.
4. Therefore it cannot be said that the future generation is worse off in some way,
because their alternative is to simply not exist at all.
iv. Responses to the non-identity problem:
1. Maximizing total utility:
a. The overall happier world should be preferred, rather than the overall
happiness of individuals.
b. There exists a cognitive bias towards
2. Type/Token Distinction:
a. We owe obligation to whoever fulfills the category/type ‘future generation’,
rather than concrete individuals/tokens
b. Ex: As a parent you have an obligation to raise a child, irrespective of who
the child is(e.g. you would abhor a parent who believes they don’t have a
moral obligation to raise their blind child)
3. Non-comparative Harm:
a. You are on a boat and somebody pushes you off. The boat then sinks in
10 minutes. Comparatively, no harm was done. However the moral wrong
of intending to kill a person still exists.
b. i.e. the harm does not have to be comparative, but intuitively, intent
establishes a moral wrong
c. Choice:
i. What is the value in choice?
1. Debaters usually suggest ‘choice’ is valuable inherently(difficult to prove)-
2. However, it is often just a proxy for the maximization of preference actualization
a. i.e. you should be given a choice, because that helps you choose the best
thing for you- the choice that maximizes your particular preference(a
utilitarian metric)
3. Response: you don’t always have to have a choice for something to be good
4. Ex: being given $100 vs being given $10 & $20
5. Note however that maximization of preference actualization is great when you
have multiple sets of choices or there is a significant number of factors/nuance in
a particular case.
d. Property Rights & Redistributive Justice:
i. Justifications:
1. Consequentialist(pareto-improvement):
a. i.e. if private property harms nobody and benefits at least one
person(pareto-improvement) then it is a net positive
2. Non-consequentialist:
a. You have an entitlement to things that you add value to using your body
b. i.e. you have a claim to private property if you actively add value to it
ii. Responses:
1. Individuals do not deserve property because skills etc. are a consequence of the
birth lottery
a. Therefore individual do not have any entitlement to the benefits of private
property- therefore redistribution is justifiable
b. i.e. you have no moral claim to private property because of the value you
add, because the value you add is already a consequence of an unjust
situation
2. According to what should we redistribute?
a. Reparatory Principle