In morally grounding a public justification requirement, public reason liberals frequently invoke the idea that persons should be construed as “free and equal.” But this tells us little with regard to what it is about us that makes us free or how a claim about our status as persons can ultimately ground a requirement of public justification. In light of this worry, I argue that a public justification requirement can be grounded in a Nozick-inspired argument from the separateness of persons (...) (one that is consistent with the idea that individuals are free and equal). As I claim, one particular feature of the fact of our separateness – the possession of a basic psychology consisting of beliefs, intentions, sentiments, and a variety of desire-like psychological states – does the most work in grounding both a principle of liberty (PL) and a requirement of public justification (RPJ). Together, PL and RPJ provide the basic framework for a theory of public reason liberalism. (shrink)

Intuitionism—in some form or another—is the most widely recognized and thoroughly discussed method of justification for moral theories. It rests on the claim that a moral theory must not deviate too much from our pre-theoretical moral convictions. In some form or another, this methodology goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and has been discussed, refined, and defended by such contemporary philosophers as John Rawls and Norman Daniels.There is, however, another methodology for constructing and defending moral theories. It draws (...) on premises about human nature or the nature of persons to support conclusions about the nature and structure of morality. This method—which I will call thenature to morality methodology—evaluates a moral claim or moral theory on the basis of its relation to some facts about the kind of beings we are. For brevity, I will use the term ‘nature-claims’ to refer to claims about human nature or the nature of persons, and the term ‘nature-facts’ to refer to true nature-claims. The nature-claims that have been used to support or criticize various moral theories include claims about human motivation, personal identity, the human soul, and the conceptual features of personhood or rational agency. (shrink)

Harsanyi defends utilitarianism by means of an axiomatic proof and by what he calls the 'equiprobability model'. Both justifications of utilitarianism aim to show that utilitarian ethics can be derived from Bayesian rationality and some weak moral constraints on the reasoning of rational agents. I argue that, from the perspective of Bayesian agents, one of these constraints, the impersonality constraint, is not weak at all if its meaning is made precise, and that generally, it even contradicts individual rational agency. Without (...) the impersonality constraint, Harsanyi's two justifications of utilitarianism on the grounds of Bayesian rationality fail. As an alternative, I develop a contractarian framework that is compatible with individual rational agency and Harsanyi's central assumptions, and that allows the derivation of moral conclusions on the grounds of Bayesian rationality. The developed framework offers a novel justification of contractarian ethics and may best be described as a combined version of Harsanyi's equiprobability model and Rawls's original position. (shrink)

I argue that the use of the separateness of persons in the debate between the priority view and the competing claims view is deeply flawed. In making the case, I argue for three points. First, that...

Utilitarians are said to be indifferent between interpersonal and intrapersonal transfers. In doing so, they fail to register the separateness of persons. This ‘separateness of persons’ objection has been traditionally used against utilitarianism, but more recently against prioritarianism. In this paper, I examine how yet another distributive view, namely sufficientarianism, fares in this respect. Sufficientarians famously believe that while inequality as such does not matter, what does matter is that all individuals meet some adequate threshold. It is often taken for (...) granted that sufficientarianism does not violate the separateness of persons. In this paper, I seek to show that that is not the case. The main challenge, however, proves to be formulating an accurate understanding of what the separateness of persons precisely means. I offer several interpretations and argue that sufficientarianism, surprisingly, violates them all. Sufficientarianism, just like utilitarianism does not respect the separateness of persons. (shrink)

Many critics of utilitarianism claim that we should reject interpersonal aggregation because aggregative principles do not take the separateness of persons seriously. In this article, I will reject this claim. I will first elucidate the theoretical structure of aggregation. I will then consider various interpretations of the notion of the separateness of persons and clarify what exactly those critics are trying to reject by appealing to the notion of the separateness of persons. I will argue that none of these interpretations (...) can serve as the ground for rejecting aggregation. (shrink)

Utilitarianism seems to require us to sacrifice a person if doing so will produce a net increase in the amount of utility. This feature of utilitarianism is extremely unattractive. The puzzle is how to reject this requirement without rejecting the plausible claim that we are often wise to trade lesser amounts of utility for greater amounts. I argue that such a position is not as paradoxical as it may appear, so long as we understand the relationship between the value of (...) utility and the value of persons in a certain way. I argue that the traditional utilitarian position assumes an inadequate view of this relationship. I suggest a more plausible view of this relationship, one which implies that we may not sacrifice a person merely in order to produce a net gain in utility, where that utility does not result from the saving of any other persons' lives. (shrink)