Mill's feminism has been attacked as being logically incoherent. The general verdict has been that Mill can easily be defended from the charge. However, both sides in the debate have ignored the fact that his feminism is part of a broader theory of liberal empiricism. Placing The Subjection of Women in this context re–opens the question of its logical credentials and reveals a basic weakness in Millian feminism.

James Mill's views on peace and war have yet to be examined in detail. Only a few scholars have paid any attention to this aspect of his thought. Edmund Silberner was the first to give any extensive account of Mill's opposition to war and his proposals for universal peace, but chiefly from an economic point of view. He rightly pointed out that Mill's opposition to war was grounded mainly on his belief that war always obstructs the progress of national wealth, and also that Mill regarded the acquisition and possession of colonies as one of the major causes of war. F. H. Kinsley summed up the leading ideas of Mill's article on the ‘Law of Nations’, but only to show how far Bentham influenced Mill's thinking in this specific area.

A largely deontological conscience will probably optimize consequences. But Bernard Williams objects to the ‘imposed and illusory dissociation’, if one therefore embraces indirect consequentialism, of ‘the theorist in oneself from the self whose dispositions are being theorized’. Admittedly the strategy is painful, and a counsel of imperfection at best. But it need not be psychologically impossible, inconsistent, or even self-deceptive, given ethical cognitivism.

This paper sketches an account of the intrinsic goodness of virtue and intrinsic evil of vice that can fit within a consequentialist framework. This ‘recursive account’ treats the virtues and vices as higher-level intrinsic values, ones that consist in, respectively, appropriate and inappropriate attitudes to other, lower-level values. After presenting the main general features of the account, the paper illustrates its strengths by showing how it illuminates a series of particular vices. In the course of doing so, it distinguishes between the categories of what it calls pure vices (such as malice), vices of indifference (such as callousness), and vices of disproportion (such as selfishness), and shows how each category is made vicious by a different general feature of the recursive account.

Writing in the foreword to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and speaking of his upbringing in Chicago between the wars Saul Bellow attests that

…as a Midwesterner, the son of immigrant parents, I recognized at an early stage that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins, my surroundings [‘the accidental circumstances of Chicago’], my schooling, were to be allowed to determine the course of my life. I did not intend to be wholly dependent upon history and culture. Full dependency must mean that I was done for. The commonest teaching of the civilized world in our time can be stated simply: ‘Tell me where you come from and I'll tell you what you are’.

In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker proposes an account of the relation between his rule-consequentialism and virtue according to which the virtues (1) have intrinsic value and (2) are identical with the dispositions that are ‘essential parts of accepting the rules’ of the ideal code. While it is not clear whether Hooker actually intends to endorse this account or only intends to moot it for discussion, I argue that for him to adopt it would be a mistake. Not only would this mean that his moral theory was no longer properly a consequentialist view at all, but it would commit him to inconsistent views about how normative theories – in particular theories of morality in the deontic sense and theories of virtue – are justified.

One response to the demandingness objection is that it begs the question against consequentialism by assuming a moral distinction between what a theory requires and what it permits. According to the consequentialist, this distinction stands in need of defense. However, this response may also beg the question, this time at the methodological level, regarding the credibility of the intuitions underlying the objection. The success of the consequentialist's response thus turns on the role we assign to intuitions in our moral methodology. After presenting the demandingness objection to consequentialism and revealing the underlying methodological stalemate, I break the stalemate by appealing to research in the cognitive neuroscience of intuitions. Given the evidence for the hypothesis that our moral intuitions are fundamentally emotional (rather than rational) responses, we should give our intuitions a modest (rather than robust) role in our moral methodology. This rescues the consequentialist's response to the demandingness objection.

Many of us think that we have duties of distributive justice towards our fellow citizens that we do not have towards foreigners. Is that thought justified? This article considers the nature of the state's relationship to distributive justice from the perspective of utilitarianism, a theory that is barely represented in contemporary philosophical debates on this question. My strategy is to mount a utilitarian case for state-specific duties of distributive justice that is similar in its basic structure to the one that is standardly mounted for special duties towards the near and dear. I begin with a discussion of whether or not the co-citizen relationship can be justified in terms of its welfare consequences. I then consider what the answer to that first question implies concerning the duties of distributive justice that arise within that relationship.

I have two aims in this article. The first is to break the deadlocked exchange between John Skorupski and John Broome concerning how best to understand Thomas Nagel's distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action. The second is to provide a reformulation of the distinction which captures an uncontroversial distinction between those reason-giving considerations which encapsulate an indexical relationship between an agent and an object of moral concern, and those which do not. The resolution of this exchange, and subsequent reformulation of the dichotomy, has two important ramifications for contemporary debates in moral philosophy. First and foremost, it reveals the true, pre-theoretical nature of the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action, and how the notion of agent-relativity cannot be utilized to underwrite the existence of deontic constraints. And, second, it provides definitive support for Skorupski's claim that agent-relative reasons are not the defining feature of deontological ethics.

This article seeks to cause trouble for a brand of consequentialism known as ‘desertarianism’. In somewhat different ways, views of this kind evaluate outcomes more favourably, other things equal, the better the fit between the welfare different people enjoy and the welfare they each deserve. These views imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing welfare to fit desert, which seems plausible enough. Unfortunately, they also imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing desert to fit welfare: in other words, by making happy people more deserving, at the cost of making unhappy people less deserving. Extant versions of desertarianism predict that such ‘deservingness transfers’ are improvements and that we ought to carry them out. Even worse, they will sometimes rank deservingness transfers higher than simply benefitting deserving people who are poorly off.

It is widely believed that consequentialists are committed to the claim that persons are mere containers for well-being. In this article I challenge this view by proposing a new version of consequentialism, according to which the identities of persons matter. The new theory, two-dimensional prioritarianism, is a natural extension of traditional prioritarianism. Two-dimensional prioritarianism holds that well-being matters more for persons who are at a low absolute level than for persons who are at a higher level and that it is worse to be deprived of a given number of units than it is good to gain the same number of units, even if the new distribution is a permutation of the original one. If a fixed amount of well-being is transferred from one person to another and then transferred back again, two-dimensional prioritarianism implies that it would have been better to preserve the status quo.

According to rule-consequentialism, we ought to follow the principles that would result in the best consequences if they were generally accepted. These principles constitute the ideal code. My aim is to make clear what the ideal code says about what we owe to animals. I argue that it accords moral status to them: the rule-consequentialist should acknowledge both general duties and special obligations to animals. However, in the ideal code there is no place for animal rights, conceived as deontological constraints. Within the animal rights debate, I conclude, rule-consequentialism is superior to some of the most prominent ethical theories in its agreement with widely shared moral intuitions. But some of its practical implications regarding the proper treatment of animals remain unclear. This point is illustrated by a discussion of what Jeff McMahan called ‘benign carnivorism’.

An important objection to many utilitarian theories is that their conceptions of utility may count as morally relevant contributions to individual well-being items which are morally or rationally suspect. For example, if the conception of utility is pleasure, or alternatively, the fulfilment of actual desire or satisfaction of preferences, then greater individual utility may be produced by whatever increases pleasure, fulfils desire, or satisfies someone's preferences. This is true no matter how disgusting or vile we may think such pleasures are, or how irrational or distasteful we find the fulfilment of a desire or the satisfaction of some preference.