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Goldstick on the ‘Two Hats’ Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Troy Jollimore
Troy Jollimore
Affiliation:
California State University, Chico
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Abstract

The indirect-strategy consequentialist recommends that the consequentialist agent develop certain non-consequentialist feelings and dispositions. It is difficult to see, however, how such an agent could knowingly do this, given her moral beliefs. Goldstick has argued that the problem is not particular to consequentialism; deontologists, too, are obliged to admit the possibility of mental divisions of this sort. I argue, however, that the type of mental division to which the deontologist is committed appears only as a response to a type of genuinely dilemmatic situation which traditional consequentialism cannot recognize. Indeed, the ability of the deontological approach to accommodate cases of conflicting obligations in an intuitively plausible way seems to be a significant point in its favour.

Type
Discussions
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2003 , pp. 369 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 See especially Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, xiii (1984)Google Scholar.

2 Goldstick, D., ‘The “Two Hats” Problem in Consequentialist Ethics,’ Utilitas, xiv (2002)Google Scholar.

3 ‘What is being claimed here is that, even within a cognitivist framework, indirect-strategy consequentialists can indeed feel that they are under some direct moral obligation to do or not do something without at all believing themselves to be so obligated’ (ibid., 110).

4 Ibid., 110 f.