Meeting of The Philosophy Club
Act Types, Act Tokens, and the Sovereignty of Conscience
Please join us at our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club Online this Wednesday, Sept. 8th from 1 to 2 p.m. as University philosophy professor Brian Skelly presents “Act Types, Act Tokens, and the Sovereignty of Conscience”. (See below for link to join meeting.)
To be a rational being is to grapple with moral problems. Our pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of what is helpful to human life and the avoidance of what is harmful. As easy as that may sound, it involves the utmost of our diligence to achieve. Our happiness is not an individual pursuit, but a social one. I cannot be happy on my own, and my own happiness consists largely in the happiness of my loved ones. For this reason, moral enlightenment is a joint venture among us all, and it is all of our business how all of us are making out in the struggle to be happy.
This struggle for moral enlightenment largely involves the moral evaluation of acts. Talk about such can get confusing because the term ‘act’ is intrinsically ambiguous; it can refer either to act token or act type.
An act type is a general heading by which to categorize individual acts: homicide, stealing, helping, giving alms, engaging in sexual intercourse, lying, gambling, working out, etc. As such, act types are simple, and their evaluation is straightforward. Each act type can be objectively evaluated according to its intrinsic pros and cons apart from being confused with any other act type or real-world incidental detail that might mitigate, nullify, or exacerbate judgment.
An act token, in contrast, is the individual action embedded fully within a real-life context, liable to being categorized under multiple, perhaps even indefinitely many act types. In order to properly judge an act token would require not only judging it according to each of the act types under which it may fall, but also prioritizing those act types and weighing the pros and cons to make an overall moral evaluation, which is arguably a task that non one but the agents themselves are in a position to carry out. This is because real-life situations include not only external worldly factors, but internal factors of the agents’ life experience, along with the life experiences of those relevant to the choice to be made and with whom the agents relate.
From this emerges a thesis of the sovereignty of conscience: Whereas all persons are equally well qualified to judge act types, only the agent is in a position to knowledgeably judge act tokens. The best outsiders can do is make reasonable probabilistic inferences. This, when I deliberate, choose to act, and carry out my action, I am as a moral agent always doing so either in good conscience or bad conscience: good conscience if my choice was based on diligent, honest, truth-oriented deliberation, bad conscience if it was not. No one but God, if God exists, can knowledgeably judge my conscience to be bad or good on any occasion, but can only at best make reasonable probabilistic inferences about it. (See attached for full paper.)
The University of Hartford Philosophy Club Online:
Meetings: Wednesday, 1 p.m.-2 p.m.
WebEx link: https://hartford.webex.com/hartford/j.php?MTID=m41d9f7fef15de4bb58eebaf6645a1ffe
Note: If the link above is not functional, then cut and paste it into your search line or URL line and hit “enter”.
Meeting Password: ACwqT3MBG33 Toll-free call-in number: 1-877-668-4493
Meeting Number (in case calling in): 171 628 0135
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Please be a part of us as we continue this great tradition online.
Brian D. Skelly, Philosophy
413-273-2273