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Philosophy

Outline​

Mental Models​

Consequentialism​

Holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct." (related: "ends justify the means")

Distributive Justice vs Procedural Justice​

Procedural justice concerns the fairness and the transparency of the processes by which decisions are made, and may be contrasted with distributive justice (fairness in the distribution of rights or resources), and retributive justice (fairness in the punishment of wrongs).

Utilitarianism​

Holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility." - The doctrine that an action is right in so far as it promotes happiness, and that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct.

Agnosticism​

The view that the truth values of certain claims - especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether God, the divine, or the supernatural exist - are unknown and perhaps unknowable."

Veil of Ignorance​

A method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following thought experiment: parties to the original position know nothing about the particular abilities, tastes, and positions individuals will have within a social order. When such parties are selecting the principles for distribution of rights, positions, and resources in the society in which they will live, the veil of ignorance prevents them from knowing who will receive a given distribution of rights, positions, and resources in that society."

Supervenience​

Supervenience is a philosophical concept that describes how certain facts, events, or properties depend on others in a noncausal way. It's a way to describe how certain phenomena seem to emerge from, or are determined by, others.

Supervenience is a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. For example, X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible.

Here are some examples of supervenience:

  • Aesthetic properties supervene on nonaesthetic properties
  • Mental properties supervene on physical properties
  • A painting's representational powers supervene on its geometrical arrangement of light-reflecting surfaces
  • A melody supervenes on a sequence of notes

Categorical imperative​

The categorical imperative (German: kategorischer Imperativ) is the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Introduced in Kant's 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is a way of evaluating motivations for action. It is best known in its original formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."