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The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39: 115125DOI: 10.1007/s10790-006-6862-5 C
Use and Misuse of Examples in Normative Ethics
EDUARDO RIVERA-LPEZ
Law School, Torcuato Di Tella University, Miones 2159 (C1428ATG), Buenos Aires, Argentina; e-mail: [email protected]
1. Introduction
The use of examples and thought-experiments is a common tool in professional philosophical argumentation. Sometimes examples are used to test a certain position or even an entire moral theory. The way examples are used to test moral views resembles what, according to some classic writers on epistemology, is common in science. If a theory contains the prediction that something will occur, but empirical experiments show that the thing does not occur, then something must be wrong with the theory and we should revise or reject some of its hypotheses. Similarly, moral theories take the following strategy. If we nd an example in which an agent acts in a way that would be right, according to a moral theory, but which would be rejected by our moral intuitions, then something must be wrong with such a theory. Other times, examples are not used to test moral theories in such a negative way, but to provide positive support for a theory. If an example shows that we are intuitively inclined to make a distinction that one theory contains and that another theory does not, then we have a reason to believe that the rst theory is superior to the second.
There is one specic area of moral discussion in which the strategies at issue are common the discussion between deontological and consequentialist moral views and, more specically, on some relevant varieties of deontologism. On the one hand, examples allegedly provide reasons for objecting to consequentialism. The strategy consists in nding examples in which a certain act would be required by consequentialists, but would simultaneously be forbidden by our deepest moral intuitions. This supposedly shows that something is wrong with consequentialism. It does certainly not prove that consequentialism is false. Only moral intuitionists who see commonsense morality as a nal tribunal to assess moral theories would consider that a robust set of counterexamples can refute a moral theory.1 Still, defenders of more moderate meta-ethical views would also see counterexamples as a strong objection. Rule-consequentialism and other kinds of sophisticated theories
Springer 2006