A causal modeler's guide to double effect reasoning

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (3):986-1008 (2025)
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Abstract

Trolley problems and like cases are often thought to show the inadequacy of purely consequentialist moral theories. In particular, they are often taken to reveal that consequentialists unduly neglect the moral significance of the causal structure of decision problems. To precisify such critiques and one sort of deontological morality they motivate, I develop a formal modeling framework within which trolley problems can be represented as suitably supplemented structural causal models and various consequentialist and double effect-inspired moral theories can be viewed as disagreeing over the inputs of a common decision rule.

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Gerard Joseph Rothfus
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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References found in this work

The View From Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Logic of Decision.Richard C. Jeffrey - 1965 - New York, NY, USA: University of Chicago Press.
The View from Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 92 (2):280-281.

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