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One way to divide various consequentialisms is by the types of consequences that are taken to matter most, that is, which consequences count as good states of affairs. According to utilitarianism, a good action is one that results in an increase in pleasure, and the best action is one that results in the most pleasure for the greatest number.
In philosophy, the consequence argument is an argument against compatibilism popularised by American philosopher Peter van Inwagen. The argument claims that if agents have no control over the facts of the past, then the agent has no control of the consequences of those facts.
March and Olsen distinguish the logic of appropriateness from what they term the "logic of consequences," more commonly known as rational choice theory.The logic of consequences is based on the assumption that actors have fixed preferences, will make cost-benefit calculations, and choose among different options by evaluating the likely consequences for their objectives.
Explanations can be characterized as answers to why-questions. [32] [33] Explanations of actions are concerned with why the agent performed the action. The most straightforward answer to this question cites the agent's desire. For example, John went to the fridge because he had a desire for ice cream.
Socratic questioning (or Socratic maieutics) [1] is an educational method named after Socrates that focuses on discovering answers by asking questions of students. According to Plato, Socrates believed that "the disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables the scholar/student to examine ideas and be able to determine the validity of those ideas". [2]
Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes." [20] [21] In the sentence hypotheses non fingo, Newton affirms the success of this approach. Bertrand Russell offers a particular version of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown ...
The accounts discussed above all yield monotonic consequence relations, i.e. ones such that if is a consequence of , then is a consequence of any superset of . It is also possible to specify non-monotonic consequence relations to capture the idea that, e.g., 'Tweety can fly' is a logical consequence of
Rule utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism that says an action is right as it conforms to a rule that leads to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance". [1]