I argue that pregnant women have a duty to refrain from behaviours (e.g. taking illicit drugs) or to allow certain acts to be done to them (e.g. caesarean section) for the sake of their foetus if the foetus has a reasonable chance of living and being in a harmed state if the woman does not refrain from those behaviours or allow those things to be done to her. There is a proviso: that her refraining from acting or allowing acts to be performed upon her does not significantly harm her. This duty does not presuppose that the foetus is a person. It is grounded on principles of respect for the interests of sentient beings and prevention of harm to future individuals. I give an argument for a general duty of easy rescue.

In this article, I argue that the state has a prima facie obligation to help its citizens satisfy their autonomous preferences. I argue that this obligation is grounded in the state's obligation to respect its citizens as persons, and that part of what is involved in respecting someone as a person is helping her satisfy her autonomous preferences. I argue that that which makes preferences autonomous is also that which makes them, and not their non-autonomous counterparts, worthy of respect. In addition, I reject other views of what makes preferences worthy of respect, in particular Ronald Dworkin's view that only preferences for one's own enjoyment of some goods or opportunities deserve political consideration. Finally, I consider the state's obligation towards immoral autonomous preferences, and I argue that the state's prima facie obligation to promote the satisfaction of autonomous preferences is quite strong.

I very much enjoyed reading and thinking about Krister Bykvist's interesting and carefully written paper. My comments will not be criticisms. I will not challenge the conclusions the paper draws about the complicated examples of conflicts between preferences that it discusses. For example, I will not attempt to defend any of the views criticized in section IV of the paper. And I agree with the positive solution presented in section V, when that solution is characterized in the broadest possible way. In cases where a choice that I must make now will create one or the other of two possible future ‘selves’ whose preferences would conflict over the question of which choice I should make, prudence tells me to create the self that will experience a higher level of well-being or welfare.

Sometimes we make decisions which affect our lives at times when we will hold values that are different from our values at the time the decision is made. What is the reasonable way to make such a choice? Some think we should accept a requirement of temporal neutrality and take both sets of values into account, others think we should decide on the strength of our present values, yet others think that in evaluating what will happen at that other time we should use the values that we will endorse at that time instead of our present values. These views see the problem as one about finding some attitude towards time itself that is distinctively rational. This article argues that these views are subject to serious objections. It suggests that instead we should think in terms of well-being. If a person approves of, or positively responds to, the way their life is going they will experience more well-being than if there is no positive response. The article explores the implications of a positive response condition on well-being for deciding what it is rational to do in cases involving changing goals.

I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to comment on McKerlie's interesting article, especially since it concerns one of my pet topics and provides many helpful comments on one of my own articles on this topic. My comments will be brief because I agree with most of his points, in particular, his criticisms of the prudential view and the present-aim theory. What I want to do here is just to clarify a couple of things concerning my own theory, concede some of the difficulties that McKerlie raises for my theory, and see to what extent his own proposal fares better than my own theory.

One of the many illuminating aspects of Bart Schultz's book is the recurrent theme of Sidgwick's Socratic inspiration. Some of Sidgwick's contemporaries at Cambridge were among those who gave new life to the study of Socrates and Plato in England. The Cambridge Apostles were self-consciously devoted both to Socratic ideals of friendship and to the Socratic aim of impartial free inquiry on fundamental questions.

Bart Schultz's Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Sidgwick. In this article, I direct my attention for the most part to one aspect of what Schultz says about Sidgwick's masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics, as well as to what he does not say about Sidgwick's illuminating but neglected work Practical Ethics. This article is divided into three sections. In the first, I argue that there is a problem with Schultz's endorsement of the view that Sidgwick's moral epistemology combines elements of both coherentism and foundationalism. In the second, I argue that Schultz has failed to do justice to Sidgwick's mature views in Practical Ethics. In the final section, I briefly say something about Schultz's suggestion that Sidgwick succumbed to both racism and dishonesty.

This essay is in effect something of a self-review of my book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (2004) and of the volume, co-edited with Georgios Varouxakis, Utilitarianism and Empire (2005). My chief concern here is to go beyond those earlier works in underscoring the arbitrariness of the dominant contextualist and reconstructive historical accounts of J. S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick on the subjects of race and racism. The forms of racism are many, and simple historical accuracy suggests that both Mill and Sidgwick could be described as ‘racist’ on some plausible understandings of that term.