A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles

Abstract

Abstract Moral theories have explanatory aspirations. They purport not merely to tell us which things are right and wrong, good and bad, and just and unjust, but also to explain why those things have the moral features that they do. Many theorists think that explanations which help us understand or make sense of morality must in some way rely on general moral principles. Suppose, for instance, that Anna ought to help Adam who is very badly off. Views which are “generalist” in this sense hold that Anna ought to do whatever it is that she ought to do in some sense because of some moral principles with suitable content, such as that one ought to help the badly off.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.