(July 2, 2013 at 4:53 pm)apophenia Wrote: Consequences favor certain actions over others, so "favoring" is not sufficient to distinguish moral properties from non-moral ones.
A consequence cannot favour something without the assistance of an agent who has some kind of favouring attitude towards the thing in question.
For instance, someone who said 'this chair favours me sitting on it' would be taken by most of us to be either talking poetically or to be attributing a mind to the chair. If the latter we would consider the person misguided - insane perhaps - but at least we could make sense of his attribution of a favouring attitude. If the person clarified and said 'no, I am not talking poetically, nor do I think the chair possesses a mind and has attitudes etc, rather I think the chair is just a piece of wood, nevertheless I think it favours me sitting on it' we would surely think him conceptually confused. We would have to assume - we would assume - that he must mean something different by 'favour' than we mean. That's what I'd think anyway.
The same is true of consequences being said to 'favour' things. A consequence is just a state of affairs that followed some other state of affairs. It can't favour anything. It isn't in that line of business.
