Well-Being, Agency and Freedom the Dewey Lectures 1984 *

Abstract

The main aim of Dewey lectures is to explore a moral approach that sees persons from two different perspectives: well-being and agency . Both the "well-being aspect" and the "agency aspect" of persons have their own relevance in the assessment of states and actions. A second objective is to examine a set of metaethical issues, making use of an "informational" approach to moral analysis which focuses on the admissibility and use of different types of information in moral valuation. Informational analysis can be used to bring out the content, scope, and limitations of different moral principles. A few examples may help to illustrate the diversity of ways in which informational constraints may be used through the specification of invariance requirements. Authorship invariance does have some claims to being a reasonable requirement of moral evaluation. The possibility of combining position relativity with authorship invariance is also the reason why positionality of moral valuation is perfectly consistent with objectivity of moral values.

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