Normativity with Judith Jarvis Thomson

She sounds like 50s Oxford philosophy! Linguistic ordinary language philosophy.

Judith apologized at the end for "rambling on." She "ought" not to have spoken for so long. She was a "defective speaker" similar to the toaster that won't toast or the beefsteak tomato that is too small. I would like to pose to Judith the following: If one were to take his working Amercian-made toaster to Italy, and attempt to toast his panini, only to discover that the electrical plug does not work in Italy, would the toaster still be defective? I think not.

That would probably fall into one of those "unsuitable circumstances."

The problem I noted was that I don't think Judith's formulation really escapes consequentialism as much as she'd like it to. As I see it, the association of the word 'defective' with the normative 'ought' doesn't avoid the problem of having to assess consequences, and therefore escape the whole problem of the consequentialist holding acceptability of action 'hostage'. This is because in order for us to know whether a particular action IS 'defective', it seems we still need to know its outcome.

watch zietgiest the movie... lets change the world in which we live

pretty smart