Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case.

The traditional accounts of pain's intrinsic badness assume a false view of what pains are. Insofar as they are normatively significant, pains are not just painful sensations. A pain is a composite of a painful sensation and a set of beliefs, desires, emotions and other mental states. A pain's intrinsic properties can include inter alia depression, anxiety, fear, desires, feelings of helplessness and the pain's meaning. This undermines the traditional accounts of pain's intrinsic badness. Pain is intrinsically bad in two distinct and historically unnoticed ways. First, most writers hold that pain's intrinsic badness lies either in its unpleasantness or in its being disliked. Given my wider conception of pain, I believe it is both. Pain's first intrinsic evil lies in a conjunction of all the traditional candidates for its source. Pain's second intrinsic evil lies in the way it necessarily undermines the self-control necessary for intrinsic goods like autonomy.

In this article I explore a kind of tragic choice that has not received due attention, one in which you have to save only one of two persons but the probability of saving is not equal (and all other things are equal). Different proposals are assessed, taking as models proposals for a much more discussed tragic choice situation: saving different numbers of persons. I hold that cases in which (only) numbers are different are structurally similar to cases in which (only) probabilities are different. After a brief defense of this claim, I conclude that some version of consequentialism seems more promising for offering a plausible solution to the probability case.

In the preface to the second edition of his deservedly popular Practical Ethics, Peter Singer notes that one of the ‘two significant changes” of his ‘underlying ethical views” consists in dropping the tentative suggestion that ‘one might try to combine both the “total” and the “prior existence” versions of utilitarianism, applying the former to sentient beings who are not self-conscious and the latter to those who are” (pp. x–xi). On the total view our aim is ‘to increase the total amount of pleasure (and reduce the total amount of pain)” regardless of ‘whether this is done by increasing the pleasure of existing beings, or increasing the number of beings who exist”, whereas on the prior existence view we ‘count only beings who already exist, prior to the decision we are taking, or at least will exist independently of that decision” (p. 103). Instead he proposes ‘that preference utilitarianism draws a sufficiently sharp distinction between these two categories of being to enable us to apply one version of utilitarianism to all sentient beings” (p. xi).

In this article I argue against Schroeder's account of the weight of normative reasons. It is shown that in certain cases an agent may have reasons she cannot know about without them ceasing to be reasons, and also reasons she cannot know about at all. Both possibilities are troubling for Schroeder's view.

There is no large number of very small bads that is worse than a small number of very large bads – or so, some maintain, it seems plausible to say. In this article, I criticize and reject two recently proposed vindications of the above intuition put forth by Dale Dorsey and Alex Voorhoeve. Dorsey advocates for a threshold marked by the interference with a person's global life projects: any bad that interferes with the satisfaction of a life project is worse than any number of bads that don't interfere with such a life project. Such thresholds, I argue, are broadly implausible. Voorhoeve gives a contractualist account for the irrelevance of minor bads. His account, I argue, does not, among other things, provide the right kind of reason in defence of the above intuition.

According to Wollstonecraft ‘every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason’. This suggests that for her ethical judgement is based on reason, and so she is an ethical cognitivist. This impression is upheld by the fact that she clearly believes in the existence of ethical truth and has little sympathy with subjectivism. At the same time, she places a great deal of importance on the role of the emotions in ethical judgement. This raises the question how the emotions can be relevant if ethics consists in a realm of truths, discoverable by reason. The paper answers this question and clarifies Wollstonecraft's model of the interaction of emotion and reason by comparing it with those of Rousseau, Godwin, Price and Adam Smith. It argues that the originality of Wollstonecraft's position resides in the way she understands the role of the imagination in ethical reasoning.

Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position.

Alan Carter's recent review in Mind of my Ethics of the Global Environment combines praise of biocentric consequentialism (as presented there and in Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics) with criticisms that it could advocate both minimal satisfaction of human needs and the extinction of ‘inessential species’ for the sake of generating extra people; Carter also maintains that as a monistic theory it is predictably inadequate to cover the full range of ethical issues, since only a pluralistic theory has this capacity. In this reply, I explain how the counter-intuitive implications of biocentric consequentialism suggested by Carter (for population, needs-satisfaction, and biodiversity preservation) are not implications, and argue that since pluralistic theories (in Carter's sense) either generate contradictions or collapse into monistic theories, the superiority of pluralistic theories is far from predictable. Thus Carter's criticisms fail to undermine biocentric consequentialism as a normative theory applicable to the generality of ethical issues.

On a consequentialist account of virtue, a trait is virtuous if it has good consequences, vicious if it has bad. Clumsiness and dimness are therefore vices. Should I resent the clumsy and the dim? ‘Yes’, says the consequentialist, counterintuitively - at any rate, Yes’ on an accuracy measure of resentment's virtue: resentment should be an accurate response to consequentialist vice, and these are vices. On a usefulness measure of resentment's virtue, the answer may be different: whether resentment is virtuous depends on whether resentment itself is useful. Equally counterintuitive, this answer divorces resentment from assessment of vice. Consequentialism is thus mistaken not only about when resentment is virtuous, but about what resentment is. Moreover it alienates the philosopher, for whom accuracy applies, from the agent, for whom usefulness applies. But abandoning this double standard would mean giving up philosophy.

This paper criticizes the conception of applied ethics as the top-down application of a theory to practical issues. It is argued that a theory such as utilitarianism cannot override our intuitive moral perceptions. We cannot be radically mistaken about the kinds of considerations which count as practical reasons, and it is the task of theoretical ethics to articulate the basic kinds of considerations which we appeal to in practical discussions. Dworkin's model of doing ethics ‘from the inside out’ is used to illustrate the appropriate role for theory in a broader sense. In conclusion, some sceptical questions are raised about how far theoretical ethics can contribute to public policy, especially if this requires a consensus.

In February 1828 a Royal Commission was appointed to examine the law of Real Property of England and Wales. The Commission sat for four years and examined a vast amount of material, recommended certain changes in the law, and drafted several bills for consideration by parliament. Four massive reports were eventually presented to parliament in May 1829, June 1830, May 1832, and lastly in April 1833. As a result parliament enacted a limited number of piecemeal (although important) reforms, but did not attempt a major revision of the law.

David Enoch recently defended the idea that there are valid inferences of the form ‘it would be good if p, therefore, p’. I argue that Enoch's proposal allows us to infer the absurd conclusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

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.

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines.

This article addresses the so-called ‘claimability objection’ to human rights. Focusing specifically on the work of Onora O'Neill, the article challenges two important aspects of her version of this objection. First: its narrowness. O'Neill understands the claimability of a right to depend on the identification of its duty-bearers. But there is good reason to think that the claimability of a right depends on more than just that, which makes abstract (and not welfare) rights the most natural target of her objection (section II). After examining whether we might address this reformulated version of O'Neill's objection by appealing to the specificity afforded to human rights in international, regional and domestic law (in section III), the article challenges a second important feature of that objection by raising doubts about whether claimability is a necessary feature of rights at all (section IV). Finally, the article reflects more generally on the role of abstraction in the theory and practice of human rights (section V). In sum, by allaying claimability-based concerns about abstract rights, and by illustrating some of the positive functions of abstraction in rights discourse, the article hopes to show that abstract rights are not only theoretically coherent but also useful and important.

There are different meanings associated with consequentialism and teleology. This causes confusion, and sometimes results in discussions based on misunderstandings rather than on substantial disagreements. To clarify this, we created a survey on the definitions of ‘consequentialism’ and ‘teleology’, which we sent to specialists in consequentialism. We broke down the different meanings of consequentialism and teleology into four component parts: Outcome-Dependence, Value-Dependence, Maximization, and Agent-Neutrality. Combining these components in different ways we distinguished six definitions, all of which are represented in the philosophical literature. We asked the respondents which definition is best for consequentialism and for teleology. The most popular definition of consequentialism was the one which accepted value-dependence, but not maximization and agent-neutrality. We therefore recommend the use of this meaning to avoid misunderstandings. The results for teleology were more problematic, with several respondents claiming they never use the term, or indicating that it is confusing.

Total views imply what Derek Parfit has called ‘the repugnant conclusion’. There are several strategies aimed at debunking the intuition that this implication is repugnant. In particular, it goes away when we consider the principle of unrestricted instantiation, according to which any instantiation of the repugnant conclusion must appear repugnant if we should be warranted in relying on it as evidence against total theories. However, there are instantiations of the conclusion where it doesn't seem to be at all repugnant. Hence there is nothing repugnant about the repugnant conclusion as such. The faults with total views have nothing to do with large numbers or with the conclusion as such. It is possible, if you like, to correct these putative faults even if you adopt some total view (different from utilitarianism).

This article suggests that Rawls's break with early utilitarians is not so much over the greatest happiness principle as it is over the relation of the institution of private property to justice. In this respect Rawls is very close to John Stuart Mill, arguing for a cleansed or tamed version of the institution. That said, Rawls's defense of private property remains very thin and highly idealized, again following Mill. If Hume and Bentham fail to demonstrate their claims, Rawls and Mill do little better. Rawls, like Mill, has constructed a challenging standard, admits to severe limitations on our empirical knowledge, and remains deeply ambivalent over the role of private property.

This article argues that, in light of Dead Sea apple cases, we should reject desire-fulfillment welfare theories (DF theories). Dead Sea apples are apples that look attractive while hanging on the tree, but which dissolve into smoke or ashes once plucked. Accordingly, Dead Sea apple cases are cases where an agent desires something and then gets it, only to find herself disappointed by what she has gotten. This article covers both actual DF theories and hypothetical (or idealized) DF theories. On actual DF theories the agent's well-being is determined by her actual desires, while on hypothetical DF theories the agent's well-being is determined by the desires that she would have if she were fully and vividly informed with respect to non-evaluative information. Various actual and hypothetical DF theory responses to Dead Sea apple objections are considered, and all such responses are argued to be inadequate.