Many philosophers hold that whether an act is overall morally obligatory is an ‘objective’ matter, many that it is a ‘subjective’ matter, and some that it is both. The idea that it is or can be both may seem to promise a helpful answer to the question ‘What ought I to do when I do not know what I ought to do?’ In this article, three broad views are distinguished regarding what it is that obligation essentially concerns: the maximization of actual value, the maximization of expected value, and the perceived maximization of actual value. The first and third views are rejected; the second view is then refined and defended. The unfortunate upshot is that there may be no very helpful answer to the question just mentioned. As to the question posed in the title of the article, the answer unsurprisingly depends on what ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are taken to mean.

In this article we consider and cast doubt on two doctrines given prominence and prestige by the utilitarian tradition in ethics. According to the interest theory of value, value is realized only in the advancement of people's interests. According to the well-being theory of interests, people's interests are advanced only in the augmentation of their well-being. We argue that it is possible to resist these doctrines without abandoning the value-humanist doctrine that the value of anything has to be explained in terms of its potential to contribute to human lives and their quality.

Should radical uncertainty about the distant future dissuade us from judging options by referring to their consequences? I argue no. Some short-run benefits are sufficiently high that we should pursue them, even if our long-run estimates possess a very high variance. I discuss the relationship between the epistemic argument and ‘fuzzy’ rankings and also ‘arguments from infinity’. Furthermore, extant versions of the epistemic argument require the assumption that we have no idea about the major consequences of our acts. Even a slight idea about some major consequences will render the epistemic argument less plausible. In most applications of the epistemic argument, long-run uncertainty is not the relevant confounding variable; on close examination the epistemic argument tends to trade on other principles altogether.

Stephen Darwall's understanding of what kind of life is a good life, good for the person whose life it is, belongs in the same family as, among others, Scanlon's and mine. It is a family of views about well-being which descends from Aristotle, and Darwall has much of interest to say about the good life, and particularly about Aristotle's views on the subject. Many of the observations central to his position seem to me cogent, and are shared by other writers. These include three important propositions:

1. that a good life, one which is good for those whose life it is, is not necessarily the same as a life which they think is good for them, nor does it necessarily consist in their desires being satisfied, nor in the satisfaction of any subset of their desires (e.g. their considered desires, or those not based on any false assumptions).

2. that people aim or intend to do what is worth doing, to have relationships worth having, and engage in goals worth pursuing, and so on, and that all of these, and their combination, are distinct from having a good life (and this explains how people can knowingly sacrifice their own good), and

3. that what makes the well-being of people worth pursuing, to the extent that it is, what provides reasons for those same people and for others to protect or promote it, is that people are valuable in themselves.

In his book Welfare and Rational Care, Stephen Darwall proposes to give an account of human welfare. Or rather, he offers two accounts, a metaethical and a normative account. The two accounts, he suggests, are somewhat supportive of each other though they are logically independent.

Darwall's subject is a person's welfare – or to use his synonyms, a person's ‘good’, ‘interest’, ‘well-being’, ‘benefit’, or ‘eudaimonia’. Darwall is satisfied that there is a univocal notion here. I am unsure and shall come back to that question at the end.

I am honored that Jim Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Susan Wolf, all of whose work I greatly admire, have thought my ideas on welfare and care worth engaging, and I am very grateful to them for doing so. Each has raised searching and difficult questions. Rather than attempting to respond to them seriatim, I propose to discuss the issues under three broad headings: questions about the concept of welfare, questions about care or sympathetic concern, and the question of whether welfare claims have agent-relative or agent-neutral normative force. These issues are, of course, interconnected, but it may nonetheless be helpful to divide them up in these ways.