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  1. Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life.David Shoemaker - 2024 - University of Chicago Press.
    A philosopher’s case for the importance of good—if ethically questionable—humor. A good sense of humor is key to the good life, but a joke taken too far can get anyone into trouble. Where to draw the line is not as simple as it may seem. After all, even the most innocent quips between friends rely on deception, sarcasm, and stereotypes and often run the risk of disrespect, meanness, and harm. How do we face this dilemma without taking ourselves too seriously? (...)
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  • A New Puzzle for Limited Aggregation.Kacper Kowalczyk - 2024 - Analysis 84 (2):258-266.
    This paper presents a new puzzle for limited aggregation. Unlike other recent puzzles, this one arises independently of the issue of rational aversion to risk. Some possible responses are laid out and explored.
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  • Doing Less Than Best.Emma J. Curran - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
    This thesis is about the moral reasons we have to do less than best. It consists of six chapters. Part I of the thesis proposes, extends, and defends reasons to do less than best. In Chapter One (“The Conditional Obligation”) I outline and reject two recent arguments from Joe Horton and Theron Pummer for the claim that we have a conditional obligation to bring about the most good. In Chapter Two (“Agglomeration and Agent-Relative Costs”) I argue that agent-relative costs can (...)
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  • Getting Machines to Do Your Dirty Work.Tomi Francis & Todd Karhu - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-15.
    Autonomous systems are machines that can alter their behavior without direct human oversight or control. How ought we to program them to behave? A plausible starting point is given by the Reduction to Acts Thesis, according to which we ought to program autonomous systems to do whatever a human agent ought to do in the same circumstances. Although the Reduction to Acts Thesis is initially appealing, we argue that it is false: it is sometimes permissible to program a machine to (...)
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  • Absolutism and its Limits.John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs & Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2):170-189.
    Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insignificant (...)
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  • Against the no-difference argument.Adam Elga - forthcoming - Analysis.
    There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a "discomfort machine" operates on the victim---leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the "no-difference argument" the answer is "yes" because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim no worse off. This argument is of interest because if it is sound, similar arguments threaten (...)
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  • Partial Aggregation: What the People Think.Markus Kneer & Juri Viehoff - manuscript
    This article applies the tools of experimental philosophy to the ongoing debate about both the theoretical viability and the practical import of partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics. We conduct a series of three experiments (N=383): First, we document the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate this position. Our study then moves beyond establishing the existence of partially aggregative intuitions in two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work in such a way as to ascertain which amongst existing versions (...)
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  • (1 other version)Limited Aggregation for Resolving Human-Wildlife Conflicts.Matthias Eggel & Angela K. Martin - 2022 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 1.
    Human-wildlife interactions frequently lead to conflicts – about the fair use of natural resources, for example. Various principled accounts have been proposed to resolve such interspecies conflicts. However, the existing frameworks are often inadequate to the complexities of real-life scenarios. In particular, they frequently fail because they do not adequately take account of the qualitative importance of individual interests, their relative importance, and the number of individuals affected. This article presents a limited aggregation account designed to overcome these shortcomings and (...)
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  • Decision theory and de minimis risk.Martin Smith - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (6):2169-2192.
    A de minimis risk is defined as a risk that is so small that it may be legitimately ignored when making a decision. While ignoring small risks is common in our day-to-day decision making, attempts to introduce the notion of a de minimis risk into the framework of decision theory have run up against a series of well-known difficulties. In this paper, I will develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of overcoming two major obstacles to the modelling (...)
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  • Collective Actions, Individual Reasons, and the Metaphysics of Consequence.Samuel Lee - 2022 - Ethics 133 (1):72-105.
    I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation (...)
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  • A new well‐being atomism.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):3-23.
    Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...)
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  • Well-Being as Need Satisfaction.Marlowe Fardell - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3).
    This paper presents a new analysis of the concept of non-instrumental need, and, using it, demonstrates how a need-satisfaction theory of well-being is much more plausible than might otherwise be supposed. Its thesis is that in at least some contexts of evaluation a central part of some persons’ well-being consists in their satisfying certain “personal needs”. Unlike common conceptions of other non-instrumental needs, which make those out to be moralised, universal, and minimal, personal needs are expansive and particular to particular (...)
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  • The Significance of Tiny Contributions : Barnett and Beyond.Erik Carlson, Magnus Jedenheim-Edling & Jens Johansson - forthcoming - Utilitas.
    In a discussion of Parfit's Drops of Water case, Zach Barnett has recently proposed a novel argument against “No Small Improvement”; that is, the claim that a single drop of water cannot affect the magnitude of a thirsty person's suffering. We first show that Barnett's argument can be significantly strengthened, and also that the fundamental idea behind it yields a straightforward argument for the transitivity of equal suffering. We then suggest that defenders of No Small Improvement could reject a Pareto (...)
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  • Why Should We Try to be Sustainable? Expected Consequences and the Ethics of Making an Indeterminate Difference.Howard Nye - 2021 - In Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier & Geoffrey Rockwell (eds.), Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. Open Book Publishers. pp. 3-35.
    Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things like vote for policies that will reduce (...)
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  • What does incommensurability tell us about agency?Luke Elson - 2021 - In Henrik Andersson & Anders Herlitz (eds.), Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk. And Decision-Making. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 181-198.
    Ruth Chang and Joseph Raz have both drawn far-reaching consequences for agency from the phenomenon of incommensurability. After criticizing their arguments, I outline an alternative view: if incommensurability is vagueness, then there are no substantial implications for agency, except perhaps a limited form of naturalistic voluntarism if our reasons are provided by desires.
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  • Contractualism, Complaints, and Risk.Bastian Steuwer - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (2).
    How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call “objective ex ante contractualism”. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic risk in favor of discounting by objective risk. I further argue in favor of this new view. Objective ex ante contractualism provides the best model of justifiability (...)
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  • Sorites On What Matters.Theron Pummer - 2022 - In Jeff McMahan, Timothy Campbell, Ketan Ramakrishnan & Jimmy Goodrich (eds.), Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 498–523.
    Ethics in the tradition of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is riddled with sorites-like arguments, which lead us by what seem innocent steps to seemingly false conclusions. Take, for example, spectrum arguments for the Repugnant Conclusion that appeal to slight differences in quality of life. Several authors have taken the view that, since spectrum arguments are structurally analogous to sorites arguments, the correct response to spectrum arguments is structurally analogous to the correct response to sorites arguments. This sorites analogy is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Animal Rights and the Duty to Harm: When to be a Harm Causing Deontologist.C. E. Abbate - 2020 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 3 (1):5-26.
    An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...)
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  • Why the Repugnant Conclusion is Inescapable.Mark Budolfson & Dean Spears - unknown
    The spectre of the repugnant conclusion and the search for a population axiology that avoids it has endured as a focus of population ethics. This is in part because the repugnant conclusion is often interpreted as a defining problem for totalism, while the implications of averagism and related views are taken to illustrate the theoretical cost of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. However, we show that this interpretation cannot be sustained unless one focuses only on a special case of the repugnant (...)
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  • (1 other version)Animal Rights and the Duty to Harm: When to be a Harm Causing Deontologist.C. E. Abbate - 2020 - Journal for Ethics and Moral Philosophy 3 (1):5-26.
    An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals (human or nonhuman) to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible (...)
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  • Consequentialism and Collective Action.Brian Hedden - 2020 - Ethics 130 (4):530-554.
    Many consequentialists argue that you ought to do your part in collective action problems like climate change mitigation and ending factory farming because (i) all such problems are triggering cases, in which there is a threshold number of people such that the outcome will be worse if at least that many people act in a given way than if fewer do, and (ii) doing your part in a triggering case maximises expected value. I show that both (i) and (ii) are (...)
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  • The teleological account of proportional surveillance.Frej Klem Thomsen - 2020 - Res Publica (3):1-29.
    This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the (...)
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  • Asymmetrism and the Magnitudes of Welfare Benefits.Andrew T. Forcehimes - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2):175-185.
    One vexing question for Desire Satisfactionism is this: At what time do you benefit from a satisfied desire? Recently Eden Lin has proposed an intriguing answer. On this proposal – Asymmetrism – when past-directed desires are satisfied, the time interval during which you benefit is the time of the desire; and, when future-directed desires are satisfied, the time interval during which you benefit is the time of the object. In this essay, I argue that Asymmetrism forces us to give implausible (...)
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  • Collective harm and the inefficacy problem.Julia Nefsky - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (4):e12587.
    This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...)
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  • Discounting, Climate Change, and the Ecological Fallacy.Matthew Rendall - 2019 - Ethics 129 (3):441-463.
    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.
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  • Morality Under Risk.Chad Lee-Stronach - 2019 - Dissertation,
    Many argue that absolutist moral theories -- those that prohibit particular kinds of actions or trade-offs under all circumstances -- cannot adequately account for the permissibility of risky actions. In this dissertation, I defend various versions of absolutism against this critique, using overlooked resources from formal decision theory. Against the prevailing view, I argue that almost all absolutist moral theories can give systematic and plausible verdicts about what to do in risky cases. In doing so, I show that critics have (...)
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  • Limited Aggregation and Risk.Seth Lazar - 2018 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 46 (2):117-159.
    Many of us believe (1) Saving a life is more important than averting any number of headaches. But what about risky cases? Surely: (2) In a single choice, if the risk of death is low enough, and the number of headaches at stake high enough, one should avert the headaches rather than avert the risk of death. And yet, if we will face enough iterations of cases like that in (2), in the long run some of those small risks of (...)
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  • Spectrum arguments and hypersensitivity.Theron Pummer - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1729-1744.
    Larry Temkin famously argues that what he calls spectrum arguments yield strong reason to reject Transitivity, according to which the ‘all-things-considered better than’ relation is transitive. Spectrum arguments do reveal that the conjunctions of independently plausible claims are inconsistent with Transitivity. But I argue that there is very strong independent reason to reject such conjunctions of claims, and thus that the fact that they are inconsistent with Transitivity does not yield strong reason to reject Transitivity.
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  • In dubious battle: uncertainty and the ethics of killing.Seth Lazar - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (4):859-883.
    How should deontologists concerned with the ethics of killing apply their moral theory when we don’t know all the facts relevant to the permissibility of our action? Though the stakes couldn’t be higher, and uncertainty is endemic where killing is concerned, few deontologists have an answer to this question. In this paper I canvass two possibilities: that we should apply a threshold standard, equivalent to the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied for criminal punishment; and that we should fit our (...)
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  • Rule-Consequentialism's Assumptions.Kevin P. Tobia - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (4):458-471.
    Rule-Consequentialism faces “the problem of partial acceptance”: How should the ideal code be selected given the possibility that its rules may not be universally accepted? A new contender, “Calculated Rates” Rule-Consequentialism claims to solve this problem. However, I argue that Calculated Rates merely relocates the partial acceptance question. Nevertheless, there is a significant lesson from this failure of Calculated Rates. Rule-Consequentialism’s problem of partial acceptance is more helpfully understood as an instance of the broader problem of selecting the ideal code (...)
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  • How to allocate scarce health resources without discriminating against people with disabilities.Tyler M. John, Joseph Millum & David Wasserman - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (2):161-186.
    One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing responses to the QALY trap and argues that all (...)
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  • Axiological Absolutism and Risk.Seth Lazar & Chad Lee-Stronach - 2019 - Noûs 53 (1):97-113.
    Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations. In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what (...)
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  • Effective Altruism and the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion.Pellegrino Gianfranco - 2017 - Essays in Philosophy 18 (1):44-67.
    Effective altruism is committed to Altruistic Maximization – the claim that any impact of giving to charities ought to be maximized at the margins and counterfactually. This may lead to counterintuitive or contradictory conclusions in certain cases. For instance, when we can bring about a substantial benefit to few or a tiny benefit to a larger number at the same cost, spreading of benefits across a great number of recipients can compensate substantial loss for fewer people. However, sometimes the perspective (...)
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  • (1 other version)Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches.A. Norcross - 1998 - Analysis 58 (2):152-158.
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  • Moral Vagueness Is Ontic Vagueness.Miriam Schoenfield - 2016 - Ethics 126 (2):257-282.
    The aim of this essay is to argue that, if a robust form of moral realism is true, then moral vagueness is ontic vagueness. The argument is by elimination: I show that neither semantic nor epistemic approaches to moral vagueness are satisfactory.
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  • Consequentialism.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Vaulting Intuition: Temkin's Critique of Transitivity.Alex Voorhoeve - 2013 - Economics and Philosophy 29 (3):409-425.
    In 'Rethinking the Good', Larry Temkin makes two core claims. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, such cases threaten the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’. I argue that the goodness of a distribution may indeed depend on what other distributions are feasible. But contrary to Temkin, I also argue that transitivity holds even when the goodness of a distribution depends on the (...)
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  • The Rejection of Epistemic Consequentialism.Selim Berker - 2013 - Philosophical Issues 23 (1):363-387.
    A quasi-sequel to "Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions." Covers some of the same ground, but also extends the basic argument in an important way.
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  • Puppies, Pigs, and Potency: A Response to Galvin and Harris.Alastair Norcross - 2012 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (3):384 - 388.
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  • Intuitions about large number cases.Theron Pummer - 2013 - Analysis 73 (1):37-46.
    Is there some large number of very mild hangnail pains, each experienced by a separate person, which would be worse than two years of excruciating torture, experienced by a single person? Many people have the intuition that the answer to this question is No. However, a host of philosophers have argued that, because we have no intuitive grasp of very large numbers, we should not trust such intuitions. I argue that there is decent intuitive support for the No answer, which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Two dogmas of deontology: Aggregation, rights, and the separateness of persons: Alastair Norcross.Alastair Norcross - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):76-95.
    One of the currently popular dogmata of anti-consequentialism is that consequentialism doesn't respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less argued for. In this paper I explain what I take to be the most plausible interpretation of the separateness of persons charge. I argue that the charge itself can be deconstructed into at least two further objections to consequentialist theories. These (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the possibility of nonaggregative priority for the worst off.Marc Fleurbaey, Bertil Tungodden & Peter Vallentyne - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):258-285.
    We shall focus on moral theories that are solely concerned with promoting the benefits (e.g., wellbeing) of individuals and explore the possibility of such theories ascribing some priority to benefits to those who are worse off—without this priority being absolute. Utilitarianism (which evaluates alternatives on the basis of total or average benefits) ascribes no priority to the worse off, and leximin (which evaluates alternatives by giving lexical priority to the worst off, and then the second worst off, and so on) (...)
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  • In defence of repugnance.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):899-933.
    I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...)
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  • A puzzle about other-directed time-bias.Caspar Hare - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2):269 – 277.
    Should we be time-biased on behalf of other people? 'Sometimes yes, sometimes no'—it is tempting to answer. But this is not right. On pain of irrationality, we cannot be too selective about when we are time-biased on behalf of other people.
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  • A set of solutions to Parfit's problems.Stuart Rachels - 2001 - Noûs 35 (2):214–238.
    In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit cannot find a theory of well-being that solves the Non-Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Absurd Conclusion, and all forms of the Mere Addition Paradox. I describe a “Quasi-Maximizing” theory that solves them. This theory includes (i) the denial that being better than is transitive and (ii) the “Conflation Principle,” according to which alternative B is hedonically better than alternative C if it would be better for someone to have all the B-experiences. (i) entails (...)
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  • Headaches, Lives and Value.Dale Dorsey - 2009 - Utilitas 21 (1):36.
    University of Alberta Forthcoming in Utilias Consider Lives for Headaches: there is some number of headaches such that the relief of those headaches is sufficient to outweigh the good life of an innocent person. Lives for Headaches is unintuitive, but difficult to deny. The argument leading to Lives for Headaches is valid, and appears to be constructed out of firmly entrenched premises. In this paper, I advocate one way to reject Lives for Headaches; I defend a form of lexical superiority (...)
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  • Taurek, numbers and probabilities.Rob Lawlor - 2006 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2):149 - 166.
    In his paper, “Should the Numbers Count?" John Taurek imagines that we are in a position such that we can either save a group of five people, or we can save one individual, David. We cannot save David and the five. This is because they each require a life-saving drug. However, David needs all of the drug if he is to survive, while the other five need only a fifth each.Typically, people have argued as if there was a choice to (...)
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  • Would a Viable Consent App Create Headaches for Consequentialists?Scott Woodcock - 2024 - Philosophy 99 (1):73-98.
    Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...)
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  • Limited aggregation and zoonotic disease outbreaks.Angela K. Martin & Matthias Eggel - 2022 - Transforming Food Systems: Ethics, Innovation and Responsibility. Eursafe Conference Proceedings.
    Human and animal interests are often in conflict. In many situations, however, it is unclear how to evaluate and weigh competing human and animal interests, as the satisfaction of the interests of one group often inevitably occurs at the expense of those of the other group. Human-animal conflicts of this kind give rise to ethical questions. If animals count morally for their own sake, then we must ask in which cases the satisfaction or frustration of the interests of humans and (...)
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  • The aggregation problem for Scanlonian Contractualism: an exploration of the relevance view, mixed solutions, and why Scanlonian Contractualists could be, and perhaps should be, Restricted Prioritarians.Aart Van Gils - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Reading
    In this thesis, I discuss the aggregation problem for T. M. Scanlon’s “contractualism”. I argue that Scanlonian contractualists have the following two options when it comes to the aggregation problem. First, they can choose to limit aggregation directly via a specific version of the Relevance View, “Sequential Claims-Matching”. Second, Scanlonian contractualists can adopt a so-called “mixed solution” of which I propose a specific version. My mixed solution does not limit aggregation. Rather, it either avoids some of the counterintuitive results in (...)
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