Negative duties are duties not to perform an action, while positive duties are duties to perform an action. This article focuses on the question of who holds the positive duties correlative to human rights. I start by outlining the Universal Scope Thesis, which holds that these duties fall on everyone. In its support, I present an argument by analogy: positive and negative duties correlative to human rights perform the same function; correlative negative duties are generally thought to be universal; by analogy, we have reason to think that positive duties are held by everyone. I then consider three disanalogies that challenge the above argument. To address these worries, I introduce the notion of ‘aggregative duties’ – duties that can only be adequately grasped when we focus on the aggregate effect of the actions and omissions of different agents. This framework allows me to refine the initial thesis and address the objections.

A traditional overall distinction between the various versions of retributive theories of punishment is that between positive and negative retributivism. This article addresses the question of what positive retributivism – and thus the obligation to punish perpetrators – implies for a society in which the state has many other types of obligation (e.g. obligations to provide its citizens with some degree of health care, education, protection, etc.). Several approaches to this question are considered. It is argued that the resource priority question constitutes a genuine and widely ignored challenge for positive retributivist theories of punishment.

Satisficing consequentialism is an unpopular theory. Because it permits gratuitous sub-optimal behaviour, it strikes many as wildly implausible. It has been widely rejected as a tenable moral theory for more than twenty years. In this article, I rehearse the arguments behind this unpopularity, before examining an attempt to redeem satisficing. Richard Yetter Chappell has recently defended a form of ‘effort satisficing consequentialism’. By incorporating an ‘effort ceiling’ – a limit on the amount of willpower a situation requires – and requiring that agents produce at least as much good as they could given how much effort they are exerting, Chappell avoids the obvious objections. However, I demonstrate that the revised theory is susceptible to a different objection, and that the resulting view requires that any supererogatory behaviour must be efficient, which fails to match typical moral verdicts.

It is widely accepted that Bentham was influenced by the thought of Helvétius. But the fact that Bentham copied some elements from Helvétius leads to the question of how he changed the Helvétian ideas, and in what respects he aspired to go further than Helvétius. Taking as a starting point Bentham's claim that Helvétius was the Bacon of moral science, whereas he himself was to be the Newton, I argue for the following. First, Bentham's theory can be understood as an attempt to work out in detail the theoretical programme that Helvétius outlined in order to reform moral philosophy. Second, in contrast to Helvétius, Bentham's theory is guided by considerations of feasibility, and this leads to claims that are more moderate than Helvétius's claims. Third, whereas Helvétius did not indicate how utilitarian principles should enter political decisions, in Bentham's approach the citizens, and especially philosophers, are considered active political agents.

For both its enthusiastic adherents as well as its more generous opponents, liberalism commands considerable ethical appeal but at a price. And that price is its lack of systematic integrity or coherence. The charm of its ethical appeal stems from the great values which it celebrates. But for many these very values seem fatally incommensurable, seem to be forever colliding with and thwarting one another. As Isaiah Berlin has never tired of reminding us, liberty and equality continue to defy our best efforts to reconcile them, to weave them together in some kind of orderly and compelling way. Liberalism, in other words, is flawed, if not tragically flawed. For those who nevertheless remain charmed by its ethical appeal, the tragedy of the incommensurability of its basic values is disappointing and disturbing.

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.

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.

Bentham and Mill and probably most utilitarians (though Sidgwick is in part an exception) have a good deal in common with Hobbes and Spinoza as moral thinkers. For they share a commitment to deriving ethics from the actual and normal motivitations of human beings as creatures of the natural world rather than, like Kant and many religious moralists, from some transcendent realm to the requirements of which natural man has a duty to submit without expecting any help therefrom in the satisfaction of his natural inclinations. In the present context I shall call all such thinkers ethical naturalists, though I do not mean this expression in any very precise technical sense, only to indicate a commitment to somehow deriving morality from natural fact.

I argue that utilitarianism requires us to tolerate intrapersonal disagreement for the same reasons that it requires us to tolerate interpersonal disagreement. I begin by arguing that multiplicity has the same costs and benefits as multiculturalism: It causes conflict, but it also allows us to perform experiments in living, adopt a division of labour, compartmentalize harm and learn from ourselves. I then argue that, in light of these costs and benefits, utilitarianism requires us to adopt a liberal system of individual self-government, according to which we should not try to impose a unified set of beliefs and values on ourselves. Finally, I argue that we should apply this policy of liberal toleration to intrapersonal disagreement about utilitarianism too. If we want to maximize utility, then we should tolerate inner conflict not only about how to maximize utility but also about whether we should be maximizing utility in the first place.

In previous work, I have argued that subjectivists about well-being must turn from a preference-satisfaction to a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being in order to avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. In a recent paper, Van der Deijl and Brouwer agree, but object that no version of the desire-satisfaction theory can provide a plausible account of how an individual's degree of well-being depends on the satisfaction or frustration of their various desires, at least in cases involving the gain or loss of desires. So subjectivists can avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons only by adopting a substantively implausible view. In this reply, I defend subjectivism by arguing that the totalist desire-satisfaction theory avoids Van der Deijl and Brouwer's objections, and briefly suggest that it may also be able to handle the problem of adaptive desires. I conclude that subjectivists should endorse the totalist desire-satisfaction theory.

Some of the commentators on Intricate Ethics (IE) complain of my method. One finds the main ideas ‘Kammouflaged’ because the relevant causal distinctions are so fine-grained and the cases that illustrate them so numerous (Richardson, p. 82). Some say that they do not have the intuitions about many cases that I have, that I concoct dubious and ad hoc distinctions and invest them with moral significance; I am Ptolemaic in that new crystalline spheres and epicycles are constantly being added in an attempt to fix the appearances (Norcross, p. 74).

To evaluate the overall good/welfare of any action, policy or institutional choice we need some way of comparing the benefits and losses to those affected: we need to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet sceptics have worried either: (1) that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals, getting ‘into their minds’; (2) that they are indeterminate as individual-level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or (3) that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume the existence either of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such things exist. This article argues that such scepticism can potentially be addressed if we view the problem of interpersonal comparisons as fundamentally an epistemic problem – that is, as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence of the individual good.

One prevailing objection to consequentialism holds that the consequentialist cannot promote both agent-neutral value and her own personal friendships: the consequentialist cannot be a genuine friend. Several versions of this objection have been advanced, but an even more sophisticated version of the charge is available. However, even this more sophisticated version fails, as it assumes a traditional, context-insensitive, account of character traits. In this article, I develop and defend a novel account of character traits that is context-sensitive and also supports a novel account of what friendship consists in. Application of the more plausible, contextual, account of character traits resolves the debate in favor of the friendly consequentialist.

Rawls scholarship has not paid much attention to Rawls's early methodological writings so far, pretty much focusing on the reflective equilibrium (RE) which he is understood to have adopted in A Theory of Justice. Nelson Goodman's coherence-theoretical formulations concerning the justification of inductive logic in Fact, Fiction and Forecast have been suggested as the source of the RE. Following Rawls's methodological development in his early works, we shall challenge both these views. Our analysis reveals that the basic elements of RE can be located in his ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ essay. We shall further show that the origins of RE go all the way back to Aristotle's methods of ethics, as RE accords with the methodology entitled saving the appearances (SA) in recent Aristotle scholarship.

Scalar consequentialism, recently championed by Alastair Norcross, holds that the value of an action varies according to the goodness of its consequences, but eschews all judgements of moral permissibility and impermissibility. I show that the strongest version of scalar consequentialism is not vulnerable to the objection that it is insufficiently action-guiding. Instead, the principle objection to the scalar view is simply that it leaves out important and interesting ethical judgements. In demonstrating this, I counter Rob Lawlor's contention that consequentialists cannot consistently care about permissibility and impermissibility.

It is morally negligent or reckless to believe without sufficient evidence. The foregoing proposition follows from a rule that is a modified expression of W. K. Clifford's ethics of belief. Clifford attempted to prove that it is always wrong to believe without sufficient evidence by advancing a doxastic counterpart to an act utilitarian argument. Contrary to various commentators, his argument is neither purely nor primarily epistemic, he is not a non-consequentialist, and he does not use stoicism to make his case. Clifford's conclusion is a universal generalisation that is in a precarious position because of potential counterexamples. But the counterexamples do not preclude a rule against going beyond the available evidence and it is worthwhile making a moral case for such a rule.

If harm is restricted to mean perceptible damage suffered by an agent against his wishes, so that his mere dislike with no evidence of injury is excluded, then Mill's liberty principle arguably is ‘one very simple principle’ as he claims. But even so, what of John Gray's charge that the liberty principle relies on a ‘radically defective’ notion of individuality or autonomy that is incompatible with every civil society's cultural and moral traditions? If he is correct about this, then Mill's principle lacks appeal even if it can be stated in a definite and coherent manner.

Most people have the intuition that, when we can save the lives of either a few people in one group or many people in another group, and all other things are equal, we ought to save the group with the most people. However, several philosophers have argued against this intuition, most famously John Taurek, in his article ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ They argue that there is no moral obligation to save the greater number, and that we are permitted to save either the many or the few. I argue in this article that, even if we are almost completely persuaded by these ‘numbers sceptics’, we ought not to just save the few. If the choice is simply between saving the many or the few, we ought to save the many.

A dialogue, in three parts, on utilitarian vulnerability to exploitation.