I defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: the claim that doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. A thing does not genuinely belong to a person unless he has special authority over it. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing protects us against harmful imposition – against the actions or needs of another intruding on what is ours. This protection is necessary for something to genuinely belong to a person. The opponent of the Doctrine must claim that (...) nothing genuinely belongs to a person, even his own body. (shrink)

Discounting future costs and benefits is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer. Simply to treat the future as better off, however, is to commit an ecological fallacy. Even if our descendants are better off when we average across climate change scenarios, this cannot justify discounting costs and benefits in possible states of the world in which they are not. Giving due weight to catastrophe scenarios requires energetic action against climate change.

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution to (...) the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle. (shrink)

Agent-relative reasons are an important feature of any nonconsequentialist moral theory. Many authors think that they cannot be accommodated within a value-first theory that understands all value as agent-neutral. In this paper, I offer a novel explanation of agent-relative reasons that accommodates them fully within an agent-neutral value-first view. I argue that agent-relative reasons are to be understood in terms of second-order value responses: when an agent acts on an agent-relative reason, she responds appropriately to the agent-neutral value of her (...) own appropriate response to some agent-neutral value. This view helps reconcile important elements of deontology and consequentialism. (shrink)