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 (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

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 (...) with recognizing the inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Bernard Williams once said that doing moral philosophy could be hazardous because there, presumably unlike in other areas of philosophy, we may run the risk of misleading people on important matters.1 This risk seems to be particularly present when considering the topic of terrorism. I would like to discuss what seems to be a most striking feature of contemporary terrorism, a feature that, as far as I know, has not been noted. This has implications concerning the way that we should (...) view terrorism (and counterterrorism) and shows the force of a number of neglected illusions surrounding the issue of terrorism, as well as its justification. (shrink)

The ethics of corporate crisis management is a seriously underdeveloped field. Among recent proposals in the area, two contributions stand out: Seeger and Ulmer’s (2001) virtue ethics approach to crisis management ethics and Simola’s (2003) ethics of care. In the first part of the paper, I argue that both contributions are problematic: Seeger and Ulmer focus on top management and propose virtues that lack substance and are in need of further development. Simola’s proposal is also fraught with difficulty, since it (...) seems to conceive of ethics of care as a course of action that can be chosen in a crisis, something which runs contrary to the idea of caring. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Simola and Seeger and Ulmer are nevertheless on the right track, and I propose some directions for further development of the ethics of corporate crisis management. I argue that the value of codes of conduct is limited. Furthermore, I propose a way of identifying relevant virtues for corporate crisis management and discuss a problem that is prevalent in crisis management ethics (the temptation of ad hoc utilitarianism). (shrink)

Many believe that in?supreme emergencies? collectives are granted what I elsewhere call?special permissions?, permissions to carry out self-defensive acts which would otherwise be morally forbidden. However, there appears to be a continuum between non-emergency, emergency and supreme-emergency situations, which gives rise to the following problem: If special permissions are granted in supreme emergencies, they should apply, mutatis mutandis, to less extreme cases too. If, to save itself from wholesale massacre, a collective is allowed to kill thousands of noncombatants on the (...) side of the aggressor, then to save itself from a less murderous campaign, a collective should be allowed to kill several hundreds of noncombatants, and so on. But this conclusion seems to undermine the most fundamental ideas of just war theory. The purpose of the paper is to discuss possible solutions to this problem. I contend that a contractarian view of the war convention offers the most attractive solution, though, at the end of the day, I am not sure that it will work. (shrink)

‘Retributivism’ covers a wide range of theories which, even though they differ in various ways, all give some room for proportionality considerations with regard to the question of how severely offenders should be punished. This article addresses the question—well‐known from traditional ethical theory—as to whether proportionality constraints should be given an absolutist or a non‐absolutist interpretation. It is argued that both absolutist and some non‐absolutist accounts of proportionality constraints have counter‐intuitive implications and, more generally, that the non‐absolutist interpretation, to which (...) most retributivists seem to subscribe, faces serious challenges with regard to how the thresholds of such constraints should be determined. It is concluded that, given the aspiration of providing genuine action guidance for penal practice, the retributivist faces a dilemma that is not easily resolved. (shrink)