Recently in the philosophical literature there has been some effort made to understand the proper application of the theory of utilitarianism to worlds in which there are infinitely many bearers of utility. Here, we point out that one of the best, most inclusive principles proposed to date contradicts fundamental utilitarian ideas, such as the idea that adding more utility makes a better world.

My aim is to vindicate two distinct and important moral categories – ideals and aspirations – which have received modest, and sometimes negative, attention in recent normative debates. An ideal is a conception of perfection or model of excellence around which we can shape our thoughts and actions. An aspiration, by contrast, is an attitudinal position of steadfast commitment to, striving for, or deep desire or longing for, an ideal. I locate these two concepts in relation to more familiar moral concepts such as duty, virtue, and the good to demonstrate, amongst other things, first, that what is morally significant about ideals and aspirations cannot be fully accommodated within a virtue ethical framework that gives a central role to the Virtuous Person as a purported model of excellence. On a certain interpretation, the Virtuous Person is not a meaningful ideal for moral agents. Second, I articulate one sense in which aspirations are morally required imaginative acts given their potential to expand the realm of practical moral possibility.

In ‘The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism’ Alastair Norcross argues that scalar consequentialism is the most plausible form of consequentialism, but his arguments are flawed: he is simply mistaken when he suggests that there is a problem with deriving absolutes like right and wrong from gradable properties such as goodness; he cannot justify his claim that the choice of a threshold will always be arbitrary; and his ‘no significant difference’ argument only shows that the consequentialist doesn't care about permissibility. Furthermore, I argue that, although Norcross was right to claim that a scalar theory can be action-guiding (to an extent), he was mistaken to think that ‘Abolishing the notion of “ought” will not seriously undermine the action-guiding nature of morality.’ If anything can be said in favour of scalar consequentialism, it is only that it is the most honest form of consequentialism, because it doesn't pretend to care about permissibility.

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.

The moral psychologist Joshua Greene has proposed a number of arguments for the normative significance of empirical research and for the unreliability of deontological intuitions. For these arguments, much hinges on the combination of various components of Greene's research – namely the dual-process theory of moral judgement, ‘personalness’ as a factor in moral decision-making, and his functional understanding of deontology and consequentialism. Incorporating these components, I reconstruct three distinct arguments and show that the Personalness Argument for the claim that empirical research can advance normative ethics and the Combined Argument against deontology are both sound and interesting in themselves. They do not, however, cast doubt on traditional deontology or reserve a specific role for neuroscience. The Indirect Route argument overcomes some of the other arguments’ limitations. It is, however, invalid. I conclude by pointing out the broader philosophical relevance of Greene's arguments as shedding light on second-order morality.

In this article I argue for a particular analysis of paternalism. I start by examining Dworkin's conditions for the paternalist act and make a case for alternative conditions. I argue that the paternalist actor acts irrespective of what she believes the wishes of the target of her action are and the paternalist actor acts because she has a positive epistemic standing that the act may or will improve the welfare of the target of her action. I also argue that it is consistent with my analysis that there are paternalist acts that don't interfere with the autonomy of the object of the paternalist act. I describe some such acts and make the case that such acts, when they are paternalist acts, may be morally permissible and outline the factors that bear on their permissibility. Finally I locate my analysis in the literature by comparing it to a number of other accounts.

What if human joy (more technically, utility) went on endlessly? Suppose, for example, that each human generation were followed by another, or that the Western religions are right when they teach that each human being lives eternally after death. If any such possibility is true in the actual world, then an agent might sometimes be so situated that more than one course of action would produce an infinite amount of utility (or of disutility, or of both). Deciding whether to have a child born this year rather than next is a situation wherein an agent may face several alternatives whose effects could well ramify endlessly on such suppositions, for the child born this year would be a different person—one who preferred different things, performed different actions, and had different descendants—from a child born next year. It has recently been suggested that traditional utilitarianism stumbles on such cases of infinite utility. Specifically, utilitarianism seems to require, for its application, that all experience of pleasure and pain cease at some time in the future or asymptotically approach zero.2 If neither of these conditions holds, then the utility (and disutility) produced by each of two alternative actions may turn out to be infinite, and utilitarianism thus loses its ability to discriminate morally between them.

Vagueness in the phrase ‘can know’ aside, the principle of (Access) An act is obligatory only if its agent can know that it is obligatory is an important principle, worthy of serious scrutiny. Its truth or falsity bears on the question of whether moral rightness, obligatoriness, etc., are a matter of factors ‘internal’ to an agent (such as motives and beliefs), or whether ‘external’ factors (such as consequences) are relevant to determining the moral normative status of acts. Moreover, Access enjoys considerable intuitive support. If I destroy Greensboro in Professor Sorensen's example by pushing the wrong button, I seem to have a good excuse to give to anyone who would accuse me of wrongdoing: ‘I had no way of knowing that this action would be wrong!’ But if I have a good excuse, then pushing the button does not seem wrong; and if that action is not wrong, then I had no obligation to refrain from pushing that button.

Was Malthus a ‘Utilitarian’? This apparently simple-minded question is justified by on-going debate in the secondary literature. For example, in his study, The Classical Economists, D. P. O'Brien maintains that ‘only the two Mills, apart from Bentham himself, were really Utilitarians’. Against this we have the view of Lord Robbins that ‘We get the picture badly out of focus if we conceive that reliance on the principle of utility was confined to Bentham and his immediate circle.’ In this paper we shall demonstrate the justice of the Robbins perspective with specific reference to the population issue.

Something can be said to be good for a particular person, whether or not it is good for anyone else, let alone good ‘overall’ or ‘good simpliciter’. Sometimes we speak of ‘John's good’ as well as of things that are ‘good for John’. What is ‘good for John’ is whatever enhances his ‘good’ or, to use an apparently synonymous term, his ‘well-being’. But what is a person's well-being: in what does it consist?

Impartialism in ethics has been said to be the common ground shared by both Kantian and utilitarian approaches to ethics. Lawrence Blum describes this common ground as follows:

Both views identify morality with a perspective of impartiality, impersonality, objectivity and universality. Both views imply the ‘ubiquity of impartiality” – that our commitments and projects derive their legitimacy only by reference to this impartial perspective.

While morality prohibits us from creating miserable children, it does not require us to create happy children. I offer an actualist explanation of this apparent asymmetry. Assume that for every possible world W, there is a distinct set of permissibility facts determined by the welfare of those who exist in W. Moral actualism says that actual-world permissibility facts should determine one's choice between worlds. But if one doesn't know which world is actual, one must aim for subjective rightness and maximize expected actual-world permissibility. So, because one should expect actual people to be worse off than they could have been if one creates a miserable child, creating a miserable child is subjectively impermissible. And because one should expect actual people to be at least as well off as they could have been if one fails to create a happy child, failing to create a happy child is subjectively permissible.

This article responds to a new objection, due to Ben Bramble, against attitudinal theories of sensory pleasure and pain: the objection from unconscious pleasures and pains. According to the objection, attitudinal theories are unable to accommodate the fact that sometimes we experience pleasures and pains of which we are, at the time, unaware. In response, I distinguish two kinds of unawareness and argue that the subjects in the examples that support the objection are unaware of their sensations in only a weak sense, and this weak sort of unawareness of a sensation does not preclude its being an object of one's attitudes.

This article considers two different ways of formulating a desire-satisfaction theory of prudential value. The first version of the theory (the object view) assigns basic prudential value to the state of affairs that is the object of a person's desire. The second version (the combo view) assigns basic prudential value to the compound state of affairs in which (a) a person desires some state of affairs and (b) this state of affairs obtains. My aims in this article are twofold. First, I aim to highlight that these are not mere notational variants, but in fact have quite different implications, so that this distinction is not one that the theorist of prudential value should ignore. More positively, I argue that the object view is better able to capture what is distinctive and appealing about subjective theories of prudential value, on any plausible account of what the central subjectivist insight is.

One might have thought that any right-thinking utilitarian would hold that motives and intentions are morally on a par, as either might influence the consequences of one's actions. However, in a neglected passage of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claims that the lightness of an action depends ‘entirely upon the intention’ but does not at all depend upon the motive. In this paper I try to make sense of Mill's initially puzzling remarks about the relative importance of intentions and motives in a way that high-lights the importance of other elements of his moral philosophy and action theory.

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism (in moral and social theory the idea, above all, of natural law) realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism.

So, on 22 July 1865 (p. 32), under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives.

Most contemporary political philosophers deny that justice requires giving people what they deserve. According to a familiar anti-desert argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines all desert-claims. According to a less familiar – but more plausible – argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines some desert-claims (or all desert-claims to an extent). But, it says, we do not know which ones (or to what extent). This article examines this ‘epistemological’ argument against desert. It gives reason to believe that it fails, emphasizing the importance of justice relative to efficiency and attempting to construct a practical way of measuring desert.

In many recent discussions of the morality of actions where both good and bad consequences foreseeably ensue, the moral significance of the distinction between intended and foreseen consequences is rejected. This distinction is thought to bear on the moral status of actions by those who support the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). According to this doctrine, roughly speaking, to perform an action intending to bring about a particular bad effect as a means to some commensurate good end is impermissible, while performing an action where one intends only this good end and merely foresees the bad as an unintended sideeffect may be permissible. Consequentialists argue that this is a distinction which makes no moral difference to the evaluation of the initial act in the two cases, given that the overall consequences are the same in each case. In this paper we aim to show that a standard consequentialist line of argument against the moral relevance of the intention/foresight distinction fails. Consequentialists commonly reject the moral relevance of this distinction on the grounds that there is no asymmetry in moral responsibility between intending and foreseeing evil. We argue that even if this claim about moral responsibility is correct, it does not entail, as many Consequentialists believe, that there is no moral asymmetry between acts of intended and foreseen evil. We go on to argue that those consequentialists who do concede the moral relevance of the intention/foresight distinction at the level of agent evaluations cannot consistently make such a concession, and that such a position is in any case untenable, because it entails a complete severance of important conceptual connections between act and agent evaluations.