Created by Daniel A. Friedrich
Well-being is the total sum of pleasures minus pains over the whole life.
All pleasures differ only in amount/intensity/duration; more net pleasure is better.
Quantitative Hedonism
Sum-Total Hedonism
Same
Total
Well-being is the average level of pleasure over a life rather than the total.
Well-being equals your overall satisfaction with your life as a whole.
Some pleasures are higher in kind (e.g., intellectual) and can outweigh many lower pleasures.
Qualitative Hedonism
Higher/lower
Are all pleasures of the same kind, or are some 'higher' than others?
How should we aggregate hedonic moments across a life?
Average
Average Hedonism
Hedonism
Global/Life-Satisfaction Theory
Global
Well-being consists in the satisfaction of the agent's (ideally informed) desires/preferences.
Well-being consists in pleasure and the absence of pain.
Do we count only global attitudes to one's life as a whole, or any desire that is satisfied?
Desire Theories
Pleasure
Success/Preference-Satisfaction
Any
Actual-Desire Theory
Actual
Desires
Objectivism: Physics / logic
Emotivism (Ayer)
Moral utterances express approval/disapproval rather than report facts.
Are the relevant desires the agent's actual desires, or idealized/informed ones?
What fundamentally makes a person's life go well (what is intrinsically good for a person)?
Intersubjectivism: Communities
Well-being is the extent to which your aims or preferences are realized.
What is good for you is getting what you actually want.
Idealized
Who determines what is ethical?
Emotion
Ideal-Desire Theory
Objective goods
Subjectivism: Individuals
Attitudes (logic-ready)
Expressivism / Quasi-realism
What is good for you is getting what you would want under full information and ideal conditions.
Axiology asks what makes a life go well (the nature of well-being/value).
Absolutism: Plus, some actions are intrinsically right or wrong
Relativism: Depends on the context
Nihilism: Noone
If not beliefs, what do moral judgments express?
Are objective goods grounded specifically in the development of human excellences (capacities/virtues)?
Objective-List Theories
Non-cognitivism
Moral language expresses attitudes yet preserves logical features of truth-talk.
AXIOLOGY
Universalism: Some values everyone independent of culture and context
Yes
No
Certain goods (e.g., friendship, knowledge, autonomy, achievement) are good for a person independently of their attitudes.
META-ETHICS
Towards whom is ethics normative?
No
What makes life valuable or worth living?
Within Perfectionism, is virtue (moral & intellectual) the core constituent of well-being?
Perfectionism
Non-Perfectionist Objective Lists
What does it mean to make moral statements?
Meta-ethics asks what moral claims mean, whether they can be true, and how we know them.
Do moral judgments express beliefs?
Yes
Anything else (Non-normative ethics)
Yes
Cognitivism
Moral judgments state beliefs that can be true or false.
Eudaimonism (Aristotelian)
No
Well-being is the development and exercise of human excellences and capacities.
Plural objective goods (e.g., friendship, knowledge, achievement, autonomy) constitute well-being.
Can we know the truth of these beliefs?
What ought we do?
Flourishing through the cultivation and exercise of virtues is central to a good life.
Other Perfectionist Views
ETHICS (Normative)
Normative ethics asks what makes actions right or wrong and what we ought to do.
Yes
No
Epistemological moral skepticism
Well-being centers on developing rational agency, mastery, creativity, or other human excellences.
Moral generalism
Are there any general principles that determine right and wrong?
Do those beliefs concern facts that are constitutively independent of human mind / opinion?
Yes
Yes and no
Forms of Moral Skepticism
No
Moral Particularism
Yes
No
Moral truth depends on standards or attitudes of agents, assessors, or communities.
Utility = attainment of objective goods such as friendship, knowledge, and achievement.
Utility = pleasure minus pain; right acts maximize net hedonic value.
What fundamentally explains why an action is right or wrong?
There are no exceptionless principles; moral reasons vary by context.
Moral realism
Prefer distributions with less inequality even at some cost to totals.
Egalitarian Consequentialism
Right actions are those that produce the best overall outcomes.
Divine command
Outcomes
Agreement
Care/Relations
Divine Command Theory
"Judgement-dependent cognitivism", some forms of ideal observer theory
Utility = satisfaction of (ideal/considered) preferences.
Objective-List Utilitarianism
Hedonic Utilitarianism
An act is right iff it maximizes expected utility.
An act is right iff it follows the utility-maximizing rules.
Reduce inequality
Consequentialism
Duties/Rights
Character
Care Ethics
Meta-ethical hedonism. (Joe Carlsmith's term for the theory of Sharon H. Rawlette)
Use commonsense rules for guidance; optimize directly in special cases.
Contractualism/Contractarianism
Rightness is determined by God's commands.
Are those beliefs sometimes true?
Preference Utilitarianism
Objective goods
Pleasure/pain
Act Utilitarianism
Within consequentialism, whose well-being and what goods count?
Deontology
No
Rule Utilitarianism
Moral principles are justified by agreement (mutual advantage) or by being justifiable to each person.
Choose the act with the highest expected utility.
Preferences
Goodness created by an individual act
Two-Level Utilitarianism
Sum all welfare
Rightness depends on duties/rights that constrain outcomes.
Virtue Ethics
Morality centers on care, relationships, attentiveness, and responsibility.
Yes
Error Theory (Mackie)
Goodness created by the broader decision-making principle behind the act
Depends on your perspective
Weight the worse-off
Are there absolute side-constraints (actions never permitted regardless of consequences)?
Right action expresses virtuous character and fosters flourishing.
Are moral facts the same kind of facts as we study in physics?
Moral judgments aim at truth but are uniformly false; there are no moral facts.
Expectational Utilitarianism
For utilitarianism, what is the utility being aggregated (the value theory)?
What is the criterion of rightness vs. decision procedure?
Prioritarianism
Consciousness: Moral claims supervene on claims about phenomenological qualities - i.e. moral claims are scientific claims about what creates positive states of consciousness
Yes
Is rightness grounded in universalizable maxims and treating persons as ends?
Yes
No
Expected-utility
No
Negative Utilitarianism
Absolutist Deontology
Moral Naturalism
Moral facts are (or reduce to) natural facts discoverable in the empirical worldview.
Moral Non-naturalism
Build risk aversion/robustness into the choice standard.
Risk-Sensitive Utilitarianism
Risk-sensitive
How do we decide under uncertainty and real-world limits?
Utilitarianism (General)
How do we treat positive vs. negative welfare?
Priority to suffering
Benefit people more the worse off they are (diminishing moral returns to the better-off).
Threshold Deontology
Yes
No
Why are moral facts observable?
How do we know about moral facts?
Through reason. Acting morally is rational.
Satisficing
Maximize aggregate well-being impartially across persons.
Give priority—possibly lexical—to minimizing suffering.
Some actions (e.g., killing the innocent) are never permitted.
Constraints hold unless consequences cross catastrophic thresholds.
Kantian Deontology
Rights-Based Deontology
Satisficing Utilitarianism
Symmetric/neutral
Supervenience: No moral difference without some natural difference; moral facts supervene on natural facts.
Ideal observer: Moral truths track the attitudes which would be endorsed by an ideally informed, impartial, rational observer.
Through intuition. They're obvious, simple properties known prima facie. We perceive them instinctively, similarly to emotions.
Intuitionism
Kantian Rationalism
What is the aggregation rule across persons and populations?
Classical (Neutral) Utilitarianism
Act only on universalizable maxims and treat persons as ends in themselves.
Rights impose side-constraints that cannot be violated for gains.
Supervenience Theories
(naturalist) Ideal Observer Theories
It’s enough to achieve a good-enough outcome rather than the best.
Person-affecting
Weigh benefits and harms symmetrically; maximize net utility.
Moral sense theory
Moorean Non-naturalism
Total Utilitarianism
Total
Average
Sum wellbeing above a baseline threshold
Person-Affecting Utilitarianism
Maximize the total sum of well-being across all persons.
Critical-Level Utilitarianism
Average Utilitarianism
Only improvements for existing/identifiable people count morally.
Maximize average well-being per person.
