Joseph Persky's excellent book, The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism, shows that J. S. Mill's support for socialism is a carefully considered element of his political and economic reform agenda. The key thought underlying Persky's argument is that Mill has an ‘evolutionary theory of justice’, according to which the set of institutions and practices that are appropriate to one state of society should give way to a new set of institutions as circumstances change and the people themselves improve. However, Persky does not spend a great deal of time discussing Mill's theory of reform, in particular the principles he believes should guide our reform efforts. Reflecting on these principles – notably his principle of impartiality or equal treatment – shows the consistency of Mill's thought over time.

The disordered state of English law reporting has for long been a favoured theme of writers on the common law. The volume of printed case law, the casual nature of its publication and its variable quality have all been frequently criticized. If earlier centuries had been largely content to express intermittent displeasure, in the nineteenth century concrete solutions were found, the obvious product of this bid to achieve a rational system of law reporting being the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting and its authoritative series of Law Reports. But if ultimately reform of the system was only realized once the profession seized the initiative in the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be an error to suppose that schemes for reform had not been conceived in earlier times. After all, only by a miracle could anything as blatantly haphazard as the quality of law reporting have escaped the strictures of major reformers.

The evaluation of character has taken on new significance in moral theory, and, indeed, some advocate a shift in focus away from evaluating action to evaluating character. This has been taken to pose special challenges for utilitarian and consequentialist moral theory. Utilitarianism's commitment to impartiality and its seeming failure to accommodate virtue evaluation have led to problems, some of which are developed in the essays in this volume.

Adams's suggestion that there must be one really right way of presenting the history of moral philosophy seems implausible to me, so I reject – with additional reasons – his charges against the structure of Invention of Autonomy. Skorupski's way of stating the ‘equal moral abilities’ thesis is not, I argue, very Kantian; a more Kantian version is not open to his objections. I am unconvinced by Schultz's claim that Sidgwick did not really hold that thesis. Deigh raises questions I cannot reply to here, but I do offer some texts that seem to show that Sidgwick is not guilty of the confusion about ‘ought’ with which Deigh charges him.

I distinguish two different arguments against cognitivism in Bernard Williams's writings on moral dilemmas. The first turns on there being a truth of the matter about what we ought to do in a moral dilemma. That argument can be met by appealing to our epistemic shortcomings and to pro tanto obligations. However, those responses make no headway with the second argument, which concerns the rationality of the moral regret that we feel in dilemma situations. I show how the rationality of moral regret can be explained on an ‘independent desire’ model. And I show how Williams's second argument only appears to have force because of a certain faulty way of conceiving the issue over cognitivism. But Williams's argument rightly alerts us to the rational role of desire in our moral thought.

I here settle a recent dispute between two rival theories in distributive ethics: Restricted Prioritarianism and the Competing Claims View. Both views mandate that the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals should be justifiable to each affected party in a way that depends on the strength of each individual's separately assessed claim to receive a benefit. However, they disagree about what elements constitute the strength of those individuals’ claims. According to restricted prioritarianism, the strength of a claim is determined in ‘prioritarian’ fashion by both what she stands to gain and her absolute level of well-being, while, according to the competing claims view, the strength of a claim is also partly determined by her level of well-being relative to others with conflicting interests. I argue that, suitably modified, the competing claims view is more plausible than restricted prioritarianism.

Adam and Eve have the same record yet receive different punishments. Adam receives the punishment that they both deserve, whereas Eve receives a more lenient punishment. In this article, we explore whether a deserved-but-unequal punishment, such as what Adam receives, can be just. We do this by explicating the conceptions of retributive justice that underlie both sides of the debate. We argue that inequality in punishment is disturbing mainly because of the disrespect it often expresses towards the offender receiving the harsher treatment, and also because it casts doubt on whether Adam got what he deserved. We suggest that when no disrespect is involved and when it is clear that the criminal got what he deserved, inequality is not worrisome.

The possibility of seeding other planets with life poses a tricky dilemma. On the one hand, directed panspermia might be extremely good, while, on the other, it might be extremely bad depending on what factors are taken into consideration. Therefore, we need to understand better what is ethically at stake with planetary seeding. I map out possible conditions under which humanity should spread life to other solar systems. I identify two key variables that affect the desirability of propagating life throughout the galaxy. The first is axiological and depends on which value theory in environmental ethics is correct. The second is empirical and depends on whether life is common or not in our region of the universe. I also consider two ethical objections to an interplanetary life-seeding mission: the risk of interfering with indigenous life and the risk of increasing suffering in our galaxy.

In this article I criticize the non-consequentialist Weighted Lottery (WL) solution to the choice between saving a smaller or a larger group of people. WL aims to avoid what non-consequentialists see as consequentialism's unfair aggregation by giving equal consideration to each individual's claim to be rescued. In so doing, I argue, WL runs into another common objection to consequentialism: it is excessively demanding. WL links the right action with the outcome of a fairly weighted lottery, which means that an agent can only act rightly if s/he has actually run the lottery. In many actual cases, this involves epistemic demands that can be almost impossible to meet. I argue that plausible moral principles cannot make such extreme epistemic demands.

Pattern-based reasons are reasons for action deriving not from the features of our own actions, but from the features of the larger patterns of action in which we might be participating. These reasons might relate to the patterns of action that will actually be carried out, or they might relate to merely hypothetical patterns. In past work, I have argued that accepting merely hypothetical pattern-based reasons, together with a plausible account of how to weigh these reasons, can lead to disastrous consequences. However, in this article, I argue that this problem is not limited to hypothetical pattern-based reasons: it turns out that there are analogous issues for reasons deriving from actual patterns. I then suggest that we can avoid this problem by adopting a different account of the weight of pattern-based reasons.

In the Principles of the Penal Code, Jeremy Bentham described offences that he labelled presumed or evidentiary. The conduct penalized under such offences is punished not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it probabilistically indicates the presence of an intrinsic wrong. Bentham was sceptical of the need to create offences, but grudgingly accepted their value in light of deficiencies in procedure and the judiciary. These days the scepticism is even greater, with courts and commentators in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere believing that such ‘proxy’ offences deny a defendant the right to establish that he did not engage in the conduct that the presumed offence probabilistically but not necessarily indicates. On closer analysis, however, such scepticism appears unjustified. Almost all offences, and indeed almost all legal rules, are premised on a probabilistic relationship between the behaviour the rule encompasses and the behaviour that is the rule-maker's real concern. Presumed offences may make this relationship especially obvious, but it is a relationship that exists whenever the law operates by the use of rules.

As is already well known, subjective consequentialists face a challenge which arises from the fact that many (perhaps even most) of the consequences of an action are unforeseeable: this fact makes trouble for the assignment of expected values. Recently there has been some discussion of the role of ‘indifference’ principles in addressing this challenge. In this article, I argue that adopting a principle of indifference to unforeseeable consequences will not work – not because of familiar worries about the rationality of such indifference principles, but because subjective consequentialist theories which adopt such principles end up entailing either deontic indeterminacy or arbitrary deontic variance. This is because of another well-known fact: that possibilities do not ‘agglomerate’.

According to positive egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as negative egalitarians claim, but relations of equality also have positive value. The egalitarian value of a population is a function of both pairwise relations of inequality (negative) and pairwise relations of equality (positive). Positive and negative egalitarianism diverge, especially in different-number cases. Hence, an investigation of positive egalitarianism might shed new light on the vexed topic of population ethics and our duties to future generations. We shall here, in light of some recent criticism, further develop the idea of giving positive value to equal relations.

In Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality, Douglas Portmore introduces a novel position regarding the actualist–possibilist controversies in consequentialist thought – securitism – a position he argues is theoretically superior to the standard views in both the actualist and possibilist camps. After distinguishing the two camps through an examination of the original Procrastinate case, I present Portmore's securitism (a new species of actualism) and its implications regarding his modified Procrastinate case. I level two serious objections against securitism: (i) that it implausibly implies that morality is radically more demanding for the virtuous than it is for the vicious and (ii) that it fails to recognize moral vice in a wide range of cases. I close by arguing that a possibilist variant of Portmore's securitist view is impervious to such objections and thus appears theoretically superior to the actualist version Portmore promotes.

There is little agreement among moral and political philosophers when it comes to determining what it is that makes adaptive preferences problematic. The large number of competing explanations offered by philosophers illustrates the absence of any consensus. The most prominent versions of these explanations have recently come under attack by Dale Dorsey, who argues that adaptive preferences are a red herring: the problematic nature of adaptive preferences is not explained by the fact of adaptation but by an appeal to some other normative consideration. In this article I offer an account of adaptive preferences that both accommodates the thought that only some of our adaptive preferences are problematic and responds to the skeptical challenge pressed by Dorsey. I argue that some adaptive preferences are prima facie irrational as they exhibit a peculiar error in reasoning where individuals change the semantic content of the reasons underpinning the new preference.

Smilansky (2006) notes that wrongdoers seem to lack any entitlement to complain about being treated in the ways that they have treated others. However, it also seems impermissible to treat agents in certain ways, and this impermissibility would give wrongdoers who are themselves wronged grounds for complaint. This article solves this apparent paradox by arguing that what is at issue is not the right simply to make complaints, but the right to have one's demands respected. Agents must accept the authority of others to make second-personal demands on them before they can expect others to treat their own demands (or complaints) as legitimate. Wrongdoers’ previous wrongdoing shows they do not treat others’ demands as authoritative. However, as they are still beings with dignity, which acts as a source of moral reasons for others, wronging them remains impermissible.

In his evaluation of the major social reform movements of his era, Mill chastised well-meaning reformers for their reluctance to elevate Malthusianism to a position of prominence in their efforts. He was convinced that the key to the material, mental, and moral improvement of the poor and the workers lay in a reduction of their physical numbers and in the behavioural modifications entailed by such a diminution, whereas most other reformers looked elsewhere for solutions. A favourite assumption about the proper means for effecting social reform was that economic growth served as an effective and almost automatic instrument for improving society. Then, as now, an unquestioned faith in the capacity of a progressive economy to stimulate gains in per capita income for the lower classes set the terms for the discussion.1 However, by suggesting that broader and more intensive economic development without a corresponding reduction in the rate of population increase would not generate material gains for those living in indigence, let alone the broader socio-cultural progress that was to have followed closely upon its heels, Mill casts aspersions upon the ‘false ideal’ of economic growth which informed many grand programmes for social progress.