The book develops, defends, and applies a "Dual Scale" model of weighing reasons to resolve various issues in ethics. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know about weighing reasons and probably a lot of stuff you didn't want to know too. It addresses, among other things, what the general issue of weighing reasons is; what it is to weigh reasons correctly; whether reasons have more than one weight value (e.g., justifying, requiring, and/or commending weight); whether weight values are (...) context sensitive; how to tell what the weights of reasons are; how reasons for are related to reasons against; and how the weights of reasons aggregate. After addressing such issues, it explains a number of puzzling phenomena in ethics, such as the All or Nothing Problem, the normative significance of small improvements, and the intransitivity of the makes-it-permissible-to-act-against relation. (shrink)

As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...) recommend that particular charity. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already being used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars of donations, it is not supported by any of the approaches to moral uncertainty that have been proposed thus-far in the philosophical literature. In this paper, we will develop a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty that honors the proportionality intuition in favor of splitting one’s donations. We also show how this bargaining-based approach has several further advantages over the best alternative proposals. (shrink)

There are plenty of classic paradoxes about conditional obligations, like the duty to be gentle if one is to murder, and about “supererogatory” deeds beyond the call of duty. But little has been said about the intersection of these topics. We develop the first general account of conditional supererogation, with the power to solve familiar puzzles as well as several that we introduce. Our account, moreover, flows from two familiar ideas: that conditionals restrict quantification and that supererogation emerges from a (...) clash between justifying and requiring reasons. (shrink)

How could it be wrong to exploit—say, by paying sweatshop wages—if the exploited party benefits? How could it be wrong to do something gratuitously bad—like giving to a wasteful charity—if that is better than permissibly doing nothing? Joe Horton argues that these puzzles, known as the Exploitation Problem and All or Nothing Problem, have no unified answer. I propose one and pose a challenge for Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem.

On many prominent accounts, moral praise- and blameworthiness depend on the quality of will an agent manifests in their action. This paper draws attention to a pertinent but overlooked phenomenon: the manifestation of commendable and objectionable qualities of will in an action at once. By showing that all the manifested qualities of will have an effect on the agent's praise- and blameworthiness (i.e., on their action's moral worth), it is argued that quality of will theories need to provide an account (...) of this effect. An account according to which the manifested degrees of qualities of will cancel each other out and the praise- or blameworthiness is determined by the remaining quality of will is discussed and dismissed. Finally, it is argued that agents who manifest objectionable and commendable qualities of will at once are simultaneously both praise- and blameworthy for their actions. Actions can thus have ambivalent moral worth. (shrink)

One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...) another as, a responsible agent. (shrink)

I defend the exclusionary power of political directives. The prevailing account, which I call the additive account, holds that a legitimate directive only provides a pro tanto obligation for subjects to comply. I show that it falls into a Goldilocks dilemma, giving either insufficient or excessive weight to these obligations. Pace the additive account, I argue that a legitimate directive not only gives subjects a pro tanto reason to comply but also excludes all the reasons bearing on its justifiability regarding (...) subjects’ actions as required by the directive. Unlike Raz, who grounds the exclusionary power of legitimate directives on authorities’ supposedly superior epistemic competence, I justify it by drawing on Kantian political philosophy, which grants states a unique moral standing to make coercive decisions on behalf of their citizenry as a solution to the problem of unilateralism. (shrink)

In Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, the agent has three options: a permissible act that saves no one, a wrongful act that saves only one child, or a supererogatory act that saves two children. Some may argue that if the agent is not going to save two children, she should save none rather than just one. However, this conclusion is counterintuitive. Although there are many proposed solutions to this problem, none of them provides a fully satisfactory answer. In this article, (...) I argue that it is plausible to accept the Individualist Obligation Principle according to which, the agent is morally permitted to fulfill a _prima facie_ obligation to save an individual in grave peril, provided that doing so demonstrates a substantial engagement with the individualized obligations to each individual involved. (shrink)