There may need to be more buckets than “pro” and “con.”
I propose “negative,” “neutral,” “positive,” “instrumental,” and “detrimental.”
Thus you can get things like “negative and yet instrumental” or “positive and yet detrimental,” where the first word is the thing taken reasonably in isolation and judged against a standard of virtue or quality, and the second word is the ramifications of the thing’s existence in the world in a long-term consequentialist sense.
(So returning to my favorite local controversy, punching people is Negative, but it’s possible that punch bug might consequentially be Instrumental for societies filled with good people that are overall on board with nonviolence and personal sovereignty.)
Other categorizations might do better to clarify cruxes … this was my attempt to create a paradigm that would allow you to zero in on the actual substance of disagreement.
You’re talking about means and ends (which, in a consequentialist framework, are, of course, just “ends” and “other ends”).
(Your example may thus be translated as “punching people is negative ceteris paribus, as it has direct, immediate, negative effects; however, the knock-on effects, etc., may result in consequences which, when all aggregated and integrated over some suitable future period, are net positive”. Of course this gets us into the usual difficulties with aggregation, both intra-personally and interpersonally, but these may probably be safely bracketed… at least, provisionally.)
I’m talking about you and ESRogs zeroing in on where you disagree, because at least one of you is wrong and has a productive opportunity to update. Sorry if the example of punch bug was distracting, but I suspect fairly strongly that it is inappropriate and oversimplified to just have a pros-and-cons list in the case of these large evaluations you’re making—not least because in a black-or-white dichotomy, you lose resolution on the places where your assumptions actually differ.
There may need to be more buckets than “pro” and “con.”
I propose “negative,” “neutral,” “positive,” “instrumental,” and “detrimental.”
Thus you can get things like “negative and yet instrumental” or “positive and yet detrimental,” where the first word is the thing taken reasonably in isolation and judged against a standard of virtue or quality, and the second word is the ramifications of the thing’s existence in the world in a long-term consequentialist sense.
(So returning to my favorite local controversy, punching people is Negative, but it’s possible that punch bug might consequentially be Instrumental for societies filled with good people that are overall on board with nonviolence and personal sovereignty.)
Other categorizations might do better to clarify cruxes … this was my attempt to create a paradigm that would allow you to zero in on the actual substance of disagreement.
Let’s not reinvent the wheel here.
You’re talking about means and ends (which, in a consequentialist framework, are, of course, just “ends” and “other ends”).
(Your example may thus be translated as “punching people is negative ceteris paribus, as it has direct, immediate, negative effects; however, the knock-on effects, etc., may result in consequences which, when all aggregated and integrated over some suitable future period, are net positive”. Of course this gets us into the usual difficulties with aggregation, both intra-personally and interpersonally, but these may probably be safely bracketed… at least, provisionally.)
I’m talking about you and ESRogs zeroing in on where you disagree, because at least one of you is wrong and has a productive opportunity to update. Sorry if the example of punch bug was distracting, but I suspect fairly strongly that it is inappropriate and oversimplified to just have a pros-and-cons list in the case of these large evaluations you’re making—not least because in a black-or-white dichotomy, you lose resolution on the places where your assumptions actually differ.