Prioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these individuals are. On this view, there are two standard ways of handling risky prospects: Ex-Post Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off in final outcomes and then values prospects by the expectation of the sum total of those adjusted values, whereas Ex-Ante Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off on each individual's expectation and then values prospects by the sum total of those adjusted expectations. A standard objection to Ex-Post Prioritarianism is that it violates Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes choices that worsen the expectations for everyone. In this article, I argue that Ex-Ante Prioritarianism suffers from much the same problem: it violates a sequential version of Ex-Ante Pareto, that is, it prescribes sequences of choices that worsen the expectations for everyone.

The ‘modern’ natural law philosophers of the seventeenth century believed that conflict was an unavoidable concomitant of human intercourse, rooted in our nature. They understood the normative laws of nature as serving the purpose of setting the limits within which conflict is compatible with lasting social cooperation, thus showing, in effect, how warfare can be turned into competition. The natural lawyers were interested primarily in legal and political problems, not in ethics. But in order to provide reasoned approaches to immediate practical issues, they had to move to a level of abstract theorizing at which philosophical claims about morality were unavoidable. Natural law theory with its understanding of the central underlying problem of human sociability dominated seventeenth-century practical philosophy, and the solutions its various proponents offered generated many of the central concerns of what we know as moral philosophy.

Restorative justice should have greater weight as a criterion in criminal justice sentencing practice. It permits a realistic recognition of the kinds of harm and damage caused by offences, and encourages individualized non-custodial sentencing options as ways of addressing these harms. Non-custodial sentences have proven more effective than incarceration in securing social reconciliation and preventing recidivism, and they avoid the serious social and personal costs of imprisonment. This paper argues in support of restorative justice as a guiding idea in sentencing. As part of this defence, it considers whether the use of the idea of restorative justice will conflate criminal law with civil law or displace the authority of the criminal courts, and whether the sentences it recommends are best thought of as punishments or alternatives to punishment.

This article defends the project of giving a single pleasure-based account of goodness against what may seem a powerful challenge. Aristotle, Peter Geach and Judith Thomson have argued that there is no such thing as simply being good; there is only (for example) being a good knife or a good painting (Geach), being serene or good to eat (Thomson), or being good in essence or in qualities (Aristotle). But I argue that these philosophers’ evidence is friendly to the hedonist project. For, I argue, hedonistic accounts of goodness tend to imply that the unqualified term ‘good’ has little or no application to the things we talk about; while if we qualify hedonic goodness in certain ways, we generate usable predicates that match the varieties of goodness recognized by the three philosophers. And those qualifications happen to be natural interpretations of signals we do use alongside ‘good’, such as ‘knife’.

A Millian response is presented to Sen's celebrated Paretian liberal impossibility theorem. It is argued that Millian Paretian liberalism is possible, if the application of Paretian norms is restricted to the selection of an optimal code of liberal justice and rights, as well as to individual choices made in compliance with the rules of the code. Key steps in outlining the Millian response include suitably modifying Sen's social choice formulation of the idea of claim-right to personal liberty, and incorporating within social choice theory the distinction between a right and its direction of exercise. The Millian response is illustrated in the context of Sen's original example of the ‘prude’ and the ‘lewd’. If the argument is successful, coherent and appealing liberal versions of Pareto-inclusive philosophies such as utilitarianism, contractualism and neo-republicanism are feasible in principle.

A central strand in philosophical debate over the just distribution of resources attempts to juggle three competing imperatives: helping those who are worst off, helping those who will benefit the most, and then – beyond this – determining when to aggregate such ‘worst off’ and ‘benefit’ claims, and when instead to treat no such claim as greater than that which any individual by herself can exert. Yet as various philosophers have observed, ‘we have no satisfactory theoretical characterization’ as to how to weigh each of the three imperatives against one another, we find it ‘difficult to state . . . precise or comprehensive conclusions’, and we do not yet have a ‘metric for integrating the three measures’. In what follows, I offer an approach to weighing the three criteria against one another that yields resolutions – in Hard Cases of the ‘saving one infant's life versus replacing ten elderly people's hips’ sort – that are cardinally definitive, intuitively satisfactory and theoretically justified.

Are torture and torturers unforgivable? The article examines this question in the light of a Humean account of forgiveness. Initially, the Humean account appears to suggest that torturers are unforgivable. However, in the end, I argue it provides us with good reasons to think that even torturers may be forgiven.

Dorsey rejects Conclusion, so he believes he must reject one of the premises. He argues that the best option is to reject Premise 3. Rejecting Premise 3 entails a certain sort of discontinuity in value. So Dorsey believes he has an argument for discontinuity.

William Godwin is often cited in contemporary philosophical discussions of ethical impartiality, within which he functions as a sort of shorthand for a particularly crude and extreme act-utilitarianism, one that contains no foundational commitments other than the maximizing of some conception of the general good. This article offers a reinterpretation of Godwin's argument, by focusing closely on the ambiguous nature of its justificatory foundations. Although utilitarian political theories seem to have two possible justifications available to them – egalitarian and teleological – there has been little effort to establish which one of them Godwin's argument for impartiality relies on. This problem becomes more complicated when it is acknowledged that Godwin actually provides two different justifications for impartiality, only one of which is consequentialist. The other seems to make a case based on the recognition of moral worth and virtue. This is something confirmed through analysis of Godwin's writings on equality and suggests his political theory is more complex than most philosophers are willing to admit.

I argue that debates about virtue are best settled by clearly distinguishing two questions:

1. (a) What sort of character trait is there reason to cultivate?

2. (b) What sort of character trait is there reason (morally) to admire?

1. (1) The instrumentalist view of virtue accepted by many prominent consequentialists should not be accepted as the default view for consequentialists to hold.

2. (2) The main rival view, the appropriate response account, not only avoids the major objection facing the instrumental view, but gives the correct diagnosis of where it goes wrong.

3. (3) Two objections that seem to face the appropriate response account can in fact be convincingly met in ways which leave it looking stronger.

4. (4) The appropriate response account is also to be preferred to a disjunctive view or a mixed view.

J. S. Mill's role in the Indian education controversy is well known, but scarcely well understood. That he drafted, in 1836, a despatch sharply critical of Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education, is general knowledge now. That in drafting the despatch Mill drew upon the ideas of H. H. Wilson, a noted Orientalist and sharp critic of Macaulay and the Anglicists, has been adequately demonstrated. That the despatch was never sent to India, because of the objections of the President of the Board of Trade, John Hobhouse, a Whig with some utilitarian connections, has been common knowledge for several decades.

Maximizing want-satisfaction per se is a relatively unattractive aspiration, for it seems to assume that wants are somehow disembodied entities with independent moral claims all of their own. Actually, of course, they are possessed by particular people. What preference-utilitarians should be concerned with is how people's lives go—the fulfilment of their projects and the satisfaction of their desires. In an old-fashioned way of talking, it is happy people rather than happiness per se that utilitarians should be striving to produce.

Interpretations of Mill's response to literature are often placed within a larger analysis of the development of his ethical thought. Such interpretations commonly seek to describe the importance to Mill's intellectual development of the episode in his personal experience, recollected in Chapter V of his Autobiography, which awakened him to the value of poetry and to the need for an active cultivation of personal feeling. The connection between the two is usually made by demonstrating how his mature ethical thought integrates ideas that were first brought home to him during this reaction against the logical rigour of his background and upbringing, a reaction that contrasts Mill's acceptance of the importance of personal culture and emotion with the scant regard afforded to these elements within Benthamite utilitarian thought. Thus the resolution of Mill's personal crisis is seen as shedding light on key limitations within the moral philosophy that he inherited from Bentham and from his father.

Suppose that time is infinitely long towards the future, and that each feasible action produces a finite amount of utility at each time. Then, under appropriate conditions, each action produces an infinite amount of utility. Does this mean that utilitarianism lacks the resources to discriminate among such actions? Since each action produces the same infinite amount of utility, it seems that utilitarianism must judge all actions permissible, judge all actions impermissible, or remain completely silent. If the future is infinite, that is, the prospects for utilitarianism look bleak.

My object in this paper is to suggest a few reflections on some themes in Bentham's work which others as well as (and even more than) I have noted, without perhaps developing them as fully as might with advantage be done. There will be nothing like full development in the limited compass of what is said here, but what is said may at least indicate possible directions for further exploration. The greater part of the paper will be concerned with the notion of natural authority; but I want to begin by taking a broader, though no doubt rather superficial, view of the role in Bentham's thinking of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’.

The argument of this paper is part of a general defence of the claim that Bentham's moral theory embodies a utilitarian theory of distributive justice, which is developed in his Civil Law writings. Whereas it is a commonplace of recent revisionist scholarship to argue that J. S. Mill had a developed utilitarian theory of justice, few scholars regard Bentham as having a theory of justice, let alone one that rivals in sophistication that of Mill. Indeed, Gerald J. Postema in his book Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, argues that Bentham had no substantial concern with the concept of justice, and that what analysis of the concept there is in Bentham's thought is unlike the utilitarian theory of justice to be found in chapter five of J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism Although Postema's interpretation is not the only one that will be addressed in this paper, it serves as an important starting point for any rival interpretation of Bentham's ethical theory for two reasons. Firstly, it is the most comprehensive and most penetrating discussion of Bentham's utilitarian theory, drawing as it does on a wide variety of published and unpublished materials written throughout Bentham's career. Secondly, it is interesting in this particular context because the contrast that Postema draws between Bentham's and Mill's theories of justice depends upon a particular reading of Mill's theory of justice and utility which is derived from recent scholarship and which is by no means uncontroversial. As part of the defence of the claim that Bentham had a sophisticated theory of distributive justice, it will be argued in this paper that the contrast drawn between Bentham and Mill does not stand up to careful scrutiny, for insofar as Mill's theory of justice can be consistently defended it is not significantly different from the utilitarian strategy that Bentham employed for incorporating considerations of distributive justice within his theory. This is not to claim that there are not significant differences between the theories of justice of Bentham and J. S. Mill, but it is to claim that whatever technical differences exist between their theories, both writers saw the need to incorporate the concept of justice within utilitarianism. Therefore, rather than showing that Mill is an interesting thinker to the extent that he abandons his early Benthamism, by demonstrating how close Mill's theory of utility and justice is to that of Bentham, it will be possible to argue that Bentham employed a sophisticated and subtle utilitarian theory that was responsive to the sort of problems which occupied Mill a generation later.

Recent debates in just war theory have been concerned with the status of combatants during war. Unfortunately, however, the debate has, up to now, focused on self-defensive wars. The present article changes the focus slightly by exploring the status of combatants during military humanitarian intervention (MHI). It begins by arguing that MHI poses a number of challenges to our thinking about the status of combatants. To solve these it draws on Jeff McMahan's theory of combatant liability. On this basis, the article contends that, first, combatants engaged in atrocities lack the same set of rights and liberties held by intervening combatants. Second, and more controversially, drawing on McMahan's theory as well as the notion of complicity, it suggests that the same applies to those combatants who do not perpetrate atrocities but are merely ordered to defend the target state against the intervening state.

The Slogan holds that one situation cannot be worse (or better) than another unless there is someone for whom it is worse (or better). This principle appears to provide the basis for the levelling-down objection to teleological egalitarianism. Larry Temkin, however, argues that the Slogan is not a plausible moral ideal, since it stands against not just teleological egalitarianism, but also values such as freedom, rights, autonomy, virtue and desert. I argue that the Slogan is a plausible moral principle, one that provides a suitable moral basis for the levelling-down objection to teleological egalitarianism. Contrary to Temkin, freedom, autonomy, virtue, and rights can all be understood in person-affecting terms, while equality of outcome cannot. Moreover, the Slogan is open to a variety of different ideas about how we should weight or rank people's gains and losses. This flexibility allows the Slogan to accommodate ideals such as prioritarianism and desert.

Adams's suggestion that there must be one really right way of presenting the history of moral philosophy seems implausible to me, so I reject – with additional reasons – his charges against the structure of Invention of Autonomy. Skorupski's way of stating the ‘equal moral abilities’ thesis is not, I argue, very Kantian; a more Kantian version is not open to his objections. I am unconvinced by Schultz's claim that Sidgwick did not really hold that thesis. Deigh raises questions I cannot reply to here, but I do offer some texts that seem to show that Sidgwick is not guilty of the confusion about ‘ought’ with which Deigh charges him.

Adam and Eve have the same record yet receive different punishments. Adam receives the punishment that they both deserve, whereas Eve receives a more lenient punishment. In this article, we explore whether a deserved-but-unequal punishment, such as what Adam receives, can be just. We do this by explicating the conceptions of retributive justice that underlie both sides of the debate. We argue that inequality in punishment is disturbing mainly because of the disrespect it often expresses towards the offender receiving the harsher treatment, and also because it casts doubt on whether Adam got what he deserved. We suggest that when no disrespect is involved and when it is clear that the criminal got what he deserved, inequality is not worrisome.