This article seeks to cause trouble for a brand of consequentialism known as ‘desertarianism’. In somewhat different ways, views of this kind evaluate outcomes more favourably, other things equal, the better the fit between the welfare different people enjoy and the welfare they each deserve. These views imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing welfare to fit desert, which seems plausible enough. Unfortunately, they also imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing desert to fit welfare: in other words, by making happy people more deserving, at the cost of making unhappy people less deserving. Extant versions of desertarianism predict that such ‘deservingness transfers’ are improvements and that we ought to carry them out. Even worse, they will sometimes rank deservingness transfers higher than simply benefitting deserving people who are poorly off.

It is sometimes asserted that enabling harm is morally equivalent to allowing harm (the moral equivalence thesis). In this article, I criticize this view. Positively, I show that cases involving self-defence and cases involving people acting on the basis of a reasonable belief to the effect that certain obstacles to harm will remain in place, or will be put in place, show that enabling harm is harder to justify than allowing it. Negatively, I argue that certain cases offered in defence of the moral equivalence thesis fail, because either (1) their similarity with the archetypal trolley case limits their relevance to an assessment of this thesis, or (2) they are compromised by their reliance on the elusive notion of a situation being completely stable.

One response to the demandingness objection is that it begs the question against consequentialism by assuming a moral distinction between what a theory requires and what it permits. According to the consequentialist, this distinction stands in need of defense. However, this response may also beg the question, this time at the methodological level, regarding the credibility of the intuitions underlying the objection. The success of the consequentialist's response thus turns on the role we assign to intuitions in our moral methodology. After presenting the demandingness objection to consequentialism and revealing the underlying methodological stalemate, I break the stalemate by appealing to research in the cognitive neuroscience of intuitions. Given the evidence for the hypothesis that our moral intuitions are fundamentally emotional (rather than rational) responses, we should give our intuitions a modest (rather than robust) role in our moral methodology. This rescues the consequentialist's response to the demandingness objection.

Ross suggests a trilemma:

1. (i) Innocent pleasure is good as an end.

2. (ii) I have a prima facie duty to produce what is good as an end.

3. (iii) I have no prima facie duty to produce innocent pleasure for myself.

Political liberals very often appeal to a so-called division of moral labour that separates the regulation of institutions from that of personal conduct. Probably the most famous statement of this idea is found in these remarks from John Rawls:

Deontological ethicists generally agree that there is a way of harming others such that it is wrong to harm others in that way for the sake of producing a comparable but greater benefit for others. Given plausible assumptions, this principle leads to the possibility of paradoxical cases in which each of two actions is wrong, yet the combination of both actions is permissible. Consequentialism provides the most natural solution of the puzzle.

According to rule-consequentialism, we ought to follow the principles that would result in the best consequences if they were generally accepted. These principles constitute the ideal code. My aim is to make clear what the ideal code says about what we owe to animals. I argue that it accords moral status to them: the rule-consequentialist should acknowledge both general duties and special obligations to animals. However, in the ideal code there is no place for animal rights, conceived as deontological constraints. Within the animal rights debate, I conclude, rule-consequentialism is superior to some of the most prominent ethical theories in its agreement with widely shared moral intuitions. But some of its practical implications regarding the proper treatment of animals remain unclear. This point is illustrated by a discussion of what Jeff McMahan called ‘benign carnivorism’.

Many of us think that we have duties of distributive justice towards our fellow citizens that we do not have towards foreigners. Is that thought justified? This article considers the nature of the state's relationship to distributive justice from the perspective of utilitarianism, a theory that is barely represented in contemporary philosophical debates on this question. My strategy is to mount a utilitarian case for state-specific duties of distributive justice that is similar in its basic structure to the one that is standardly mounted for special duties towards the near and dear. I begin with a discussion of whether or not the co-citizen relationship can be justified in terms of its welfare consequences. I then consider what the answer to that first question implies concerning the duties of distributive justice that arise within that relationship.

One family of maximizing act consequentialist theories is actualist direct theories. Indeed, historically there are at least three different forms of actualist direct consequentialism (due to Bentham, Moore, and contemporary consequentialists). This article is about the logical differences between these three actualist direct theories and the differences between actualist direct theories and their competitors. Three main points emerge. First, the sharpest separation between actualist direct theories and their competitors concerns the so-called ‘inheritance’ principle. Second, there are a myriad of other logical differences among actualist direct theories. Third, one theory (Moore's theory) stands out among actualist direct theories because it entails a variety of logical principles. This fact may count in favor of that theory.

I have two aims in this article. The first is to break the deadlocked exchange between John Skorupski and John Broome concerning how best to understand Thomas Nagel's distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action. The second is to provide a reformulation of the distinction which captures an uncontroversial distinction between those reason-giving considerations which encapsulate an indexical relationship between an agent and an object of moral concern, and those which do not. The resolution of this exchange, and subsequent reformulation of the dichotomy, has two important ramifications for contemporary debates in moral philosophy. First and foremost, it reveals the true, pre-theoretical nature of the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action, and how the notion of agent-relativity cannot be utilized to underwrite the existence of deontic constraints. And, second, it provides definitive support for Skorupski's claim that agent-relative reasons are not the defining feature of deontological ethics.

Utilitarianism faces a difficulty in that what are typically regarded as natural goods seem to have possible occurrences that strike most people as morally reprehensible, yet which according to the theory must be taken to add to the good in the world. Thus, totake a recent treatment of the problem by Geoffrey Scarre, it would seem that even sadistic pleasures must contribute to human happiness and thus morally offset the concomitant suffering of the victim. Scarre has offered a defence of utilitarianism, arguing that in fact such pleasures will undermine the self-respect that is required for happiness. In this paper I argue that a partial undermining is plausible but leaves the problem untouched, while a complete undermining can be established only by a stipulation that is unmotivated from a utilitarian point of view.

Can we formulate a moral theory that captures the moral significance of patterns of group behaviour we cannot affect through our own action while at the same time avoiding the so-called ‘Ideal Worlds’ objection? In a recent article, Caleb Perl has argued that we can. Specifically, Perl claims that one view that does so is his Patterned View: roughly, you ought to act only in accordance with that set of sufficiently general rules that has optimal moral value (Perl 2021: 98). The Patterned View undoubtedly constitutes a welcome contribution to our existing set of moral theories. However, does it avoid the Ideal Worlds objection? In this article, I argue ‘no’.

This article argues that Bernard Mandeville's ideas were more likely to have influenced Jeremy Bentham's writings than previously believed. The conventional interpretation of Mandeville as a forerunner of the Hayekian “theory of spontaneous order” has obscured Mandeville and Bentham's shared emphasis on legal and interventionist solutions for the issues of prostitution and prisoners. This influence is evinced by focusing on some of Mandeville's minor works, which anticipated some of Bentham's arguments. It is unlikely that Bentham directly knew of Mandeville's minor works, but his reformist and interventionist bent was consistent and discernible in the Fable, which Jeremy Bentham read in his youth.

Writing in the foreword to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and speaking of his upbringing in Chicago between the wars Saul Bellow attests that

…as a Midwesterner, the son of immigrant parents, I recognized at an early stage that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins, my surroundings [‘the accidental circumstances of Chicago’], my schooling, were to be allowed to determine the course of my life. I did not intend to be wholly dependent upon history and culture. Full dependency must mean that I was done for. The commonest teaching of the civilized world in our time can be stated simply: ‘Tell me where you come from and I'll tell you what you are’.

Mill's feminism has been attacked as being logically incoherent. The general verdict has been that Mill can easily be defended from the charge. However, both sides in the debate have ignored the fact that his feminism is part of a broader theory of liberal empiricism. Placing The Subjection of Women in this context re–opens the question of its logical credentials and reveals a basic weakness in Millian feminism.