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  1. A Defense of the Obligation to Keep Promises to the Dead.James Stacey Taylor - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (6):547-559.
    It is widely held that to break a promise that one made to a person who is now dead would be to wrong her. This view undergirds many positions in bioethics, ranging from those that concern who may access a person’s medical records after she has died, to questions concerning organ procurement and posthumous procreation. Ashley Dressel has argued that there is no reason to believe that promissory obligations can be owed to people who are dead. Although her arguments are (...)
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  • Seeing the Good in Medical Ethics.Finn Wilson - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (6):513-521.
    This issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy is unified by a theme of what contributes to and detracts from patient well-being. I highlight this unifying thread through five of this issue’s contributions, dividing them according to whether they are predominantly about what diminishes or enhances the well-being of patients. Three of them are more directly relevant to whether certain actions diminish well-being, and two of them touch more closely on what promotes well-being. Although these papers are generally focused (...)
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  • Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters?Samuel Iglesias, Brian D. Earp, Cristina Voinea, Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Anda Zahiu, Nancy S. Jecker & Julian Savulescu - forthcoming - American Journal of Bioethics:1-16.
    There is an ongoing debate about the ethics of research on lifespan extension: roughly, using medical technologies to extend biological human lives beyond the current “natural” limit of about 120 years. At the same time, there is an exploding interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create “digital twins” of persons, for example by fine-tuning large language models on data specific to particular individuals. In this paper, we consider whether digital twins (or digital doppelgängers, as we refer to (...)
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  • Love, Freedom, and Resentment.Samuel Lundquist - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Virginia
    In recent decades, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) has had an enormous influence on philosophical views of moral responsibility. Many contemporary views follow Strawson in centering questions of responsibility on the appropriateness of certain attitudes in our interpersonal relations, especially attitudes of blame and anger, rather than on the abstract nature of free will. Strawson’s influence has in many ways been beneficial, but the prevailing Strawsonian views have taken on some of the more dubious tendencies of contemporary moral (...)
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  • Reparations after species extinctions: An account of reparative interspecies justice.Anna Wienhues & Alfonso Donoso - 2024 - Journal of Social Philosophy:1-21.
    While anthropogenic species extinctions can be considered morally problematic for a range of reasons, they can also be described as a problem of interspecies justice. That is the focus of this paper in which we argue that human-caused species extinctions can be integrated within a non-anthropocentric account of reparative justice that is significantly similar to how reparation is understood within political theory at large. An account such as this faces a series of difficulties, such as how to make right past (...)
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  • Is Discrimination Harmful?Andreas Bengtson - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (3):293-300.
    According to a prominent view, discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off. In this paper, I argue that this harm-based account runs into trouble because it cannot point to a harm, without making controversial metaphysical commitments, in cases of discrimination in which the discriminatory act kills the discriminatee. That is, the harm-based account suffers from a problem of death. I then show that the two main alternative accounts of the wrongness of discrimination—the mental-state-based account and (...)
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  • Blaming the dead.Anneli Jefferson - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):548-559.
    Should moral blame stop at the grave? We often blame the dead for the bad things they did while alive. But blaming the dead poses a prima facie challenge to accounts which take our blaming practices to aim at communicating moral disapproval to wrongdoers or at improving their moral agency. If these kinds of aims are made definitional for blame, blaming the dead becomes impossible. But even on accounts which say that paradigmatically, blame is a form of moral engagement which (...)
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  • Death, Badness, and Well-Being at a Time.Karl Ekendahl - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-18.
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  • What We Owe Past Selves.Lauritz Aastrup Munch - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (5):936-950.
    Some say that we should respect the privacy of dead people. In this article, I take this idea for granted and use it to motivate the stronger claim that we sometimes ought to respect the privacy of our past selves.
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  • Capital Punishment (or: Why Death is the 'Ultimate' Punishment).Michael Cholbi - forthcoming - In Jesper Ryberg (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Punishment Theory and Philosophy.
    Both proponents and opponents of capital punishment largely agree that death is the most severe punishment that societies should consider imposing on offenders. This chapter considers how (if at all) this ‘Ultimate Thesis’ can be vindicated. Appeals to the irrevocability of death, the badness of being executed, the badness of death, or the harsh condemnation societies express by sentencing offenders to death do not succeed in vindicating this Thesis, and in particular, fail to show that capital punishment is more severe (...)
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  • Value After Death.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Ratio 35 (3):194-203.
    Does our life have value for us after we die? Despite the importance of such a question, many would find it absurd, even incoherent. Once we are dead, the thought goes, we are no longer around to have any wellbeing at all. However, in this paper I argue that this common thought is mistaken. In order to make sense of some of our most central normative thoughts and practices, we must hold that a person can have wellbeing after they die. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 1: The concept of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 2: Theories of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...)
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  • The Sheriff in Our Minds: On the Morality of the Mental.Director Samuel - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (3):1-19.
    Many people believe that our thoughts can be morally wrong. For example, many regard rape and murder fantasies as morally wrong. In a provocative recent essay, George Sher disagrees with this and argues that “the realm of the purely mental is best regarded as a morality-free zone,” wherein “no thoughts or attitudes are either forbidden or required”. Ultimately, Sher argues that “each person’s subjectivity is a limitless, lawless wild west in which absolutely everything is permitted”. Sher calls this view the (...)
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  • Permanent Value.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):356-372.
    Temporal nihilism is the view that our lives won’t matter after we die. According to the standard interpretation, this is because our lives won’t make a permanent difference. Many who consider the view thus reject it by denying that our lives need to have an eternal impact. However, in this paper, I develop a different formulation of temporal nihilism revolving around the persistence of personal value itself. According to this stronger version, we do not have personal value after death, so (...)
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  • Dissolving Death’s Time-of-Harm Problem.Travis Timmerman - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):405-418.
    Most philosophers in the death literature believe that death can be bad for the person who dies. The most popular view of death’s badness—namely, deprivationism—holds that death is bad for the person who dies because, and to the extent that, it deprives them of the net good that they would have accrued, had their actual death not occurred. Deprivationists thus face the challenge of locating the time that death is bad for a person. This is known as the Timing Problem, (...)
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  • Fewer Mistakes and Presumed Consent.Alexander Zambrano - 2021 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (1):58-79.
    “Opt-out” organ procurement policies based on presumed consent are typically advertised as being superior to “opt-in” policies based on explicit consent at securing organs for transplantation. However, Michael Gill has argued that presumed consent policies are also better than opt-in policies at respecting patient autonomy. According to Gill’s Fewer Mistakes Argument, we ought to implement the procurement policy that results in the fewest frustrated wishes regarding organ donation. Given that the majority of Americans wish to donate their organs, it is (...)
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  • The experience requirement on well-being.Eden Lin - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):867-886.
    According to the experience requirement on well-being, differences in subjects’ levels of welfare or well-being require differences in the phenomenology of their experiences. I explain why the two existing arguments for this requirement are not successful. Then, I introduce a more promising argument for it: that unless we accept the requirement, we cannot plausibly explain why only sentient beings are welfare subjects. I argue, however, that because the right kind of theory of well-being can plausibly account for that apparent fact (...)
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  • Epicureanism and Skepticism about Practical Reason.Christopher Frugé - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2):195-208.
    Epicureans believe that death cannot harm the one who dies because they hold the existence condition, which states that a subject is able to be harmed only while they exist. I show that on one reading of this condition death can, in fact, make the deceased worse off because it is satisfied by the deprivation account of death’s badness. I argue that the most plausible Epicurean view holds the antimodal existence condition, according to which no merely possible state of affairs (...)
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  • Punishing the Dead.Saul Smilansky - 2018 - Journal of Value Inquiry 52 (2):169-177.
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  • Don't Fear the Reaper: An Epicurean Answer to Puzzles about Death and Injustice.Simon Cushing - 2007 - In Woodthorpe Kate (ed.), Layers of Dying and Death. Inter-Disciplinary Press. pp. 117-127.
    I begin by sketching the Epicurean position on death - that it cannot be bad for the one who dies because she no longer exists - which has struck many people as specious. However, alternative views must specify who is wronged by death (the dead person?), what is the harm (suffering?), and when does the harm take place (before death, when you’re not dead yet, or after death, when you’re not around any more?). In the second section I outline the (...)
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  • Deletion as second death: the moral status of digital remains.Patrick Stokes - 2015 - Ethics and Information Technology 17 (4):237-248.
    There has been increasing attention in sociology and internet studies to the topic of ‘digital remains’: the artefacts users of social network services (SNS) and other online services leave behind when they die. But these artefacts also pose philosophical questions regarding what impact, if any, these artefacts have on the ontological and ethical status of the dead. One increasingly pertinent question concerns whether these artefacts should be preserved, and whether deletion counts as a harm to the deceased user and therefore (...)
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  • A Promise Acceptance Model of Organ Donation.Alida Liberman - 2015 - Social Theory and Practice 41 (1):131-148.
    I aim to understand how the act of becoming an organ donor impacts whether it is permissible for a family veto to override an individual’s wish to donate. I argue that a Consent Model does not capture the right understanding of donor autonomy. I then assess a Gift Model and a Promise Model, arguing that both fail to capture important data about the ability to revoke one’s donor status. I then propose a Promise Acceptance Model, which construes becoming an organ (...)
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  • Historic Injustices and the Moral Case for Cultural Repatriation.Karin Björnberg - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (3):461-474.
    It is commonly argued that cultural objects ought to be returned to their place of origin in order to remedy injustices committed in the past. In this paper, it is shown that significant challenges attach to this way of arguing. Although there is considerable intuitive appeal in the idea that if somebody wrongs another person then she ought to compensate for that injustice, the principle is difficult to apply to wrongdoings committed many decades or centuries ago. It is not clear (...)
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  • Organs: tradable, but not necessarily inheritable.James Stacey Taylor - 2014 - Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (1):62-62.
    Teck Chuan Voo and Soren Holm argue that “organs should be inheritable if they were to be socially and legally recognised as tradable property.”1 To support this view they first observe that “…legal recognition of objects as property… opens up the possibility of the legal recognition of the survival of the property rights and their inheritability after the death of the source/owner, even if those rights are intimately bound with the person.”1 They also note that if organs are tradable property (...)
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  • Whole-Life Welfarism.Ben Bramble - 2014 - American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (1):63-74.
    In this paper, I set out and defend a new theory of value, whole-life welfarism. According to this theory, something is good only if it makes somebody better off in some way in his life considered as a whole. By focusing on lifetime, rather than momentary, well-being, a welfarist can solve two of the most vexing puzzles in value theory, The Badness of Death and The Problem of Additive Aggregation.
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  • In search of the missing subject: narrative identity and posthumous wronging.Malin Masterton, Mats G. Hansson & Anna T. Höglund - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (4):340-346.
    With the advanced methods of analysing old biological material, it is pressing to discuss what should be allowed to be done with human remains, particularly for well documented historical individuals. We argue that Queen Christina of Sweden, who challenged the traditional gender roles, has an interest in maintaining her privacy when there are continued attempts to reveal her ‘true’ gender. In the long-running philosophical debate on posthumous wronging, the fundamental question is: Who is wronged? Our aim is to find this (...)
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  • The Irrevocability of Capital Punishment.Benjamin S. Yost - 2011 - Journal of Social Philosophy 42 (3):321-340.
    One of the many arguments against capital punishment is that execution is irrevocable. At its most simple, the argument has three premises. First, legal institutions should abolish penalties that do not admit correction of error, unless there are no alternative penalties. Second, irrevocable penalties are those that do not admit of correction. Third, execution is irrevocable. It follows that capital punishment should be abolished. This paper argues for the third premise. One might think that the truth of this premise is (...)
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  • The metaphysics of harm.Matthew Hanser - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2):421-450.
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  • Well-being and the problem of unstable desires.Atus Mariqueo-Russell - 2023 - Utilitas 35 (4):260-276.
    This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the average strength (...)
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  • Transgenerational Social Structures and Fictional Actors: Community-Based Responsibility for Future Generations.Tiziana Andina & Fausto Corvino - 2023 - The Monist 106 (2):150-164.
    The notion of transgenerational community is usually based on two diachronic interactions. The first interaction consists of present generations taking up the legacy (not only economic, but also institutional, artistic, cultural, and so forth) of past generations and giving it continuity, exercising a form of active agency. The second interaction occurs when present generations pass on their legacy to future generations. This is supposed to expand the boundaries of the community in a transgenerational sense (both backward- and forward-looking). In this (...)
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  • Organ Conscription and Greater Needs.Alexander Zambrano - 2023 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (1):123-133.
    Since its inception, the institution of postmortem organ transplantation has faced the problem of organ shortage: Every year, the demand for donor organs vastly exceeds supply, resulting in the deaths of approximately 8,000 individuals in the United States alone.1 This is in large part due to the fact that the United States, for the most part, operates under an “opt-in” policy in which people are given the opportunity to voluntarily opt-in to organ donation by registering as organ donors.2 In the (...)
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  • Promises to the Dead.James Stacey Taylor - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:81-103.
    Many people attempt to give meaning to their lives by pursuing projects that they believe will bear fruit after they have died. Knowing that their death will preclude them from protecting or promoting such projects people who draw meaning from them will often attempt to secure their continuance by securing promises from others to serve as their caretakers after they die. But those who rely on such are faced with a problem: None of the four major accounts that have been (...)
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  • Posthumous Repugnancy.Benjamin Kultgen - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (3):317-337.
    I argue that the possibility of posthumous harm ought to be rejected. My argument centers on a kind of repugnancy case involving posthumous harm. Supposing the existence of posthumous harm, a person whose wellbeing was extremely high while she was alive could incur small posthumous harms over a long enough period such that it is true of that person that she had a life not worth living. I respond to various objections and in the end conclude that rejecting posthumous harm (...)
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  • At the Bar of Conscience: A Kantian Argument for Slavery Reparations.Jason R. Fisette - 2022 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 48 (5):674-702.
    Arguments for slavery reparations have fallen out of favor even as reparations for other forms of racial injustice are taken more seriously. This retreat is unsurprising, as arguments for slavery reparations often rely on two normatively irregular claims: that reparations are owed to the dead (as opposed to, say, their living heirs), and that the present generation inherits an as yet unrequited guilt from past generations. Outside of some strands of Black thought and activism on slavery reparations, these claims are (...)
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  • The Problem of the Kantian Line.Samuel Kahn - 2019 - International Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):193-217.
    In this paper I discuss the problem of the Kantian line. The problem arises because the locus of value in Kantian ethics is rationality, which (counterintuitively) seems to entail that there are no duties to groups of beings like children. I argue that recent attempts to solve this problem by Wood and O’Neill overlook an important aspect of it before posing my own solution.
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  • Psychopathy: Morally Incapacitated Persons.Heidi Maibom - 2017 - In Thomas Schramme & Steven Edwards (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer. pp. 1109-1129.
    After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...)
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  • Why Live Forever? What Metaphysics Can Contribute.Aaron Segal - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (2):185-204.
    I suggest a way in which metaphysics might cure us of our desire for immortality. Supposing that time is composed of instants, or even that time could be composed of instants, leads to the conclusion that there is nothing good that immortality offers, nothing we might reasonably want, that is in principle unavailable to a mere mortal. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I suggest a necessary condition for a feature to ground the desirability of a life or a (...)
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  • Harm, Benefit, and Non-Identity.Per Algander - 2013 - Dissertation, Uppsala University
    This thesis in an invistigation into the concept of "harm" and its moral relevance. A common view is that an analysis of harm should include a counterfactual condition: an act harms a person iff it makes that person worse off. A common objection to the moral relevance of harm, thus understood, is the non-identity problem. -/- This thesis criticises the counterfactual condition, argues for an alternative analysis and that harm plays two important normative roles. -/- The main ground for rejecting (...)
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  • Comparative Harm, Creation and Death.Neil Feit - 2016 - Utilitas 28 (2):136-163.
    Given that a person's death is bad for her,whenis it bad? I defendsubsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the (...)
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  • Harm.Michael Rabenberg - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (3):1-32.
    In recent years, philosophers have proposed a variety of accounts of the nature of harm. In this paper, I consider several of these accounts and argue that they are unsuccessful. I then make a modest case for a different view.
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  • Divided we fall.Jacob Ross - 2014 - Philosophical Perspectives 28 (1):222-262.
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  • Mortal Harm and the Antemortem Experience of Death.Stephan Blatti - 2014 - Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (9):640-42.
    In his recent book, Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics (Routeledge 2012), James Stacey Taylor challenges two ideas whose provenance may be traced all the way back to Aristotle. The first of these is the thought that death (typically) harms the one who dies (mortal harm thesis). The second is the idea that one can be harmed (and wronged) by events that occur after one’s death (posthumous harm thesis). Taylor devotes two-thirds of the book to arguing against both theses and the (...)
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  • Queen Christina’s moral claim on the living: Justification of a tenacious moral intuition. [REVIEW]Malin Masterton, Gert Helgesson, Anna T. Höglund & Mats G. Hansson - 2007 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 10 (3):321-327.
    In the long-running debate on the interest of the dead, Joan C. Callahan argues against such interests and although Søren Holm for practical reasons is prepared to consider posthumous interests, he does not see any moral basis to support such interests. He argues that the whole question is irresolvable, yet finds privacy interests where Tutankhamen is concerned. Callahan argues that there can be reasons to hold on to the fiction that there are posthumous interests, namely if it is comforting for (...)
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  • Death and other nothings.David B. Suits - 2012 - Philosophical Forum 43 (2):215-230.
    One kind of attempt to defeat the Epicurean conclusion that "death is nothing to us" is the claim that death could be some kind of unexperienced harm. The possibility of such harm is thought to be made plausible by analogy to the possibility of unexperienced harm in life, and it has motivated the invention of many thought experiments which attempt to show that in life one can indeed be harmed without experiencing the harm or its effects in any way. But (...)
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  • Pleasurably Regarding the Pain of Fictional Others.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Is it ever bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? I think so. I attempt to show when and why. I begin with two powerful objections to my view: (1) engaging with fiction is akin to morally unproblematic autonomous fantasy, and (2) since no one is harmed, it is morally unproblematic. I reply to the objections and defend a Moorean view on the issue: It is intrinsically bad to enjoy evil, actual (past, present, or future) and merely (...)
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  • Why it is Important to Take Account of History.Alan Holland - 2011 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 14 (3):377 - 392.
    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 377-392, October 2011.
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  • A Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But there is more to what makes a life worth living than just well-being. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. I defend an objective list theory of the worth of a life: The most worthwhile lives are those high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. By distinguishing between worth and welfare, we (...)
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  • Structuring Ends.Jon Garthoff - 2010 - Philosophia 38 (4):691-713.
    There is disagreement among contemporary theorists regarding human well-being. On one hand there are “substantive good” views, according to which the most important elements of a person’s well-being result from her nature as a human, rational, and/or sentient being. On the other hand there are “agent-constituted” views, which contend that a person’s well-being is constituted by her particular aims, desires, and/or preferences. Each approach captures important features of human well-being, but neither can provide a complete account: agent-constituted theories have difficulty (...)
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  • (1 other version)Death.Steven Luper - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    First, what constitutes a person's death? It is clear enough that people die when their lives end, but less clear what constitutes the ending of a person's life.
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