Drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham, we can forward a parity thesis concerning formal and substantive legal invalidity. Formal and substantive invalidity are, according to this thesis, traceable to the same source, namely, the sovereign's inability to adjust expectations to motivate obedience. The parity thesis, if defensible, has great appeal for positivists. Explaining why contradictory or contrary mandates yield invalidity is unproblematic. But providing an account of content-based invalidity invites the collapse of the separation between what the law is and what the law ought to be. Grounding formal and substantive invalidity in a unified source – the sovereign's inability to adjust expectations to motivate obedience – allows us to avoid bringing in any additional apparatus that might compromise this separation. This essay fleshes out and defends the parity thesis.

According to standard comparativist views, death is bad in so far as it deprives someone of goods she would otherwise have had. In The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan argues against such views and in favour of a gradualist account according to which how bad it is to die is a function of both the future goods of which the decedent is deprived and her cognitive development when she dies. Comparativists and gradualists therefore disagree about how bad it is to die at different ages. In this article I examine two prominent criticisms of gradualism and show that both misconstrue McMahan. I develop a related criticism that seems to show that a gradualist cannot coherently relate morbidity and mortality. This criticism also fails, but has an instructive implication for how policy-makers setting priorities for health care investments should regard choices between life-saving interventions and interventions against non-fatal diseases in the very young.

Prioritarianism is the moral view that a fixed improvement in someone's well-being matters more the worse off they are. Its supporters argue that it best captures our intuitions about unequal distributions of well-being. I show that prioritarianism sometimes recommends acts that will make things more unequal while simultaneously lowering the total well-being and making things worse for everyone ex ante. Intuitively, there is little to recommend such acts and I take this to be a serious counterexample for prioritarianism.

In this article I show the shortcomings of autonomy-based justifications for exemptions from paternalism and appeal to the value of settling to defend an alternative well-being-based justification. My well-being-based justification, unlike autonomy-based justifications, can (1) explain why adults but not children are exempt from paternalism; (2) show which kinds of paternalism are justified for children; (3) explain the value of the capacity of autonomy; (4) offer a plausible relationship between autonomy and exemption from paternalism; and (5) give political philosophers a justification for exempting persons from paternalism even if broad scepticism about the capacity for autonomy is justified.

I argue that utilitarianism requires us to tolerate intrapersonal disagreement for the same reasons that it requires us to tolerate interpersonal disagreement. I begin by arguing that multiplicity has the same costs and benefits as multiculturalism: It causes conflict, but it also allows us to perform experiments in living, adopt a division of labour, compartmentalize harm and learn from ourselves. I then argue that, in light of these costs and benefits, utilitarianism requires us to adopt a liberal system of individual self-government, according to which we should not try to impose a unified set of beliefs and values on ourselves. Finally, I argue that we should apply this policy of liberal toleration to intrapersonal disagreement about utilitarianism too. If we want to maximize utility, then we should tolerate inner conflict not only about how to maximize utility but also about whether we should be maximizing utility in the first place.

The notion of a non-renounceable right – that is, a right one cannot irrevocably relinquish – is an integral part of recent liberal reconciliatory attempts to justify apparently paternalistic policies, such as compulsory insurance or providing people with certain goods irrespective of their subjective preferences, non-paternalistically. However, non-renounceable rights cannot be justified non-paternalistically. A critical scrutiny of the liberal reconciliatory arguments in question reveals this and points towards a plausible paternalist justification of the policies in question.

It is sometimes asserted that enabling harm is morally equivalent to allowing harm (the moral equivalence thesis). In this article, I criticize this view. Positively, I show that cases involving self-defence and cases involving people acting on the basis of a reasonable belief to the effect that certain obstacles to harm will remain in place, or will be put in place, show that enabling harm is harder to justify than allowing it. Negatively, I argue that certain cases offered in defence of the moral equivalence thesis fail, because either (1) their similarity with the archetypal trolley case limits their relevance to an assessment of this thesis, or (2) they are compromised by their reliance on the elusive notion of a situation being completely stable.