In his landmark paper, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, Michael Stocker introduces an affliction that is, according to his diagnosis, endemic to all modern ethical theories. Stocker's paper is well known and often cited, yet moral schizophrenia remains a surprisingly obscure diagnosis. I argue that moral schizophrenia, properly understood, is not necessarily as disruptive as its name suggests. However, I also argue that Stocker's inability to demonstrate that moral schizophrenia constitutes a reductio of modern ethical theories does not rule out the possibility that he has identified a noteworthy psychological phenomenon. Stocker is, in my opinion, correct to note that balancing our broad ethical obligations with authentic personal motives is a non-trivial psychological challenge, even if this challenge is not equivalent to a mental disorder. Hence, I conclude that proponents of modern ethical theorists should not be complacent about the burdens associated with implementing a ‘schizophrenic’ moral psychology.

In The Right and the Good, W. D. Ross commits himself to the view that, in addition to being distinct and defeasible, some prima facie duties are more binding than others. David McNaughton has argued that there appears to be no way of making sense of this claim that is both coherent and consistent with Ross's overall picture. I offer an alternative way of understanding Ross's remarks about the comparative stringency of prima facie duties, which, in addition to being compatible with his view as presented in the text, provides us with a coherent, and indeed plausible, account of what it means for some duties to be more binding than others.

The prescriptive ‘ought’ has both an objective and a subjective interpretation. In the objective sense, what one ought to do depends on what is actually true. In the subjective sense it depends on what one believes to be true. Ordinary usage seems to vacillate between these two interpretations. An example (the indecisive terrorist) is used to show that a subjective ought statement can have a determinate truth-value in situations where the corresponding objective ought statement has no truth-value, not even an unknowable one. Therefore the subjective ought is not definable in terms of the objective ought. However, definability in the other direction is not excluded by this argument.

Wayne Sumner, in the first six chapters of his excellent book Welfare, Happiness and Ethics, argues for what he calls an authentic life satisfaction theory of welfare. Somewhat generally, Sumner's theory of welfare is a sophisticated subjective account that treats one's happiness of a certain sort, and in the right conditions, as enhancing one's welfare. In this essay, I critically explore Sumner's account of welfare. I argue that Sumner's arguments for his own account of welfare, when followed to their logical conclusion, support a position which is slightly, but significantly, different from his own position. Additionally, I argue that Sumner's account of welfare has several counter-intuitive implications. I conclude that his account is seriously flawed.

Mill's most famous departure from Bentham is his distinction between higher and lower pleasures. This article argues that quality and quantity are independent and irreducible properties of pleasures that may be traded off against each other – as in the case of quality and quantity of wine. I argue that Mill is not committed to thinking that there are two distinct kinds of pleasure, or that ‘higher pleasures’ lexically dominate lower ones, and that the distinction is compatible with hedonism. I show how this interpretation not only makes sense of Mill but allows him to respond to famous problems, such as Crisp's Haydn and the oyster and Nozick's experience machine.

In ‘Sidgwick's Epistemology’, John Deigh argues that Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics ‘was not perceived during his lifetime as a major and lasting contribution to British moral philosophy’ and that interest in it declined considerably after Sidgwick's death because the epistemology on which it relied ‘increasingly became suspect in analytic philosophy and eventually [it was] discarded as obsolete’. In this article I dispute these claims.

This article is a reply to Anthony Skelton's ‘On Sidgwick's Demise: A Reply to Professor Deigh’. Professor Skelton, in his article, makes several objections to the account of Sidgwick's epistemology I presented in my earlier article ‘Sidgwick's Epistemology’. I answer these objections by further explaining my account.