Erich Rast

In this talk, I address the question how a decision maker’s choices may be considered moral without presuming that morally relevant attributes of alternative courses of action always dominate other attributes. Instead of relaxing moral rules or laws themselves, I propose to introduce thresholds for values (in the sense of valuations) and stakes to distinguish moral action-guiding ‘decision matrices’ from immoral ones. Multi-criteria decision theory and its underlying preference models are taken as a means to determine and prescribe rational choices; with that respect the talk concerns practical reasoning. I also briefly discuss the value taxonomies of von Wright (1963) and Jackendoff (2006, 2007).