Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this (...) challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that zebras, goats, lions, and similar animals matter morally, but not in quite the same way people do. This might lead us to adopt a hybrid view of animal ethics such as ‘Utilitarianism for Animals; Deontology for People’. One of the core commitments of deontology is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm. I explore how this core tenant of deontology applies to non-person, (...) non-human animals and whether hybrid views of animal ethics can accept it. In doing so, I aim to do three things. First, to show that my defence of the DDA can solve a problem surrounding our duties to wild animals, while making only minimal claims about animal moral status. Second, to offer an argument that for many non-person, non-human animals, we should recognise deontological constraints on their treatment, but also see those constraints as importantly different from the constraints against doing harm to persons. Third, to get clearer on how we should understand Utilitarianism for Animals and Nozickian hybrid approaches to animal ethics. (shrink)

In the article, the scenario-moulding is evaluated through the linguistic and conceptual accessibility of the future and the moral challenges of doing and allowing harm to the future participants of the practical discourses rooted in the present-centered scenarios. The viability of the scenarios is suggested to be defined by the alienation from the present and past imaginative contexts, as well as by overcoming the projections of humanity exclusiveness through inversible forecasting with the shift from human power to vulnerability as the (...) key issue in scenario-making. The eccentric approach to the future makes it possible to review both intergenerational and intragenerational perspectives of the future through the chronological distance and yet-inexistent subjects’ expectations and needs simulation. Taking to account the impact of the past, present and future otherness implies the three-dimensional assessment model involving metaphorical evaluation of the past-rooted patterns as paradise lost, illusions of the accessible futures as paradise found, and refusal of the futurized present expectations for the yetunknown imaginative future contexts as paradise conceptually postponed. The approach can find its practical application in tailoring and evaluating migration solutions and scenarios. (shrink)