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  1. Getting Personal: The Intuition of Neutrality Reinterpreted.Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2020 - In Paul Bowman & Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (eds.), Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations, Vol. 2. Institute for Futures Studies.
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  • Can't Kant count? Innumerate Views on Saving the Many over Saving the Few.Sergio Tenenbaum - 2023 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 13:215-234.
    It seems rather intuitive that if I can save either one stranger or five strangers, I must save the five. However, Kantian (and other non-consequentialist) views have a difficult time explaining why this is the case, as they seem committed to what Parfit calls “innumeracy”: roughly, the view that the values of lives (or the reasons to save them) don’t get greater (or stronger) in proportion to the number of lives saved. This chapter first shows that in various cases, it (...)
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  • Each Counts for One.Daniel Muñoz - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    After 50 years of debate, the ethics of aggregation has reached a curious stalemate, with both sides arguing that only their theory treats people as equals. I argue that, on the issue of equality, both sides are wrong. From the premise that “each counts for one,” we cannot derive the conclusion that “more count for more”—or its negation. The familiar arguments from equality to aggregation presuppose more than equality: the Kamm/Scanlon “Balancing Argument” rests on what social choice theorists call “(Positive) (...)
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  • How Do People Balance Death against Lesser Burdens?Veronika Luptakova & Alex Voorhoeve - 2023 - In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 123-158.
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  • The ethics of pandemics: an introduction.Iwao Hirose - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    The recent Covid-19 pandemic has brought a broad range of ethical problems to the forefront, raising fundamental questions about the role of government in response to such outbreaks, the scarcity and allocation of health care resources, the unequal distribution of health risks and economic impacts, and the extent to which individual freedom can be restricted. In this clear introduction to the topic Iwao Hirose explores these ethical questions and analyzes the central issues in the ethics of pandemic response and preparedness (...)
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  • Other People.Kieran Setiya - 2023 - In Sarah Buss & Nandi Theunissen (eds.), Rethinking the Value of Humanity. New York, US: OUP Usa.
    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.
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  • Rightness as Fairness.Marcus Arvan - 2016 - In Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 153-201.
    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 (...)
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  • A Response to John Taurek's Should the Numbers Count.Nia McCabe - manuscript
    This short essay outlines the problem Taurek responds to and the argument he uses in Should the Numbers Count. His argument posits that in a situation where you can either prevent harm to one stranger or five strangers but you cannot prevent harm to all six, the best thing to do is is give each person an equal chance of survival by flipping a coin. Although this paper is largely an explication, I do provide a short critique of Taurek's argument. (...)
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  • Einführung in die Ethik.Micha H. Werner - 2020 - Heidelberg, Germany: J.B. Metzler / Springer Nature.
    Open access-introduction into moral philosophy in German language that contains chapters on the concept of morality, on the development and the main positions of normative ethics, on meta-ethics, and on the various fields of applied ethics. One of its distinctive features is that it explicitly reflects on the role of morality and ethics in modern society and that it analyses the import of alternative conceptual and normative positions for determining this role. The book can be freely downloaded from the publisher's (...)
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  • Doing Less Than Best.Emma J. Curran - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
    This thesis is about the moral reasons we have to do less than best. It consists of six chapters. Part I of the thesis proposes, extends, and defends reasons to do less than best. In Chapter One (“The Conditional Obligation”) I outline and reject two recent arguments from Joe Horton and Theron Pummer for the claim that we have a conditional obligation to bring about the most good. In Chapter Two (“Agglomeration and Agent-Relative Costs”) I argue that agent-relative costs can (...)
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  • Longtermism, Aggregation, and Catastrophic Risk.Emma J. Curran - manuscript
    Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about a significant amount of good. Indeed, in expectation, such long-term interventions bring about far more good than their short-term counterparts. As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to prefer long-term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism about aggregation. I do so by demonstrating that, from (...)
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  • The Scope and Limits of Debunking Arguments in Ethics.Shang Long Yeo - 2020 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    Debunking arguments use empirical evidence about our moral beliefs - in particular, about their causal origins, or about how they depend on various causes - in order to reach an epistemic conclusion about the trustworthiness of such beliefs. In this thesis, I investigate the scope and limits of debunking arguments, and their implications for what we should believe about morality. I argue that debunking arguments can in principle work - they are based on plausible epistemic premises, and at least some (...)
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  • Agent-Relativity and the Foundations of Moral Theory.Matthew Hammerton - 2017 - Dissertation, Australian National University
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  • Incomparable numbers.Kenneth Walden - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 10.
    This chapter presents arguments for two slightly different versions of the thesis that the value of persons is incomparable. Both arguments allege an incompatibility between the demands of a certain kind of practical reasoning and the presuppositions of value comparisons. The significance of these claims is assessed in the context of the “Numbers problem”—the question of whether one morally ought to benefit one group of potential aid recipients rather than another simply because they are greater in number. It is argued (...)
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  • Impartiality.Troy Jollimore - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Contractualism.Elizabeth Ashford - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Effective Altruism and Extreme Poverty.Fırat Akova - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    Effective altruism is a movement which aims to maximise good. Effective altruists are concerned with extreme poverty and many of them think that individuals have an obligation to donate to effective charities to alleviate extreme poverty. Their reasoning, which I will scrutinise, is as follows: -/- Premise 1. Extreme poverty is very bad. -/- Premise 2. If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do (...)
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  • Non-Consequentialism Demystified.John Ku, Howard Nye & David Plunkett - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15 (4):1-28.
    Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments (...)
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  • What Would Taurek Do?Tyler Doggett - manuscript
    A very short, exegetical paper about Taurek's "Should the Numbers Count?," arguing against the view that Taurek requires giving chances.
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  • Human beings and the other animals.Christine M. Korsgaard - unknown
    Human ethical practices and attitudes with respect to the other animals exhibit a curious instability. On the one hand, most people believe that it is wrong to inflict torment or death on a non-human animal for a trivial reason. Skinning a cat or setting it on fire by way of a juvenile prank is one of the standard examples of obvious wrongdoing in the philosophical literature. Like torturing infants, it is the kind of example that philosophers use when we are (...)
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  • One-by-one: moral theory for separate persons.Bastian Steuwer - 2020 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    You and I lead different lives. While we share a society and a world, our existence is separate from one another. You and I matter individually, by ourselves. My dissertation is about this simple thought. I argue that this simple insight, the separateness of persons, tells us something fundamental about morality. My dissertation seeks to answer how the separateness of persons matters. I develop a precise view of the demands of the separateness of persons. The separateness of persons imposes both (...)
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  • Moral sequencing and intervening to prevent harm.Benjamin David Costello - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    This thesis will utilise the literature on the distinction between doing harm and allowing harm to develop a novel system of moral sequencing that can be applied to general moral problems to decide if, when, and how an agent should intervene to prevent harm from occurring to another agent. Off the back of this discussion, this thesis will offer a way of determining the responsibility of certain agents for their actions within a moral sequence. These motivations will be at the (...)
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  • Exporting the Culture of Life.Laura Purdy - 2008 - In Michael Boylan (ed.), International Public Health Policy & Ethics. Dordrecht. pp. 91--106.
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  • On the margins: personhood and moral status in marginal cases of human rights.Helen Ryland - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...)
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  • The aggregation problem for Scanlonian Contractualism: an exploration of the relevance view, mixed solutions, and why Scanlonian Contractualists could be, and perhaps should be, Restricted Prioritarians.Aart Van Gils - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Reading
    In this thesis, I discuss the aggregation problem for T. M. Scanlon’s “contractualism”. I argue that Scanlonian contractualists have the following two options when it comes to the aggregation problem. First, they can choose to limit aggregation directly via a specific version of the Relevance View, “Sequential Claims-Matching”. Second, Scanlonian contractualists can adopt a so-called “mixed solution” of which I propose a specific version. My mixed solution does not limit aggregation. Rather, it either avoids some of the counterintuitive results in (...)
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  • Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism.Michael Plant - 2019 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments or alleviating poverty (...)
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  • On the possibility of limited weighing of lives.Daniel Ramöller - 2020 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    This thesis discusses the possibility of limited moral trade-offs between different people’s welfare. In chapter 2, I introduce the two central limited trade-off conditions. First, according to minimal infinite superiority, significantly benefiting one person matters more than slightly benefiting each of any number of better-off people. Second, according to minimal finite superiority, significantly benefiting many people matters more than slightly benefiting one person. I consider both axiological and deontic interpretations of these conditions. However, I explain why none of the simple (...)
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  • Ethics, Fitting Attitudes, and Practical Reason: A Theory of Normative Facts.Howard Nye - 2009 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    I present and defend (1) an account of ethical judgments as judgments about our reasons to feel specific motivationally laden attitudes, (2) an account of what an agent should do in terms of what would achieve ends that she has reason to be motivated to pursue, and (3) an account of an agent’s reasons for motivation (and thus action) in terms of the prescriptions of the most fundamental principles that guide her deliberations. Using these accounts, I explain the connection between (...)
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  • Edible insects – defining knowledge gaps in biological and ethical considerations of entomophagy.Isabella Pali-Schöll, Regina Binder, Yves Moens, Friedrich Polesny & Susana Monsó - 2019 - Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 17 (59):2760-2771.
    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 (...)
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  • What Is Goodness Good For?Christian Piller - 2015 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies Normative Ethics: Volume 4. pp. 179-209.
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  • AI and affordances for mental action.McClelland Tom - unknown
    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 (...)
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  • Objective Double Effect and the Avoidance of Narcissism.Howard Nye - 2013 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 260-286.
    The Doctrine of Double Effect [DDE] states roughly that it is harder to justify causing or allowing harm as a means to an end than it is to justify conduct that results in harm as a side effect. This chapter argues that a theory of deontological constraints on harming needs something like the DDE in order to avoid the charge that it reflects a narcissistic obsession with the cleanliness of our own hands. Unfortunately, the DDE is often interpreted as maintaining (...)
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  • Morality Under Risk.Chad Lee-Stronach - 2019 - Dissertation,
    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 (...)
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  • 'Along an imperfectly-lighted path': practical rationality and normative uncertainty.Andrew Sepielli - unknown
    Nobody's going to object to the advice "Do the right thing", but that doesn't mean everyone's always going to follow it. Sometimes this is because of our volitional limitations; we cannot always bring ourselves to make the sacrifices that right action requires. But sometimes this is because of our cognitive limitations; we cannot always be sure of what is right. Sometimes we can't be sure of what's right because we don't know the non-normative facts. But sometimes, even if we were (...)
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  • Personal or Public Health?Muireann Quigley & John Harris - 2008 - In Michael Boylan (ed.), International Public Health Policy & Ethics. Dordrecht. pp. 15--29.
    Intuitively we feel that we ought (to attempt) to save the lives, or ameliorate the suffering, of identifiable individuals where we can. But this comes at a price. It means that there may not be any resources to save the lives of others in similar situations in the future. Or worse, there may not be enough resources left to prevent others from ending up in similar situations in the future. This chapter asks whether this is justifiable or whether we would (...)
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  • Abortion, Libertarianism, and Evictionism: A Last Word.Jakub Wiśniewski - 2013 - Libertarian Papers 5:153-162.
    This paper is my last word, in the present journal, in the debate I have been having with Walter Block on the subject of evictionism as an alleged libertarian “third way,” capable of transcending the familiar “pro-life” and “pro-choice” dichotomy. In this debate, I myself defended what might be regarded as a qualified “pro-life” position, while Block consistently argued that the mother is morally allowed to expel the fetus from her womb provided that no non-lethal methods of its eviction are (...)
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