In discussion surrounding the destruction of cultural heritage in armed conflict, one often hears two important claims in support of intervention to safeguard heritage. The first is that the protection of people and the protection of heritage are two sides of the same coin. The second is that the cultural heritage of any people is part of the common heritage of all humankind. In this article, I examine both of these claims, and consider the extent to which they align with (...) the current practices that they are intended to justify. (shrink)

Few moral arguments have been made against vegetarian diets. One exception is the “Logic of the Larder:” We do animals a favor by purchasing their meat, eggs, and milk, for if we did not purchase these products, fewer animals would exist. This argument fails because many farm animals have lives that are probably not worth living, while others prevent a significant number of wild animals from existing. Even if this were not so, the purchase of animal products uses resources that (...) could otherwise be used to bring a much greater number of animals into existence. (shrink)

In this paper I explore an epistemic asymmetry that sometimes occurs regarding the moral status of alternative actions. I argue that this asymmetry is significant and has ramifications for what it is morally permissible to do. I then show how this asymmetry often obtains regarding three moral issues: vegetarianism, abortion, and charitable giving. In doing so, I rely on the epistemic significance of disagreement and the existence of moral controversy about these issues.

Peter Singer has argued for a radical anti-intuitionism on the basis of recent empirical research into the psychological and evolutionary origins of moral intuition. There is, however, a gap between the putative genealogy of moral intuition that Singer offers and his desired methodological claim. I explore three ways to bridge the gap, and argue that the promising way is to construe the genealogy as a debunking genealogy. I sketch an account of how debunking arguments work, and then show that this (...) causes problems for Singer, since utilitarianism itself is liable to be debunked. Finally, I suggest how we can take lessons for ethics from the empirical work, but that the result is a far more restricted kind of anti-intuitionism than Singer was hoping for. (shrink)

This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral goodness is more multi-faceted. (...) My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness: the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy. (shrink)

Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law-like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question whether this is possible and what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” (...) that aims to make living together possible, and strengthens people's capability to live a good life within a society. The role of moral philosophy is, accordingly, to develop our moral tools further. Moral philosophers become ethical engineers who use their expertise in ethical topics to criticize existing “moral technology” and construct new concepts, tools, and theories that better answer the current challenges for living a good life. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as a major threat to public health and healthcare systems worldwide. Recent research suggests that pollution from antibiotics manufacturing is an important driver of resistance development. Using Sweden as an example, this article considers how industrial antibiotic pollution might be addressed by public actors who are in a position to influence the distribution and use of antibiotics in high-income countries with publicly funded health systems. We identify a number of opportunities for these actors to incentivize (...) industry to increase sustainability in antibiotics production. However, we also show that each alternative would create tensions with other significant policy goals, necessitating trade-offs. Since justifiable trade-offs require ethical consideration, we identify and explore the main underlying normative issues, namely, the weighing of local versus global health interests, the weighing of present versus future health interests, and the role of individualistic constraints on the pursuit of collective goals. Based on this analysis, we conclude that the actors have weighty principled reasons for prioritizing the goal of addressing pollution, but that translating this stance into concrete policy requires accommodating significant pragmatic challenges. (shrink)

In this article I reject the argument of Colin McGinn ("Must I Be Morally Perfect?", 1992) that ordinary morality requires that each of us be morally perfect. McGinn's definition of moral perfection –– according to which I am morally perfect if I never do anything that is supererogatory, but always do what is obligatory, and always avoid doing what is impermissible –– should be rejected, because it is open to the objection that I am morally perfect if I always do (...) what is optional but bad to do (what is suberogatory), in addition to always doing what is obligatory and always avoiding what is impermissible. Moral perfection may be defined as always doing what is obligatory, and always doing what is optional but good to do (supererogatory), and never doing what is impermissible, and never doing what is optional but bad to do [suberogatory]. Since ordinary morality does not require this, ordinary morality does not require moral perfection. (shrink)

This paper develops the Value-Based Theory of Reasons in some detail. The central part of the paper introduces a number of theoretically puzzling features of normative reasons. These include weight, transmission, overlap, and the promiscuity of reasons. It is argued that the Value-Based Theory of Reasons elegantly accounts for these features. This paper is programmatic. Its goal is to put the promising but surprisingly overlooked Value-Based Theory of Reasons on the table in discussions of normative reasons, and to draw attention (...) to a number of areas for fruitful further research. (shrink)

A dogma of contemporary ethical theory maintains that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is the very same as the nature of normative support for actions. The prevailing view is that normative reasons provide the support across the board. I argue that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is importantly different from the nature of normative support for actions. Actions are indeed supported by reasons. Reasons are gradable and contributory. The support relations for affective attitudes are (...) neither. So-called reasons of the right kind for affective attitudes are facts that make those very attitudes fitting. Unlike reasons, fit-making facts for affective attitudes do not conflict with each other or combine in the explanation of further normative facts. More fit-making facts just make a more complex set of reactions fitting. This result undermines various analyses and unity theses in the philosophy of normativity. (shrink)

There are several powerful motivations for neutral value‐based deontic theories such as Act Consequentialism. Traditionally, such theories have had great difficulty accounting for partiality towards one's personal relationships and projects. This paper presents a neutral value‐based theory that preserves the motivations for Act Consequentialism while vindicating some crucial intuitions about reasons to be partial. There are two central ideas. The first is that when it comes to working out what you ought to do, your friends’ interests, the needs of your (...) family, the significance of your own projects and ideals, etc. have more weight than the interests and needs of strangers. Your friends’ interests are not (thereby) more neutrally valuable than the interests of others. So there is a difference between the value of an outcome and its deontic significance. The second familiar idea is that reasons are modifiable. Reasons of partiality are reasons the weights of which are a function of the value of the relevant outcome modified by facts about the value of caring about the outcome in question. The resulting principle has various further explanatory advantages; in particular, it accounts for project‐ and relationship‐specific permissions and requirements, both at a time and across time. (shrink)

The article makes two substantive contributions to the existing literature on the ethics of international assistance and global justice. First, it builds what we take to be a widely held set of propositions about international assistance into a consistent view, and articulates a strong case against its desirability. Second, it sketches a more attractive alternative. To do so the article uses Sen’s idea of agent-oriented development as a starting point while at the same time providing a generalization of Sen’s account (...) and a justificatory framework that does not rely on the capability approach. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of a particular account of decision‐making under normative uncertainty: that, when it is possible to do so, one should maximize expected choice‐worthiness. Though this position has been often suggested in the literature and is often taken to be the ‘default’ view, it has so far received little in the way of positive argument in its favor. After dealing with some preliminaries and giving the basic motivation for taking normative uncertainty into account in our decision‐making, we (...) consider and provide new arguments against two rival accounts that have been offered—the accounts that we call ‘My Favorite Theory’ and ‘My Favorite Option’. We then give a novel argument for comparativism—the view that, under normative uncertainty, one should take into account both probabilities of different theories and magnitudes of choice‐worthiness. Finally, we further argue in favor of maximizing expected choice‐worthiness and consider and respond to five objections. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have claimed that we should take not just empirical uncertainty but also fundamental moral uncertainty into account in our decision-making, and that, despite widespread moral disagreement, doing so would allow us to draw robust lessons for some issues in practical ethics. In this article, I argue that, so far, the implications for practical ethics have been drawn too simplistically. First, the implications of moral uncertainty for normative ethics are far more wide-ranging than has been noted so (...) far. Second, one can't straightforwardly argue from moral uncertainty to particular conclusions in practical ethics, both because of ‘interaction’ effects between moral issues, and because of the variety of different possible intertheoretic comparisons that one can reasonably endorse. (shrink)

Some philosophers have recently argued that decision-makers ought to take normative uncertainty into account in their decisionmaking. These philosophers argue that, just as it is plausible that we should maximize expected value under empirical uncertainty, it is plausible that we should maximize expected choice-worthiness under normative uncertainty. However, such an approach faces two serious problems: how to deal with merely ordinal theories, which do not give sense to the idea of magnitudes of choice-worthiness; and how, even when theories do give (...) sense to magnitudes of choice-worthiness, to compare magnitudes of choice-worthiness across different theories. Some critics have suggested that these problems are fatal to the project of developing a normative account of decision-making under normative uncertainty. The primary purpose of this article is to show that this is not the case. To this end, I develop an analogy between decision-making under normative uncertainty and the problem of social choice, and then argue that the Borda Rule provides the best way of making decisions in the face of merely ordinal theories and intertheoretic incomparability. (shrink)

: Kathryn Paxton George's recent publication, Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? (2000), is the culmination of more than a decade's work and encompasses standard and original arguments against the feminist-vegetarian connection. This paper demonstrates that George's key arguments are deeply flawed, antithetical to basic feminist commitments, and beg the question against fundamental aspects of the debate. Those who do not accept the feminist-vegetarian connection should rethink their position or offer a non-question-begging defense of it.

Kathryn Paxton George's recent publication, Animal, Vegetable, or Woman?, is the culmination of more than a decade's work and encompasses standard and original arguments against the feminist-vegetarian connection. This paper demonstrates that George's key arguments are deeply flawed, antithetical to basic feminist commitments, and beg the question against fundamental aspects of the debate. Those who do not accept the feminist-vegetarian connection should rethink their position or offer a non-question-begging defense of it.

This paper examines two strategies aimed at demonstrating that moral obligations to improve global health exist. The ‘humanitarian model’ stresses that all human beings, regardless of affluence or global location, are fundamentally the same in terms of moral status. This model argues that affluent global citizens’ moral obligations to assist less fortunate ones follow from the desirability of reducing disease and suffering in the world. The ‘political model’ stresses that the lives of the world's rich and poor are inextricably linked (...) because of harmful state-to-state actions and because of the currently existing transnational institutions. These institutions’ design at once secures the high standard of living of the affluent and reinforces the continued foreseeable—and avoidable—deprivation of many of the global poor; and these give rise to compensatory health-related moral obligations beyond borders. This paper argues that political reasoning is unsuitable for the crucial task of determining priority in the receipt of health aid. We conclude that in the context of global health ethics, political reasoning must be supplemented with, if not replaced by, humanitarian reasoning. (shrink)

Contemporary liberalism and republicanism present clearly distinct programs for domestic politics, but the same cannot be said when it comes to global politics: the burgeoning literature on global republicanism has reproduced the divide between cosmopolitan and associational views familiar from long-standing debates among liberal egalitarians. Should republicans be cosmopolitans? Despite presence of a range of views in the literature, there is an emerging consensus that the best answer is no. This paper aims to resist the emerging consensus, arguing that republicans (...) should be cosmopolitans. The considerations offered against cosmopolitanism generally rest on an incomplete understanding of the relationship between economic inequality or poverty on the one hand, and domination on the other. Insofar as republicans agree that promoting freedom from domination should be our central political aim, they should regard the reduction of economic inequality and poverty at home and abroad as equally pressing. (shrink)

Some people (e.g., Drs. Paul and Susan Lim) and, with them, organizations (e.g., the National Embryo Donation Center) believe that, morally speaking, the death of a frozen human embryo is a very bad thing. With such people and organizations in mind, the question to be addressed here is as follows: if one believes that the death of a frozen embryo is a very bad thing, ought, morally speaking, one prevent the death of at least one frozen embryo via embryo adoption? (...) By way of a three‐premise argument, one of which is a moral principle first introduced by Peter Singer, my answer to this question is: at least some of those who believe this ought to. (Just who the “some” are is identified in the paper.) If this is correct, then, for said people, preventing the death of a frozen embryo via embryo adoption is not a morally neutral matter; it is, instead, a morally laden one. Specifically, their intentional refusal to prevent the death of a frozen embryo via embryo adoption is, at a minimum, morally criticizable and, arguably, morally forbidden. Either way, it is, to one extent or another, a moral failing. (shrink)

Wenn eine Person unter einer tödlichen Krankheit leidet und nicht über die Ressourcen für eine medizinische Behandlung verfügt, sind wir normalerweise dazu verpflichtet, ihr die notwendigen Ressourcen bereitzustellen. Wären wir aber in einem biotechnischen Zukunftsszenario, in dem die menschliche Lebensspanne durch Eingriffe in den Alterungsprozess erhöht werden kann, auch dazu verpflichtet, anderen Personen die notwendigen Ressourcen für solche Maßnahmen bereitzustellen? John Harris hat argumentiert, dass wir zu solch einer direkten biotechnischen Lebensverlängerung verpflichtet wären, da ein Leben zu verlängern das Gleiche (...) sei, wie ein Leben zu retten. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz wird gezeigt, dass Harris’ Argument nicht schlüssig ist, da entgegen seiner Prämisse ein begrifflicher Unterschied zwischen der Rettung und der Verlängerung eines Lebens besteht. Auf Grundlage von Harris’ zurückgewiesenem Argument werden dann aber zwei alternative Argumente für eine (prima facie) Pflicht zur direkten Lebensverlängerung konstruiert. Das erste Argument basiert auf der Überlegung, dass durch eine direkte biotechnische Lebensverlängerung trotz des begrifflichen Unterschieds mit einer substanziellen Wahrscheinlichkeit Leben gerettet werden würden. Das zweite Argument besagt, dass trotz deskriptiver Unterschiede eine moralische Äquivalenz zwischen der Rettung und der Verlängerung eines Lebens besteht, sofern durch die bloße Lebensverlängerung das Leben um die gleiche Dauer und Qualität verlängert wird wie durch die Lebensrettung. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When a person suffers from a deadly disease and is lacking the resources for a medical treatment, we are normally obliged to provide the necessary resources. But would we also be morally obliged to provide the resources for an extension of someone’s lifespan through anti-aging treatments which might be developed due to biotechnological progress? John Harris has argued that there would be an obligation to such a direct biotechnical life extension because extending a life is the same as saving a life. In the present paper, it will be shown that Harris’ argument is not sound since, contrary to his premise, there is a conceptual difference between extending and saving a life. On the basis of Harris’ rejected argument, though, two alternative arguments for a (prima facie) obligation to direct biotechnical life extension will be developed. The first argument is based on the idea that, despite the conceptual difference, one saves someone’s life with a substantial probability when extending it by direct biotechnical means. In the second argument, it will be argued that there is a moral equivalence between extending and saving someone’s life despite the descriptive differences as far as the additional lifetime has the same duration and quality in both cases. (shrink)

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in (...) the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community. (shrink)

Philosophers debate over the truth of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the thesis that there is a morally significant difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm to happen. Deontologists tend to accept this doctrine, whereas consequentialists tend to reject it. A robust defence of this doctrine would require a conceptual distinction between doing and allowing that both matches our ordinary use of the concepts in a wide range of cases and enables a justification for the alleged moral difference. (...) In this article, I argue not only that a robust defence of this doctrine is available, but also that it is available within a consequentialist framework. (shrink)

How does other people’s opinion affect judgments of norm transgressions? In our study, we used a modification of the famous Asch paradigm to examine conformity in the moral domain. The question we addressed was how peer group opinion alters normative judgments of scenarios involving violations of moral, social, and decency norms. The results indicate that even moral norms are subject to conformity, especially in situations with a high degree of social presence. Interestingly, the degree of conformity can distinguish between different (...) types of norms. (shrink)

According to Thomas Pogge, rich people do not simply violate a positive duty of assistance to help the global poor; rather, they violate a negative duty not to harm them. They do so by imposing an unjust global economic structure on poor people. Assuming that these claims are correct, it follows that, ceteris paribus, wars waged by the poor against the rich to resist this imposition are morally equivalent to wars waged in self-defense against military aggression. Hence, if self-defense against (...) military aggression is just, then, ceteris paribus, so are defensive wars against the imposition of economic injustice. While I do not think Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, I defend these inferences against various challenges. (shrink)

This paper provides a new argument for the relevance of empirical research to moral and political philosophy and a novel defense of the positive program in experimental philosophy. The argument centers on the idea that normative concepts used in moral and political philosophy can be evaluated in terms of their fruitfulness in solving practical problems. Empirical research conducted with an eye to the practical problems that are relevant to particular concepts can provide evidence of their fruitfulness along a number of (...) dimensions. An upshot of the argument is that philosophers should not only engage with but must also be involved in conducting experimental studies that examine the practical roles that normative concepts can play. Rather than just clearing the way for philosophical work to be done, the argument has the further implication that empirical research will be required to advance at least some important debates in moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Indifference is often described as a vice. Yet who is indifferent; to what; and in what way is poorly understood, and frequently subject to controversy and confusion. This paper proposes a framework for the interpretation and analysis of ethically problematic forms of indifference in terms of how different states of indifference can be either more or less dynamic, or more or less sensitive to the nature and state of their object.

When moral philosophers study ignorance, their efforts are almost exclusively confined to its exculpatory and blameworthy aspects. Unfortunately, though, this trend overlooks that certain kinds of propositional ignorance, namely of the personal costs and benefits of altruistic actions, can indirectly incentivize those actions. Humans require cooperation from others to survive, and that can be facilitated by a good reputation. One avenue to a good reputation is helping others, sticking to moral principles, and so forth, without calculating the personal costs of (...) doing so, e.g., saving someone from a burning building without calculating how personally costly or beneficial it would be. These actions are indirect moral benefits (partly) resulting from that kind of propositional ignorance. (shrink)

Julia Driver has argued that there is a special set of actions, lodged between neutral actions and wrongful actions called suberogatory actions. These actions are not impermissible, according to Driver, but still strike us as troubling or bad, and are therefore worse than morally neutral (1992). Since this paper was written 20 years ago, many philosophers have utilized or alluded to this moral territory. The existence of some action-types that are not wrong but still carry some dis-value has become a (...) staple in the realm of moral evaluation. However, Driver's argument for the existence of this moral territory amounts to three types of moral cases that, according to Driver, can only be explained by the existence of the suberogatory. In this short paper, I will respond by saying that we can account for these cases using our traditional notions of moral neutrality and moral wrongness. The temptation of invoking the suberogatory is that it can be used as a substitute for answering a variety of hard ethical questions. However appealing this substitute may be, we should resist it so long as the problem cases put forward to motivate the new evaluative realm can be handled, and handled well, by our traditional apparatus. (shrink)

While many Christians accept the claim that giving to support the poor and needy is a core moral and religious obligation, most Christian giving is usually not very efficient in EA terms. In this paper, I explore possibilities for productive collaboration between effective altruists and Christian givers. I argue that Christians are obligated from their own perspective to give radically in terms of quantity and scope to alleviate the suffering of the poor and needy. I raise two important potential stumbling (...) blocks for EAChristian collaboration. First, Christians cannot assess outcomes using a straightforward utilitarian calculus of the sort preferred by many EAs, lest they run into a reductio. Second, Christians will want to give to support aims such as worship and evangelism that are not shared by secular EAs and that are not easily commensurable, making the allocation of giving resources more difficult. I conclude with some tentative suggestions about how Christians who are sympathetic to EA might become more effective in their giving. (shrink)

Many international declarations state that human beings have a human right to health care. However, is there a human right to health care? What grounds this right, and who has the corresponding duties to promote this right? Elsewhere, I have argued that human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. Drawing on this fundamental conditions approach of human rights, I offer a novel way of grounding a human right to health care.

In this essay, I continue Nicholas Wolterstorff’s work of developing a rights-based theory of ethics called eirenéism, which maintains the good life only occurs when justice—as a moral state of affairs where agents enjoy the goods to which they have a right—is achieved. As a result, justice is eirenē (the Greek word for peace). In the process of developing eirenéism I explain how eirenē differs from other conceptions of peace, and I offer several interpretive arguments for how best to understand (...) eirenéism in relation to better-known competing ethical theories, like utilitarianism, virtue ethics, duty ethics, and care ethics. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s famous and influential article is criticised in three main ways that can be considered libertarian, although many non-libertarians could also accept them: 1) the relevant moral principle is more plausibly about upholding an implicit contract rather than globalising a moral intuition that had local evolutionary origins; 2) its principle of the immorality of not stopping bad things is paradoxical, as it overlooks the converse aspect that would be the positive morality of not starting bad things and also thereby (...) conceptually eliminates innocence; and 3) free markets—especially international free trade—have been cogently explained to be the real solution to the global “major evils” of “poverty” and “pollution”, while “overpopulation” does not exist in free-market frameworks; hence charity is a relatively minor alleviant to the problem of insufficiently free markets. There are also various subsidiary arguments throughout. (shrink)

One of the most significant challenges facing global egalitarian theorists is the motivational gap: there is a noted gap between the duties imposed by a global commitment to the equal moral worth of all people and the willingness of the wealthy to carry out these duties. For Pablo Gilabert, the apparent absence of motivation to act justly on a global scale presses us to consider the importance of feasibility in developing a persuasive account of global justice, part of which requires (...) being attentive to what motivates us to act in support of global egalitarianism. In this article, I am critical of Gilabert’s account of the role that relationships between individuals play in conceiving our global justice duties. I begin with an account of some confusion in Gilabert’s account of the actual costs likely to be imposed on citizens of wealthy states as a result of the duties he demands of us and why it is important to resolve that confusion. I will then consider, and critique, Gilabert’s account of special responsibilities. I shall argue that, fundamentally, there is an ineliminable tension between the special responsibilities individuals legitimately possess and the duties they have to eradicate global poverty. (shrink)

Many of us read Peter Singer ’ s work on our obligations to those in desperate need with our students. Famously, Singer argues that we have a moral obligation to give a significant portion of our assets to famine relief. If my own experience is not atypical, it is quite common for students, upon grasping the implications of Singer ’ s argument, to ask whether Singer gives to famine relief. In response it might be tempting to remind students of the (...) ad hominem fallacy of attacking the person advancing an argument rather than the argument itself. In this paper I argue that the “ ad hominem reply ” to students ’ request for information about Singer is misguided. First I show that biographical facts about the person advancing an argument can constitute indirect evidence for the soundness / unsoundness of the argument. Second, I argue that such facts are relevant because they may reveal that one can discard the argument without thereby incurring moral responsibility for failing to act on its conclusion even if the argument is sound. (shrink)

There are individuals, including children, dying needlessly in poverty-stricken third world countries. Many of these deaths could be prevented if pharmaceutical companies provided the drugs needed to save their lives. Some believe that because pharmaceutical companies have the power to save lives, and because they can do so with little effort, they have a special obligation. I argue that there is no distinction, with respect to obligations and responsibilities, between pharmaceutical companies and other types of companies. As a result, to (...) hold pharmaceutical companies especially responsible for saving lives in third world countries is unjustified. (shrink)

Moral Internalism proposes a necessary link between judging that an action is right/wrong and being motivated to perform/avoid that action. Internalism is central to many arguments within ethics, including the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs, and the claim that certain types of moral skepticism are incoherent. However, most of the basis for accepting Internalism rests on intuitions that have recently been called into question by empirical work. This paper further investigates the intuitions behind Internalism. Three experiments show not (...) only that these intuitions are not widespread, but that they are significantly influenced by normative evaluations of the situation in question. These results are taken to undermine Internalist intuitions, and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that normative evaluations influence supposedly non-normative judgments. (shrink)