PHIL 2750 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Shelly Kagan, Deontological Ethics

• School: University of Manitoba
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 2750
• Professor: Robert J.Leland

Document Summary

Consequenialists: there is one and only one factor that has any intrinsic moral signiicance in determining the status of an act: the goodness of that act"s consequences. Consequenialists can ind a place for the more familiar rules of commonsense morality. An act is right if and only if it will have the best results; morally speaking, nothing else maters. Most of us believe that there are other factors that have intrinsic moral signiicance beyond that of goodness of outcomes. Virtually no one denies that goodness of outcomes is one of the intrinsically relevant factors. One can accept this modest claim while sill rejecing the consequenialist"s considerably bolder claim that this is the only factor with intrinsic signiicance. Opposiion to consequenialism, people believe that there are several normaive factors with intrinsic moral signiicance. The moral status of an act is determined by the interplay of all of these various factors.