Dr. Marshall Bierson, Assistant Professor, and Dr. John Schwenkler, an alumnus of The Catholic University of America and faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published a new article titled “Rules, Rights, and Hedges” in the journal Ergo, according to a Mar. 16 announcement.
The article addresses when it is justified to pursue a less-than-ideal course of action out of concern that attempting the ideal might lead to an even worse outcome if not followed through successfully. This topic is important for understanding how people make ethical decisions in complex situations where perfect outcomes are uncertain.
Bierson and Schwenkler’s paper explains that such hedging is sometimes justified but not always. Their explanation relies on philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s distinction between reasons—which are normative considerations identifying good or bad outcomes—and logoi, which constrain what actions may be considered at all. They argue that misunderstanding this distinction leads to inappropriate cases of hedging: “First, the intuitively inappropriate cases of hedging all involve treating logoi as though they had the normative bearing of reasons. Second, the action-theoretic differences between reasons and logoi ground a principled explanation of why one may hedge when considering reasons but not when considering logoi,” they write.
The authors also compare their approach with recent theories by Berislav Marušić and Stephen White. They claim their account avoids counter-intuitive results found in those other approaches and better respects interpersonal parity—the idea that we should judge our own faults as we do others’. “Finally, we argue that our account better explains how intuitions shift as we vary the details of cases,” they state.
The publication offers new insights into philosophical debates about moral reasoning and could influence future research on ethical theory.
