Half of the drug offenders incarcerated in the United States are black, even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs at the same rate, and blacks make up only 13 per cent of the population. Non-comparativists about retributive justice see nothing wrong with this picture; for them, an offender's desert is insensitive to facts about other offenders. By contrast, comparativists about retributive justice assert that facts about others can partially determine an offender's desert. Not surprisingly, comparativists, especially comparative egalitarians, contend that differential punishment is retributively unjust. I agree with this assessment, but take issue with the reasons egalitarians cite in its favour. In this article, I argue that differential punishment violates retributive justice because it contributes to structural racial oppression. Over the course of developing and defending this claim, I identify the shortcomings of both comparative egalitarianism and respectarianism, which is the most popular and plausible brand of non-comparativism.

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.

Mark Rowlands gives a compelling argument that, if John Rawls's contractarianism is consistently applied, and Rawls's premises fully explained, then we have powerful reasons to believe that representatives behind the Veil of Ignorance should be blind to species membership in the same way that they are blind to economic status and natural talent.1 I argue that even if we suppose this to be correct, these agents would not choose the two principles of justice, but instead ones that more closely resemble utilitarian principles.

The concept of liability is currently at the centre of contemporary debates on interpersonal defensive killing and war. This often leads to radically asymmetrical moral positions between aggressors and victims, and between just and unjust combatants. This article argues that the dichotomy liable/non-liable is too rigid to adequately capture the moral landscape in many relevant defensive killing situations. By contrast, it proposes a more granulated framework that takes seriously both the conceptual features of rights as essentially individualistic entities and their strength in moral reasoning. Finally, the article also shows that far from creating problems for the morality of killing in war, the proposed framework allows us to better accommodate for the position of unjust combatants than standard revisionist accounts of just war theory.

Perfectionism, the view that well-being is a matter of developing characteristically human capacities, has relatively few defenders in the literature, but plenty of critics. This article defends perfectionism against some recent formulations of classic objections, namely, the objection that perfectionism ignores the relevance of pleasure or preference for well-being, and a sophisticated version of the ‘wrong properties’ objection, according to which the intuitive plausibility of the perfectionist ideal is threatened by an absence of theoretical pressure to accept putative wrong properties cases. The article argues that these objections are unsuccessful, but introduce a new worry, the deep problem: perfectionism fails to offer a satisfying foundational justification for why developing the human essence is valuable. The article responds to the deep problem, ultimately arguing that it is a puzzle put to all theories of well-being to provide a justification for their normative significance.