A common assumption is that psychological egoism, the view that a person can do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest, combined with ought-implies-can, the view that a person morally ought to do an act only if she can do it, entails the view – call it OIB – that a person morally ought to do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest. I argue that psychological egoism and ought-implies-can, interpreted fairly, use “can” in different ways; consequently, they do not entail OIB. They entail something similar to OIB, but not OIB itself. From these facts several significant results follow, each concerning arguments or assumptions about psychological, ethical, or rational egoism. For instance, they undermine the view that psychological egoism rules out those other two forms of egoism.

Eggleston claims that my account of harm suffers from more problems than his preferred account. I clarify my account, and explain how his account suffers from some of the supposed problems he charges my account with. Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that his contrastivist approach is preferable to my contextualism. I clarify the role of linguistic context, and suggest that our positions are quite close to each other. Mason worries that my scalar approach does not properly accommodate the notions of blame and moral responsibility. I maintain that such notions have only a derivative status, but are nonetheless important, and I suggest fruitful avenues for the scalar consequentialist to pursue. Kagan claims that the addition of a contextualist account of “right” renders my view not importantly different from maximizing or satisficing views. I explain why this is mistaken, and why neither maximizing nor satisficing versions of rightness can explain its supposed moral significance.

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross defends a view he calls “scalar consequentialism.” I argue, first, that Norcross does not use the term consistently, since in most passages this seems to refer to a version of consequentialism that rejects all claims about rightness altogether, yet in other passages Norcross claims that scalar consequentialists should nonetheless embrace his favored “contextualist” account of rightness. I also argue, second, that the particular arguments offered by Norcross as to why consequentialists should forgo more traditional consequentialist accounts of rightness (such as maximizing or satisficing) are unpersuasive.

An important strand of argument in Alastair Norcross's Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands is the rejection of the standard account of harm, which underwrites non-comparative statements of the form “act A harms person X.” According to Norcross, the correct account of harm is a contextualist one that only underwrites comparative statements of the form “act A results in a worse world for X than alternative act B, and a better world than alternative act C.” This article criticizes Norcross's contextualist account and his rejection of the standard account. It follows that moral theorists of all kinds should not be deterred by Norcross's arguments from continuing to rely on the standard account and using it to non-comparatively categorize some acts as harmings.

Norcross's recent book has a two-part title: Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands. In this essay I focus on the second part of the title – the idea that there are moral reasons without demands. I do not think that it is at all obvious what this means, and whether it is distinct from Norcross's central (and compelling) idea, that moral reasons come in degrees. I explore several possible ways of cashing out a distinctive claim that morality does not make demands, and argue that we should not accept that morality does not make demands. It does make demands, but it sometimes makes them in degrees.

Daniel Immerman has recently put forward a novel account of harm, the Worse than Nothing Account. We argue that this account faces fatal problems in cases in which an agent performs several simultaneous actions. We also argue that our criticism is considerably more powerful than another one that has recently been advanced.

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross presents contextualist accounts of good and right acts as well as harm and free will. All of his analyses compare what is assessed with “the appropriate alternative,” which is supposed to vary with context. This paper clarifies Norcross's approach, distinguishes it from previous versions of moral contextualism and contrastivism, and reveals difficulties in adequately specifying the context and the appropriate alternative. It also shows how these difficulties can be avoided by moving from contextualism to a kind of contrastivism that does not claim that any alternative is or is not appropriate or relevant.

Climate change is to a large extent a collective action problem, but many believe that individual action is also required. But what if no individual contribution to climate change is necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change-induced harms? This issue is known as the problem of inconsequentialism. It is particularly problematic for act consequentialism because the theory does not seem to judge such inconsequential contributions negatively. In this paper, we apply Henry Sidgwick's idea of esoteric morality to climate change and assess whether what we call a climate esoteric morality could help to deal with the problem of inconsequentialism from an act consequentialist perspective. Consequentialists ought then to promote what we call nonconsequentialist faux principles; exaggerate existing consequentialist principles that pro tanto forbid contributing to climate change whenever strictly consequentialist principles fail to do so; and refrain from criticising nonconsequentialist principles that forbid contributing to climate change.

Weighted lottery proposals give guidance in rescue dilemma situations by balancing the demands of comparative and absolute fairness. While they do not advocate for saving the greater number outright, they are responsive to absolute fairness insofar as they show a certain sensitivity to the numbers involved. In this paper we investigate what criterion of absolute fairness we should demand weighted lotteries to fulfill. We do so by way of critically examining what is probably the most sophisticated weighted lottery on the market: Gerard Vong's Exclusive Composition-Sensitive (EXCS) lottery. We find that both the standard that seems most common in the debate, and a different standard Vong uses to criticize Jens Timmermann's Individualist Lottery are in contradiction to basic demands placed upon weighted lotteries and are therefore unsuitable as necessary conditions for absolute fairness. We instead propose a purely gradual understanding of absolute fairness.

The procreation asymmetry is a widely held view in ethics, claiming that one should make existing people happy but has no reason to make happy people. Here, I shall present a new objection demonstrating from modest premises that one has a reason to take a sequence of actions that simply creates a happy person; yet this judgment in combination with plausible principles about sequences of actions entails that one has some reason to simply create a happy person. Additionally, I will argue that one's reasons to create a happy person are quite strong.

I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for what is funny; the norms of comedy are complex, but funny is funny. However, this is compatible with moral reasons to change the practices themselves, and therefore change what is fitting within them: in the first instance, a moralistic “that's not funny” is ill-fitting, but “that shouldn't be funny” can be apt. The analogous reformist position prescribes practices constituting the minimal responsibility norms necessary for cooperative society.

Egalitarian theories assess when and why distributive inequalities are objectionable. How should egalitarians assess inequalities between generations? One egalitarian theory is (telic) distributive egalitarianism: other things being equal, equal distributions of some good are intrinsically better than unequal distributions. I first argue that distributive egalitarianism produces counterintuitive judgements when applied across generations and that attempts to discount or exclude intergenerational inequalities do not work. This being so, intergenerational comparisons also undercut the intragenerational judgements that made distributive egalitarianism intuitive in the first place. I then argue that egalitarians should shed distributive egalitarianism: relational and instrumental arguments against inequality likely suffice to capture egalitarian concerns – including across generations – without encountering the problems produced by distributive egalitarianism.

John Stuart Mill is central to parallel debates in mainstream contemporary political epistemology and philosophy of federalism concerning the epistemic dimension(s) of legitimate authority. Many scholars invoke Mill to support epistemic arguments for democratic decision-making and decentralized federalism as a means of conferring democratic legitimacy. This article argues that Millian considerations instead provide reason to reject common epistemic arguments for decentralized federalism. Combining Mill's own insights about the epistemic costs of decentralization and recent work in philosophy, politics, and economics undermines purportedly Millian arguments for federalism focused on political experimentation, diversity and participation. Contrary to many interpretations, Millian considerations weaken, rather than strengthen, arguments for federalism. Any valid justification for federalism must instead rest on non-epistemic considerations. This conclusion is notable regardless of how one interprets Mill. But it also supports Mill's stated preference for local decisions subject to central oversight.

Totalism states that one population is better than another iff it has higher total welfare. One counterintuitive consequence is the Repugnant Conclusion (RC). Totalism also entails that a very large population of animals with lives barely worth living is better than a smaller population of happier humans. Furthermore, the strategies that have been used to avoid the troubling normative implications of the RC do not work in the animal case, so we may have reason to bring about such a population. I introduce the notion of ‘Efficiency of Welfare Production’ – that animals of different species vary in the efficiency with which they convert resources into welfare. If we want to maximize total welfare, without any speciesist bias, we should identify which species is most efficient and try to maximize the population of that species. This has counterintuitive implications whether we accept hedonism or a more sophisticated theory of welfare.

According to Shelly Kagan, the moral status of an individual is determined by the extent to which the individual has (has now, might/will have, or could have had) certain psychological capacities. Roughly speaking, the greater one's relevant psychological capacities, the higher their moral status. In this paper, I offer a twofold critique of Kagan's hierarchicalism. On the one hand, I argue against the primary argument in favor of Kagan's view (the argument from distribution) by challenging the key intuition on which the argument relies, thereby reducing the appeal of Kagan's position. On the other hand, using Kagan's general methodology, I argue that a good reason to reject Kagan's account of moral status is that he fails to explain away the counterintuitive result of his theory in the case of normal variation.

Prioritarianism is a family of views comparing distributions of well-being. What unites prioritarians is the thought that when deciding whether a distribution is overall better than another, the worse off have priority. There are different ways of making this idea more precise. However, some of these views have extreme aggregative implications and others have extreme anti-aggregative implications. This raises the question: can prioritarians accommodate partial aggregation (aggregating in some but not all cases) and avoid both extremes? In this paper, I explore and focus on a neglected anti-aggregation condition. I identify a family of views I call ‘bounded prioritarianism’ that meet this condition by placing an upper bound on the moral significance of benefits. I argue that anyone sympathetic to partial aggregation ought to opt for a version of bounded prioritarianism.

Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, including well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking J.S. Mill's argument for hedonism as a test case, I show that historically, classic hedonism was grounded metaethically via a commitment to two positions: empiricist epistemology and the view that pleasure occurs in sensation. Together, these two positions provided principled grounds for various iterations of classic hedonism. Moreover, these two positions are still serious options in both contemporary epistemology and the contemporary literature on the nature of pleasure. Insofar as a contemporary ethicist takes those two views seriously, they ought to take classic hedonism seriously as well.

The desire-satisfactionist defense of the existence of posthumous harm faces the problem of changing desires. The problem is that, in some cases where desires change before the time of their objects, the principle underlying the desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm yields implausible results. In his prominent desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm, David Boonin proposes a solution to this problem. First, I argue that there are two relevantly different versions of the problem of changing desires, and that Boonin's proposed solution addresses only one of them. Second, I argue that modifying the underlying principle is a better approach to overcoming the problem of changing desires since it addresses both versions of the problem. I defend this approach against objections by showing that the problems raised are problems for the principle as a general theory of harm, not for the principle as part of the desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm.

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’.

Almost everyone believes that freedom from deprivation should have significant weight in specifying what justice between generations requires. Some theorists hold that it should always trump other distributive concerns. Other theorists hold that it should have some but not lexical priority. I argue instead that freedom from deprivation should have lexical priority in some cases, yet weighted priority in others. More specifically, I defend semi-strong sufficientarianism. This view posits a deprivation threshold at which people are free from deprivation, and an affluence threshold at which people can live an affluent life, even though their lives may be even further improved beyond that point. I argue that freedom from deprivation in one generation lexically outweighs providing affluence in another generation; in all other cases, freedom from deprivation does not have lexical priority.