Talk:Demandingness objection

Proposed merger
No: I do not think the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality (FAM) should be merged with the Demandingness objection article. The demandingness objection is a general objection to utilitarianism and not specifically related to FAM. Additionally, FAM does not explicitly assume utilitarianism (though the reasoning is very similar and some think the article does in fact assume utilitarianism; in any event it does not do so explicitly). These articles, while related somewhat, do not warrant merger. Not every article tangentially related to another should be merged with that article. JEN9841 (talk) 22:50, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Oppose. FAM is not actually making a utilitarian argument, and the demandingness objection has been around for a long time before it. The demandingness objection serves as one of several possible responses to FAM; FAM is not a subtopic of the demandingness objection.  K . Bog  02:03, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Sources, clarity, notability
I've done a bit of a blitz on trying to clean this mess of arguments up, unfortunately the only reference available online was the lecture by Corbett, everything else was just book titles and abstracts.

The basic problem I have is that I am trying to clarify the VERY muddy arguments against Peter Singer into actual coherent objections while maintaining NPOV, with only the pre-existing text in the article to go on.

The "Pettit" section seems to me to be completely unrelated to "demandingness" unless Pettit is trying to posit a different definition of moral obligation like Corbett above. I have tried to clarify the "Nagel" section, but I think there is at least one typo that completely obscures the meaning of a sentence, and the entire section is written in the first person.

Basically, while a lot of academic ink has been spilled arguing about supposed "Demandingness" problem, there does not seem to much to justify this being more than a footnote in the "utilitarianismW page. Jmackaerospace (talk) 03:01, 6 April 2022 (UTC)


 * The "demandingness of consequentialism" category in PhilPapers has over 60 articles, and most of the over 200 papers with "demandingness" in the title in Google Scholar are related to the subject, so I see a strong case for keeping the subject as a separate article. Judging from the available literature, this article is very underdeveloped. Biogeographist (talk) 17:53, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank-you, that seems to be an excellent source for information on this subject, with actual formal arguments as opposed to the editorialising style of the one accessable source on the current article. I would still argue that in it's current form the article would be better placed as a sub-catagory of ultilitarian ethics, but it would seem from a quick skim of the papers in that that "Demandingness" is actually a recognised factor in a number of Ethical systems, it is just that the writers of this article were focused on utilitarianism specifically. If I recall, Objectivism is rooted in opposition to demandinness in other ethical systems. I found at least one of those published papers talking about "Demandingness" as a general criteria of ethics critiques, which might be a good place to start as a ground-up re-write of the article.Jmackaerospace (talk) 20:16, 9 June 2022 (UTC)