Agent-centered restrictions are widely accepted both in commonsense morality and across social and legal institutions, making it all the more striking that we have yet to ground them in a compelling theoretical rationale. This dissertation amounts to an effort to fill that gap by seeking out a new principled basis for justifying such constraints. I devote each of the first three chapters, respectively, to the three established deontological normative ethical theories: Rossian intuitionism, Kantianism, and Neo-Thomism. In each of these chapters, I lay out the relevant portion of the view’s deontological apparatus, analyzing it both for its plausibility as a whole and for its ability to justify constraints of the appropriate shape. After assessing and rejecting all three approaches, I devote the next two chapters to developing a new rationale for grounding constraints—one that avoids the pitfalls indicated in the prominent historical alternatives. Specifically, I anchor constraints in the distinction between the agent-neutral and agent-relative points of view, basing them in the widely accepted psychological fact of the natural independence of the personal point of view.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/35718 |
| Date | 18 July 2013 |
| Creators | Sinha, Gaurav Alex |
| Contributors | Hurka, Thomas |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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