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Forrester's Paradox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Dale Jacquette
Dale Jacquette
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

In “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, James William Forrester presents what he describes as “the most powerful version yet put forward” of Lennart Åqvist's Good Samaritan paradox in deontic logic. Forrester suggests that the paradox may make it necessary to reject the standard deontic inference principle

(where “r” is an index for any source of obligation). This desperate conclusion, as Forrester acknowledges, would imply that all of standard deontic logic “must be in a bad way”. But Forrester's “paradox” is not nearly so deep or intractable as he maintains.

Type
Interventions
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1986 , pp. 761 - 764
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1986

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References

1 Forrester, James William, “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, The Journal of Philosophy 81/4 (1984), 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., 197.

3 Ibid., 195–197

4 The problem of logically inconsistent legislation is discussed by Castaňeda, Hector-Neri, Thinking and Doing: The Philosophical Foundations of Institutions (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1975), 225–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The principle of deontic adverbial attachment also entails that if it is obligatory not to murder, then it is obligatory not to murder gently, kindly, or with compassion, consideration, or expedition. For then it is obligatory not to murder at all, in any way or by any means. Thus, (6') is implied by (I). (The converse of deontic adverbial attachment does not hold. It is invalid to infer that an agent ought not to kill from the fact that the agent ought not to kill cruelly.) Deontic adverbial attachment follows from the contrapositive of adverbial detachment and the deontic principle in Forrester's proposition (8).

6 An alternative resolution of the paradox is offered in Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, “A Solution to Forrester's Paradox of Gentle Murder”, The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985), 162–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar