Table 1.
The analysis developed here—while motivated by an interest to evaluate the appropriateness of lion farming—leads to the identification of general lessons of value to any ethical analysis.
| Lesson | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 (Section 4) | A common misconception is that evaluating ethical arguments necessarily requires evaluating underlying, thorny and seemingly intractable ethical premises. Often enough, however, an ethical argument fails because one or more empirical premises do not hold—precluding the need to evaluate the ethical premises. |
| 2 (Section 4) | Uncertainty about the truth-value of a premise can be built into the verbiage of a premise and subsequently the conclusion. See, for example, the argument represented as P1′, P2, and C1′. |
| 3 (Section 4) | Invoking the precautionary principle is of limited value for overcoming an impasse, unless it is accompanied by careful analysis of all the various harms that might be judged as irreparable. |
| 4 (Section 5) | Attend not only to the consequences of an action, but also to concerns about whether the consequences can be justified given the proffered means. |
| 5 (Section 5) | Express end-goals with sufficient precision. Specificity aids evaluating (1) merit of the end-goal, (2) alternative means of realising the end-goal, and (3) whether the proffered means would lead substantively (or only trivially) to the end-goal. For example, “create new jobs” is a vague end-goal that might be expressed more precisely as “decrease unemployment rate in some region to less than 5%”. |
| 6 (Section 6) | Account for the intrinsic value of humans and nonhumans that possess it. Doing so can be difficult, but no more so, in principle, than accounting for the intrinsic value of humans with competing interests. See Section 6 for details. |
| 7 (Section 6) | Competing interests can be adjudicated, at least in part, by evaluating questions like: Is there asymmetry in vitalness of the competing interests, and can either of the competing interests be met by some other means? Another useful guide for adjudication is the veil of ignorance thought experiment. See Section 6 for details. |
| 8 (Section 7) | When the truth-value of a premise is in doubt—especially a normative premise—pull that premise from the argument, treat it as the conclusion to some other unstated argument, build and evaluate that argument. |
| 9 (Section 7) | Argument by comparison—while valuable—can also be challenging. |
| 10 (Section 7) | Encyclopaedias of logical fallacy can be a great aid to evaluating ethical arguments. |