> They tend to look best on the moral equivalent of PowerPoint slides.
This is an interesting formulation, when you put that way I imagine most readers have seen some 'moral powerpoint slides' that fall apart on a closer examination.
This is an interesting formulation, when you put that way I imagine most readers have seen some 'moral powerpoint slides' that fall apart on a closer examination.
They tend to look best on the moral equivalent of PowerPoint slides. But if you look beyond toy examples, nearly everything is too complex to believe that you've really formed a decent model of the situation. Without that model you're stuck where you were without the Utilitarian principles.
It's fun to argue about but I don't think it makes for a pragmatic moral system. And it's easily subverted by people claiming to present a moral case that is in fact incomplete, leading to abhorrent conclusions that they feel rigorously bound by.