It is commonly held that unexcused impermissible acts are necessarily blameworthy, not praiseworthy. I argue that unexcused impermissible acts can not only be pro tanto praiseworthy, but overall praiseworthy—and even more so than permissible alternatives. For example, there are cases in which it is impermissible to at great cost to yourself rescue fewer rather than more strangers, yet overall praiseworthy, and more so than permissibly rescuing no one. I develop a general framework illuminating how praiseworthiness can so radically come apart (...) from deontic status. (shrink)

Most non-consequentialists “let the numbers count” when one can save either a lesser or greater number from equal or similar harm. But they are wary of doing so when one can save either a small number from grave harm or instead a very large number from minor harm. Limited aggregation is an approach that reconciles these two commitments. It is motivated by a powerful idea: our decision whom to save should respect each person who has a claim to our help, (...) including those whom we fail to save. However, it has recently been argued that it is open to decisive objections. I develop a new limitedly aggregative view:Hybrid Balance Relevant Claims. This view is well grounded in the reasons we have to be skeptical of aggregation and resolves all recent challenges by paying careful attention to the rationale for limited aggregation. (shrink)

This paper deals with the core version of the Trolley Problem. In one case many people favor an act which will bring about the death of one person but save five other persons. In another case most people would refuse to “sacrifice” one person in order to save five other lives. Since the two cases seem similar in all relevant respects, we have to explain and justify the diverging verdicts. Since I don’t find current proposals of a solution convincing, I (...) propose an alternative one according to which —but not —violates two forms of equality. I also test the underlying egalitarian principle against other cases. I argue that it offers a good explanation and also a normative justification of our intuitive verdicts about the cases. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is often criticized because of its reliance on the interpersonal aggregation of harms and benefits. However, since the rejection of all forms of interpersonal aggregation strikes most people as implausible, some critics of utilitarianism have proposed theories of Limited Aggregation. These occupy the middle ground between fully aggregative and non-aggregative views. Recently, Limited Aggregation has been criticized for having counterintuitive implications that seem even worse than the counterintuitive implications of fully aggregative and non-aggregative views it tried to escape. I (...) here propose a new view of Limited Aggregation that does better than existing accounts in this regard. It is more modest than existing accounts of Limited Aggregation, but it retains the view's core idea. This, I claim, is the thought that sometimes very strong individual claims stand in the way of realizing the best outcome. (shrink)

Some ethicists assert that there is a consensus that maximising medical outcomes takes precedence as a principle of resource allocation in emergency triage of absolutely scarce resources. But the nature of the current severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 pandemic and the history of debate about balancing equity and efficiency in resource allocation do not support this assertion. I distinguish a number of concerns with justice and balancing considerations that should play a role in critical care triage policy, focusing on (...) discrimination and on fundamental egalitarian and social justice concerns. (shrink)

Is there any number of people you should save from paralysis rather than saving one person from death? Is there any number of people you should save from a migraine rather than saving one person from death? Many people answer “yes” and “no,” respectively. The aim of partially aggregative moral views is to capture and justify combinations of intuitions like these. In this article, I develop a risk-based reductio argument that shows that there can be no adequate partially aggregative view. (...) I then argue that the only plausible response to this reductio is to accept a fully aggregative view. (shrink)

Moral extremists argue for a demanding duty of poverty relief by leveraging powerful intuitions about our duties to rescue those close at hand. I clear the way for a less demanding duty by arguing that this argumentative strategy commits the extremist to a conception of our duty in the face of global poverty that is deeply at odds with our convictions about how we may discharge that duty. These convictions reveal that global poverty and easy rescue cases give rise to (...) duties of different kinds: whereas duties of rescue are ultimately explicable by appeal to moral claims to assistance, duties of poverty relief are not. The extremist’s most compelling argumentative strategy is therefore not viable—he may not straightforwardly appeal to facts about the demandingness of duties of rescue in arguing for demanding duties of poverty relief. (shrink)

If we can save the lives of only one of multiple groups of people, we might be inclined simply to save whichever group is largest. We may worry, though, that automatically saving the largest group fails to take each saveable individual sufficiently into account, offering some of these individuals no chance at all of being rescued. Still wanting to give larger groups higher chances of survival, we may then say that we ought to employ a proportionally weighted lottery to determine (...) which group to save. In this paper, I argue that this would be a mistake. Given the most plausible way of specifying it, the weighted-lottery view itself fails to treat each saveable individual with equal moral respect. (shrink)

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic raises a host of challenging ethical questions at every level of society. However, some of the most acute questions relate to decision making in intensive care. The problem is that a small but significant proportion of patients develop severe viral pneumonitis and respiratory failure. It now seems likely that the number of critically ill patients will overwhelm the capacity of intensive care units within many health systems, including the National Health Service in the UK. The experience (...) of Northern Italy—a couple of weeks ahead of the UK, suggests that it will simply not be possible to provide mechanical ventilation to every patient who might need it. When the crunch comes, the unpalatable question facing clinicians is which patient to save. There are some obvious strategies to avoid or reduce the problem—through measures to increase intensive care capacity, and via society-level interventions to reduce the spread of the virus. These are vitally important, but unfortunately they are unlikely to prevent the problem of demand outstripping supply from occurring. What, then, should clinicians do? How should they allocate the scarce resource of intensive care—particularly over the coming weeks as the crisis escalates? There are different values at stake in triage decisions, but at a basic level the key values are those of benefit and …. (shrink)

Chapter 1 of this book argued that moral philosophy should be based on seven principles of theory selection adapted from the sciences. Chapter 2 argued that these principles support basing normative moral philosophy on a particular problem of diachronic instrumental rationality: the ‘problem of possible future selves.’ Chapter 3 argued that a new moral principle, the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative, is the rational solution to this problem. Chapter 4 argued that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative has three equivalent formulations akin to but superior to (...) Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Chapter 5 argued that my principle’s three formulations make it rational to adopt a Moral Original Position to derive moral principles. The present chapter derives Four Principles of Fairness from the Moral Original Position--principles of coercion minimization, mutual assistance, fair negotiation, and virtue—and unifies them into a single principle of rightness: Rightness as Fairness. Finally, this chapter argues that Rightness as Fairness entails a novel approach to applied ethics called ‘principled fair negotiation’, illustrating how the theory provides a plausible new framework for addressing applied cases including lying, suicide, trolleys, torture, distribution of scarce resources, poverty, and the ethical treatment of animals. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of (...) unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be “worse achieved”. In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety. (shrink)

One rationale policy-makers sometimes give for declining to fund a service or intervention is on the grounds that it would be ‘unaffordable’, which is to say, that the total cost of providing the service or intervention for all eligible recipients would exceed the budget limit. But does the mere fact that a service or intervention is unaffordable present a reason not to fund it? Thus far, the philosophical literature has remained largely silent on this issue. However, in this article, we (...) consider this kind of thinking in depth. Albeit with certain important caveats, we argue that the use of affordability criteria in matters of public financing commits what Parfit might have called a ‘mistake in moral mathematics’. First, it fails to abide by what we term a principle of ‘non-perfectionism’ in moral action: the mere fact that it is practically impossible for you to do all the good that you have reason to do does not present a reason not to do whatever good you can do. And second, when used as a means of arbitrating between which services to fund, affordability criteria can lead to a kind of ‘numerical discrimination’. Various attendant issues around fairness and lotteries are also discussed. (shrink)

Some sacrifices—like giving a kidney or heroically dashing into a burning building—are supererogatory: they are good deeds beyond the call of duty. But if such deeds are really so good, philosophers ask, why shouldn’t morality just require them? The standard answer is that morality recognizes a special role for the pursuit of self-interest, so that everyone may treat themselves as if they were uniquely important. This idea, however, cannot be reconciled with the compelling picture of morality as impartial—the view that (...) we are each anyone’s equal. I propose an alternative Self-Other Symmetric account of our moral freedom: the limits on what morality may demand of us are set by the duties we owe to ourselves. I begin with a defense of the Self-Other Symmetry: the idea that we owe the same duties to ourselves—and have the same rights against ourselves—as any relevantly similar other. Because we are consenting parties to our own actions, I argue, our rights against ourselves do not function like the rights of unwilling others. Instead, they play a permissive function, allowing us to block the demand to give up what is ours. I conclude by uniting, aggravating, and trying to solve some paradoxes of supererogatory permissions, guided by the idea that morality cannot be reduced to a ranking of options from best-to-worst. Rights against oneself are an irreducible second dimension, one that we need if we are to unify rights and supererogation into an impartial moral vision. (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)

Most arguments in support of act utilitarianism are elaborations of one of two basic strategies. One is the consequentialist strategy. This strategy relies on the consequentialist premise that an act is right if and only if it produces the best possible consequences and the welfarist premise that the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its overall amount of well-being. The other strategy is based on the idea of treating individuals respectfully and resolving conflicts among individuals in (...) whatever way best conforms to that idea. Although both of these strategies can be used to argue for the principle of act utilitarianism, they are significantly different from each other, and these differences cause them to have different strengths and weaknesses. It emerges that which argumentative strategy is chosen by a proponent of act utilitarianism has a large impact on which virtues her view has and which objections it is vulnerable to. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In this article I respond to the eight critical essays in this issue that evaluate the claims in my book with Gerhard Øverland, Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.

According to psychological research, people are more eager to help identified individuals than unidentified ones. This phenomenon significantly influences many important decisions, both individual and public, regarding, for example, vaccinations or the distribution of healthcare resources. This paper aims at presenting definitions of various levels of identifiability as well as a critical analysis of the main philosophical arguments regarding the normative significance of the identifiability effect, which refer to: (1) ex ante contractualism; (2) fair distribution of chances and risks; (3) (...) anti-aggregationist principles that recommend the distribution of bad effects and the concentration of good ones. I will show that these arguments, although connected with interesting philosophical problems regarding e.g. counterfactuals, aggregation, or probability, are unconvincing. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen presented a powerful argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I henceforth abbreviate as ‘PSR’. For decades, the consensus was that this argument successfully refuted PSR. However, now a growing consensus holds that van Inwagen’s argument is fatally flawed, at least when ‘sufficient reason’ is understood in terms of ground, for on this understanding, an ineliminable premiss of van Inwagen’s argument is demonstrably false and cannot be repaired. I will argue that this growing consensus is mistaken (...) and that a powerful argument relevantly similar to van Inwagen’s should still concern us, even when we understand ‘sufficient reason’ in terms of ground. (shrink)

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 (...) overlooked: (1) the fact that absolutist theories -- and moral theories, more generally -- underdetermine their formal decision-theoretic representations; (2) that decision theories themselves can be generalised to better accommodate distinctively absolutist commitments. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that we can navigate a risky world without compromising our moral commitments. (shrink)

While seeking novel food sources to feed the increasing population of the globe, several alternatives have been discussed, including algae, fungi or in vitro meat. The increasingly propagated usage of farmed insects for human nutrition raises issues regarding food safety, consumer information and animal protection. In line with law, insects like any other animals must not be reared or manipulated in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, distress or harm on them. Currently, there is a great need for research in (...) the area of insect welfare, especially regarding species-specific needs, health, farming systems and humane methods of killing. Recent results from neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and behavioral sciences prompt caution when denying consciousness and therefore the likelihood of presence of pain and suffering or something closely related to it to insects. From an animal protection point of view, these issues should be satisfyingly solved before propagating and establishing intensive husbandry systems for insects as a new type of mini-livestock factory farming. (shrink)

According to a common view, in a case involving an indivisible good and several potential beneficiaries, who are equal in every relevant respect, there is a non-instrumental reason to allocate the benefit in a way that gives each an equal chance to receive the benefit. In this paper, I argue that this view is incompatible with several plausible and widely held assumptions. I emphasize especially the assumption that the distributive role of chances is secondary to that of benefits in an (...) important sense: the value of allocating chances is related to the ways in which it is possible to allocate the relevant benefits. Specifically, chances should be allocated only when it is impossible or too costly to allocate benefits in accordance with the relative importance of the reasons in favor of allocating the relevant benefit to each potential beneficiary. Given this assumption, I argue that the fact that there is no relation between the distributive concern for chances and other distributive concerns suggests that we should reject the view that chances have a distributive role that is not merely instrumental. (shrink)

It is more or less uncontroversial that when we harm someone through wrongful conduct we incur an obligation to compensate her. But sometimes compensation is impossible: when the victim is killed, for example. Other times, only partial compensation is possible. In this article, I take some initial steps towards exploring this largely ignored issue. I argue that the perpetrator of a wrongful harm incurs a duty to promote the impartial good in proportion to the amount of harm that cannot be (...) made up for by compensating her victim. (shrink)

Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no (...) more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now? (shrink)

A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many (...) things are like this when you look closely enough. The problem arises for mundane things like rocks, houses and coins. It also arises for entities that present special philosophical challenges, like persons and experiencers. In this essay, I present a new argument that the problem of the many experiencers is an especially hard problem of the many, and property dualism—the view that properties that there is something it is like to instantiate are irreducible—may be the best way to solve it. (shrink)

Four decades ago, Bernard Williams accused Kantian moral theory of providing agents with ‘one thought too many’. The general consensus among contemporary Kantians is that this objection has been decisively answered. In this paper, I reconstruct the problem, showing that Williams was not principally concerned with how agents are to think in emergency situations, but rather with how moral theories are to be integrated into recognizably human lives. I show that various Kantian responses to Williams provide inadequate materials for solving (...) this ‘integration problem’, and that they are correspondingly ill-positioned to account for the authority of morality, as Williams suspected all along. (shrink)

A dissociated area of medical research warrants bioethical consideration: a proposed transplantation of a donor’s entire body, except head, to a patient with a fatal degenerative disease. The seeming improbability of such an operation can only underscore the need for thorough bioethical assessment: Not assessing a case of such potential ethical import, by showing neglect instead of facing the issue, can only compound the ethical predicament, perhaps eroding public trust in ethical medicine. This article discusses the historical background of full-body (...) transplantation, documents the seriousness of its current pursuit, and builds an argument for why prima facie this type of transplant is bioethically distinct. Certainly, this examination can only be preliminary, indicating what should be a wide and vigorous discussion among practitioners and ethicists. It concludes with practical suggestions for how the medical and bioethics community may proceed with ethical assessment. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge has argued, famously, that ‘we’ are violating the rights of the global poor insofar as we uphold an unjust international order which provides a legal and economic framework within which individuals and groups can and do deprive such individuals of their lives, liberty and property. I argue here that Pogge’s claim that we are violating a negative duty can only be made good on the basis of a substantive theory of collective action; and that it can only provide (...) substantive ethical guidance when combined with an account of how collective action gives rise to forward-looking responsibility and/or accountability on an individual level. I consider accounts of these two topics given in work by Peter French and Christopher Kutz; and I argue that neither of them give Pogge what he needs. Although there is a sense in which 'we' can be said to be violating the rights of the worst off, the sense in which this is true does not generate any plausible action-guiding claims for individuals. (shrink)

Principles of need are constantly referred to in health care priority setting. The common denominator for any principle of need is that it will ascribe some kind of special normative weight to people being worse off. However, this common ground does not answer the question how a plausible principle of need should relate to the aggregation of benefits across individuals. Principles of need are sometimes stated as being incompatible with aggregation and sometimes characterized as accepting aggregation in much the same (...) way as utilitarians do. In this paper we argue that if one wants to take principles of need seriously both of these positions have unreasonable implications. We then characterize and defend a principle of need consisting of sufficientarian elements as well as prioritarian which avoids these unreasonable implications. (shrink)

Haecceitism is the thesis that, necessarily, in addition to its qualities, each thing has a haecceity or individual essence. The purpose of this paper is to expose a flaw in haecceitism: it entails that familiar cases of fission and fusion either admit of no explanation or else only admit of explanations too bizarre to warrant serious consideration. Because the explanatory problem we raise for haecceitism closely resembles the Euthyphro problem for divine command theory, we refer to our objection as the (...) haecceitic Euthyphro problem, or the Haecceitic Euthyphro for short. We conclude that the objection is decisive against haecceitism. (shrink)

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 (...) does it require of you when deciding under risk? What ought you to do when there is a chance that, say, you will not succeed in saving the life? In recent years, various critics have argued that moral absolutism cannot satisfactorily deal with risk and should, therefore, be abandoned. In this paper, we show that moral absolutism can answer its critics by drawing on—of all things—orthodox expected utility theory. (shrink)

Beginning with a thought experiment about a mysterious Delphic oracle, this article motivates, explains, and attempts to defend a view it calls Ethical Pragmatism. Ethical Pragmatism is the view that we can and should carry on our practice of moral deliberation without reference to moral truths, or more broadly, without reference to metaethics. The defense the article mounts tries to show that neither suspicions about the tenability of fact-value distinctions, nor doubts about the viability of global pragmatism, nor worries about (...) the “force” of ethical injunctions without reference to moral truths constitute good reason to reject Ethical Pragmatism. (shrink)

There is a well-known moral quandary concerning how to account for the rightness or wrongness of acts that clearly contribute to some morally significant outcome – but which each seem too small, individually, to make any meaningful difference. One consequentialist-friendly response to this problem is to deny that there could ever be a case of this type. This paper pursues this general strategy, but in an unusual way. Existing arguments for the consequentialist-friendly position are sorites-style arguments. Such arguments imagine varying (...) a subject’s predicament bit by bit until it is clear that a relevant difference has been achieved. The arguments offered in this paper are structurally different, and do not rely on any sorites series. For this reason, they are not vulnerable to objections that have been leveled against the sorites-style arguments. (shrink)

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

Many prominent ethicists, including Shelly Kagan, John Rawls, and Thomas Scanlon, accept a kind of epistemic modesty thesis concerning our capacity to carry out the project of ethical theorizing. But it is a thesis that has received surprisingly little explicit and focused attention, despite its widespread acceptance. After explaining why the thesis is true, I argue that it has several implications in metaethics, including, especially, implications that should lead us to rethink our understanding of Reductive Realism. In particular, the thesis (...) of epistemic modesty in ethics implies a kind of epistemic modesty about the metaphysical nature of ethics, if Reductive Realism about the metaphysical nature of ethics is true, and it implies that normative concepts are indispensable to practical deliberation in a way that answers an influential objection to Reductive Realism from Jonathan Dancy, David Enoch, William FitzPatrick, and Derek Parfit. (shrink)

We address the moral importance of fish, invertebrates such as crustaceans, snails and insects, and other animals about which there is qualified scientific uncertainty about their sentience. We argue that, on a sentientist basis, one can at least say that how such animals fare make ethically significant claims on our character. It is a requirement of a morally decent (or virtuous) person that she at least pays attention to and is cautious regarding the possibly morally relevant aspects of such animals. (...) This involves having a moral stance, in the sense of patterns of perception, such that one notices such animals as being morally relevant in various situations. For the person who does not already consider these animals in this way, this could be a big change in moral psychology, and can be assumed to have behavioural consequences, albeit indeterminate. Character has been largely neglected in the literature, which focuses on act-centred approaches (i.e. that the evidence on sentience supports, or does not support, taking some specific action). We see our character-centred approach as complementary to, not superior to, act-centred approaches. Our approach has the advantage of allowing us to make ethically interesting and practically relevant claims about a wider range of cases, but it has the drawback of providing less specific action guidance. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017This rich and engaging book addresses a nest of questions that have been mostly neglected in recent Anglophone philosophy. These questions concern ordinary uses of the concept of identity in speaking for example of identity crises, of one’s identity as something that can be lost or maintained, of identification with certain groups, traits, values, or beliefs, and so on. That there are these uses, and that they are an important feature of contemporary culture, is beyond question: witness (...) the difficulty in helping undergraduates focus in the classroom on what ‘we’ mean by personal identity, where this meaning is supposed to be distinct from the substantive use of ‘identity’ to mean something that a person has, and that can change or be replaced over the course of their continued life.... (shrink)

To perceive an affordance is to perceive an object or situation as presenting an opportunity for action. The concept of affordances has been taken up across wide range of disciplines, including AI. I explore an interesting extension of the concept of affordances in robotics. Among the affordances that artificial systems have been engineered to detect are affordances to deliberate. In psychology, affordances are typically limited to bodily action, so the it is noteworthy that AI researchers have found it helpful to (...) extend the concept to encompass mental actions. I propose that psychologists can learn from this extension, and argue that human subjects can perceive mental affordances, such as affordances to attend, affordances to imagine and affordances to count. (shrink)

Aggregation in moral philosophy calls for the summing or averaging of values or utilities as a guide to individual behavior. But morality, it is argued, needs to be individualistic, in view of the evident separateness of persons, especially given the great disparities among individuals who nevertheless interact with each other in social life. The most plausible general moral program is the classical liberal (or “libertarian”) one calling for mutual noninterference rather than treating others as equal to oneself in point of (...) demands on our action. Why, then, would we ever aggregate? The reason is that we are affected by behavior that has general effects, especially unintended side effects, on all sorts of people among whom we ourselves are often to be found. When we are randomly situated among such groups—as we sometimes are and often are not—minimizing aggregate harm is the plausible strategy, and sometimes promoting aggregate benefit as well. (shrink)

The ‘standard interpretation’ of John Taurek’s argument in ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ imputes two theses to him: first, ‘numbers scepticism’, or scepticism about the moral force of an appeal to the mere number of individuals saved in conflict cases; and second, the ‘equal greatest chances’ principle of rescue, which requires that every individual has an equal chance of being rescued. The standard interpretation is criticized here on a number of grounds. First, whilst Taurek clearly believes that equal chances are all-important, (...) he actually argues for a position weaker than the equal greatest chances principle. Second, the argument Taurek gives for the importance of equal chances ought to commit him to being more hospitable to the significance of numbers than he seems to be. Third, and as a result, Taurek should not have dismissed the significance of numbers but embraced a form of pluralism instead. Fourth, this result should be welcomed, because pluralism is more plausible than either the equal greatest chances principle or the saving the greater number principle. (shrink)

Argues for the role of personal acquaintance in both love and concern for individuals, as such. The challenge is to say what personal acquaintance is and why it matters in the way it does. These questions are addressed through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Topics include: the ethics of aggregation, the basis of moral standing, and the value of human life.

This article puts forward solutions to some of the ethical and legal dilemmas posed in the current discussion on how to program crash algorithms in autonomous or self-driving cars. The first part of the paper defines the scope of the problem in the criminal legal field, and the next section gives a critical analysis of the proposal to always prioritise the interest of the occupant of the vehicle in situations with conflict of interests. The principle of minimizing social damage as (...) a model for configuring self-driving cars is examined in the third section. Despite its apparent plausibility, within the framework of a liberal legal system that recognises humans as free agents who have rights and responsibilities, maximizing the function of social utility does not justify harmful interference into a person’s legal sphere. Therefore, in the fourth part, the author argues the need to program the crash algorithms of autonomous cars based on a deontological understanding of the system of justifications in criminal law. The solution to the dilemma lies in a prior analysis of the legal positions of all agents involved in the conflict, from a perspective of the principles of autonomy and solidarity as the core of the system of justifications. (shrink)

BackgroundResuscitation and treatment of critically ill newborn infants is associated with relatively high mortality, morbidity and cost. Guidelines relating to resuscitation have traditionally focused on the best interests of infants. There are, however, limited resources available in the neonatal intensive care unit, meaning that difficult decisions sometimes need to be made. This study explores the intuitions of lay people regarding resource allocation decisions in the NICU.MethodsThe study design was a cross-sectional quantitative survey, consisting of 20 hypothetical rationing scenarios. There were (...) 119 respondents who entered the questionnaire, and 109 who completed it. The respondents were adult US and Indian participants of the online crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk. Respondents were asked to decide which of two infants to treat in a situation of scarce resources. Demographic characteristics, personality traits and political views were recorded. Respondents were also asked to respond to a widely cited thought experiment involving rationing.ResultsThe majority of respondents, in all except one scenario, chose the utilitarian option of directing treatment to the infant with the higher chance of survival, higher life expectancy, less severe disability, and less expensive treatment. As discrepancy between outcomes decreased, however, there was a statistically significant increase in egalitarian responses and decrease in utilitarian responses in scenarios involving chance of survival, life expectancy, and cost of treatment. In the classic ‘lifeboat’ scenario, all but two respondents were utilitarian.ConclusionsThis survey suggests that in situations of scarcity and equal clinical need, non-health professionals support rationing of life-saving treatment based on probability of survival, duration of survival, cost of treatment or quality of life. However, where the difference in prognosis or cost is very small, non-health professionals preferred to give infants an equal chance of receiving treatment. (shrink)

When allocating scarce healthcare resources, the expected benefits of alternative allocations matter. But, there are different kinds of benefits. Some are direct benefits to the recipient of the resource such as the health improvements of receiving treatment. Others are indirect benefits to third parties such as the economic gains from having a healthier workforce. This article considers whether only the direct benefits of alternative healthcare resource allocations are relevant to allocation decisions, or whether indirect benefits are relevant too. First, we (...) distinguish different conceptions of direct and indirect benefits and argue that only a recipient conception could be morally relevant. We analyze four arguments for thinking that indirect benefits should not count and argue that none is successful in showing that the indirectness of a benefit is a good reason not to count it. We conclude that direct and indirect benefits should be evaluated in the same way. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish moral rules, reasons, or values that are agent-relative from those that are agent-neutral. One can also distinguish moral rules, reasons, or values that are moment-relative from those that are moment-neutral. In this article, I introduce a third distinction that stands alongside these two distinctions—the distinction between moral rules, reasons, or values that are patient-relative and those that are patient-neutral. I then show how patient-relativity plays an important role in several moral theories, gives us a better (...) understanding of agent-relativity and moment-relativity, and provides a novel objection to Derek Parfit’s “appeal to full relativity” argument. (shrink)