An Investigation into the Formal Representation of Normative Moral Theories

Abstract

This thesis investigates the formal representation of normative moral theories. I started by providing a formal representation of a representative version of consequentialism, namely CONSEQUENTIALISM. I then verified that there are other versions of consequentialism with features that make it impossible to apply the formal representation of CONSEQUENTIALISM on them. These features are shared by non-consequentialist theories that cannot be consequentialized in the literature of consequentializing. I investigated how to formally represent these features, including moral dilemmas, agent and menu-relativity and supererogation before providing a general representation for a wide range of moral theories that are binary and coherent. It was found that binary and coherent permissibility functions are representable by coherent binary relations over options and binary and coherent supererogation functions are representable by coherent binary relations over permissible options. This general representation, however, is too coarse to capture some moral theories' properties under uncertainty. Thus I drew connections between my representation results and existing representation results in theories of rational choice to provide finer representations for classical utilitarianism and deontology. Lastly I identified two directions for future research. The first is to develop a formal representation for moral theories with non-binary permissibility functions. The second is to investigate finer representations for other moral theories that have special properties under uncertainty.
second is to investigate finer representations for other moral theories that have special properties under uncertainty.

Date of Award	17 Mar 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Richard G Pettigrew (Supervisor) & Jason P Konek (Supervisor)