The idea that immoral behaviour can sometimes be admirable, and that moral behaviour can sometimes be less than admirable, has led several of its supporters to infer that moral considerations are not always overriding, contrary to what has been traditionally maintained. In this paper I shall challenge this inference. My purpose in doing so is to expose and acknowledge something that has been inadequately appreciated, namely, the moral aspect of nonmoral goods and evils. I hope thereby to show that, even if immorality can be admirable (and morality less than admirable), this poses no threat to morality.

This paper discusses what the so-called Priority View implies regarding possible people. It is argued that this view is plausible when applied to fixed populations, but that, when applied to the issue of possible people, it faces certain difficulties. If it is claimed that possible people fall within the scope of the Priority View, we are led to the repugnant conclusion (and other counter-intuitive conclusions) at a faster pace than we are by, e.g., utilitarianism. And if it is claimed that possible people do not fall within the scope of the Priority View, we shall have to combine this view with a different view in order to avoid certain counter-intuitive judgements. Such a combined view, however, leads to intransitivities. At the end of the paper, I discuss what these conclusions imply regarding both the Priority View and our moral obligations to possible people.

Moral pluralism of the kind associated with W. D. Ross is the doctrine that there is a plurality of moral principles, which in their application to particular cases can conflict, and that there is no further principle to determine which of these principles takes priority in cases of conflict. Two objections are commonly advanced against this kind of pluralism: that it proposes a rag-bag of moral principles lacking a unifying basis; and that it offers no way to adjudicate moral disputes when our intuitions about what to do conflict. The present paper replies to both of these objections, in particular by responding to versions of them advanced by Brad Hooker. The tying together and justification of different moral principles may be achieved by a general rational justification procedure, rather than by a further moral principle; and such a rational justification procedure can help to adjudicate moral disputes.

It is impermissible to violate a constraint, even if by doing so a greater number of violations of the very same constraint were to be prevented. Most find this puzzling. But what makes the impermissibility of such minimizing violations puzzling? This article discusses some recent answers (by Scheffier, Kamm and Nagel) to this question. The article's first aim is to make clear in what way these answers differ. The second aim is to evaluate the answers, along with Kamm's and Nagel's proposed solutions of what they see as the puzzle of constraints. The main thesis of the article is this: because defenders of constraints are not committed to any conception of valuable states of affairs, constraints do not conflict with maximizing rationality; but neither can they be accounted for in terms of impersonal values.

I distinguish two different arguments against cognitivism in Bernard Williams's writings on moral dilemmas. The first turns on there being a truth of the matter about what we ought to do in a moral dilemma. That argument can be met by appealing to our epistemic shortcomings and to pro tanto obligations. However, those responses make no headway with the second argument, which concerns the rationality of the moral regret that we feel in dilemma situations. I show how the rationality of moral regret can be explained on an ‘independent desire’ model. And I show how Williams's second argument only appears to have force because of a certain faulty way of conceiving the issue over cognitivism. But Williams's argument rightly alerts us to the rational role of desire in our moral thought.

Frances Howard-Snyder has argued that objective consequentialism violates the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In most situations, she claims, we cannot produce the best consequences available, although objective consequentialism says that we ought to do so. Here I try to show that Howard-Snyder's argument is unsound. The claim that we typically cannot produce the best consequences available is doubtful. And even if there is a sense of ‘producing the best consequences’ in which we cannot do so, objective consequentialism does not entail that we ought, in this sense, to produce the best consequences.

Frances Howard-Snyder argues that objective consequentialism should be rejected because it violates the principle of ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ in asking us to do what we cannot. In this comment I suggest that Howard-Snyder does not take sufficiently seriously the chief defence of objective consequentialism, which reformulates it so that it applies only to actions we can perform. Nonetheless, I argue that there are arguments relating to ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ which discredit objective consequentialism even if it is thus reformulated. These arguments also cause problems for a reformulated version of subjective consequentialism.

In ‘The Rejection of Objective Consequentialism’ I argued against objective consequentialism on the grounds that it requires us to do what we cannot do and hence violates the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Erik Carlson and Mozaffar Qizilbash have raised objections to my arguments, chiefly by distinguishing different senses of ‘can’ and ‘ought’. I here attempt to rebut those challenges.