Agent-centred restrictions, rationality, and the virtues
Mind, vol. 44, no. 375, 1985, pp. 409–419
Abstract
This article examines a class of moral theories that include agent-centered restrictions, which are restrictions that it is impermissible to violate even when doing so would minimize the total amount of violations of those restrictions. Although such restrictions are often thought paradoxical and seemingly contrary to rationality as it is commonly conceived, the author explores two approaches to defending these restrictions. One involves showing that they can be made consistent with the standards of maximizing rationality. This could be done, for example, by arguing that the restrictions serve a higher-order maximizing purpose. Alternatively, one might defend these restrictions by arguing that they are licensed by features of comprehensive human rationality beyond the framework of maximizing rationality – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
[C]ommon-sense deontological morality, standing between egoism and consequentialism, sometimes seems to be caught in a kind of normative squeeze, with its rationality challenged in parallel ways by (as it were) the maximizers of the right and of the left: those who think that one ought always to pursue one’s good, and those who are convinced that one should promote the good of all.