The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning英文资料.pdfVIP

The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning By Robert H. Frank Cornell University Presented at “Free Enterprise: Values in Action” Gruter Institute/John Templeton Foundation/ UCLA-Sloan Research Program 4th Working Conference at Harvard Business School June 20-21, 2006 2 The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning by Robert H. Frank1 The philosopher Bernard Williams describes an example in which a botanist wanders into a village in the jungle where ten innocent people are about to be shot. He is told that nine of them will be spared if he himself will shoot the tenth. What should the botanist do? Although most people would prefer to see only one innocent person die rather than ten, Williams argues that killing the innocent villager is not by any means the obviously right thing for Jim to do.2 And most people seem to agree. The force of the example is its appeal to a widely shared moral intuition. Yet some philosophers counter that it is the presumed validity of moral intuitions that such examples call into question (Singer, 2002). These consequentialists insist that whether an action is morally right depends only on its consequences. The right choice, they argue, is always the one that leads to the best overall consequences. I will argue that consequentialists make a persuasive case that moral intuitions are best ignored in at least some specific cases. But many consequentialists