I here settle a recent dispute between two rival theories in distributive ethics: Restricted Prioritarianism and the Competing Claims View. Both views mandate that the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals should be justifiable to each affected party in a way that depends on the strength of each individual's separately assessed claim to receive a benefit. However, they disagree about what elements constitute the strength of those individuals’ claims. According to restricted prioritarianism, the strength of a claim is determined in ‘prioritarian’ fashion by both what she stands to gain and her absolute level of well-being, while, according to the competing claims view, the strength of a claim is also partly determined by her level of well-being relative to others with conflicting interests. I argue that, suitably modified, the competing claims view is more plausible than restricted prioritarianism.

G. A. Cohen's critique of Rawls's defence of economic incentives echoes some of J. S. Mill's insights on the subject. Some of Cohen's arguments, however, clash not only with those of Rawls but also with each other as well as with Mill's. A similar charge, however, may be made against Rawls. This article has conciliatory ambitions. It suggests reconciling each author with himself, as well as with each other, by focusing on the worth of liberty. It stresses the importance of non-pecuniary occupational inequalities and proposes various measures to enhance the worth of the occupational freedom of those with fewer options.

Half of the drug offenders incarcerated in the United States are black, even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs at the same rate, and blacks make up only 13 per cent of the population. Non-comparativists about retributive justice see nothing wrong with this picture; for them, an offender's desert is insensitive to facts about other offenders. By contrast, comparativists about retributive justice assert that facts about others can partially determine an offender's desert. Not surprisingly, comparativists, especially comparative egalitarians, contend that differential punishment is retributively unjust. I agree with this assessment, but take issue with the reasons egalitarians cite in its favour. In this article, I argue that differential punishment violates retributive justice because it contributes to structural racial oppression. Over the course of developing and defending this claim, I identify the shortcomings of both comparative egalitarianism and respectarianism, which is the most popular and plausible brand of non-comparativism.

I began to transition into the role of editor-in-chief of Utilitas in the spring of 2016 and fully assumed the position late in the summer. Since volume 29 will be the first for which I am entirely responsible, this seems like an appropriate juncture for me to say a few words about my plans for the journal.

Does doing good in itself make one a better person? This idea is intuitive yet its precise formulation underexplored. This article first shows that it is not the case that a person is good to the extent that her existence brings about good or to the extent that her actions do good. A proportional principle that evaluates a person according to the expected goodness of her actual course of action relative to the expected goodness of other available courses is shown to be the most plausible candidate. However, such a principle can only be a pro tanto principle of what makes persons good. To account for other relevant intuitions – such as that a person's motives matter for how good she is – we need further principles. This article ends with a few practical implications about how to be a better person according to the principle defended here.

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.

This article offers a new critical evaluation of the Rawlsian model of global public reason (‘GPR’), focusing on its ability to serve as a normative standard for guiding international diplomacy and deliberation in matters of war. My thesis is that, where war is concerned, the model manifests two fatal weaknesses. First, because it demands extensive neutrality over the moral status of persons – and in particular over whether they possess equal basic worth or value – out of respect for the beliefs of inegalitarian yet ‘decent’ societies, or ‘peoples’, Rawlsian GPR renders calculations of proportionality in war impossible. Second, because its content is provided by a conception of global justice (the so-called ‘Law of Peoples’) whose injunctions are addressed exclusively to peoples, as corporate agents, Rawlsian GPR pushes the moral evaluation of the independent wartime choices of individuals off the agenda of the global public forum altogether.

Largely in response to Epicurus’ famous challenge, philosophers have been quite imaginative in coming up with ways in which death is bad. Most often, death is described as an instrumental bad. Given that I would have obtained additional welfare benefits had I not died when I did, my death causes me to miss out on intrinsic goods I might otherwise have obtained. In this article, however, I argue that the standard account (and its corollaries) misses an important feature of the dis/value of death. I argue that some deaths can be good – intrinsically good – for the person who dies.

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework.

Mark Rowlands gives a compelling argument that, if John Rawls's contractarianism is consistently applied, and Rawls's premises fully explained, then we have powerful reasons to believe that representatives behind the Veil of Ignorance should be blind to species membership in the same way that they are blind to economic status and natural talent.1 I argue that even if we suppose this to be correct, these agents would not choose the two principles of justice, but instead ones that more closely resemble utilitarian principles.

Harsanyi claimed that his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems provide a justification for utilitarianism. This claim has been strongly resisted, notably by Sen and Weymark, who argue that while Harsanyi has perhaps shown that overall good is a linear sum of individuals’ von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities, he has done nothing to establish any connection between the notion of von Neumann–Morgenstern utility and that of well-being, and hence that utilitarianism does not follow.

The present article defends Harsanyi against the Sen–Weymark critique. I argue that, far from being a term with precise and independent quantitative content whose relationship to von Neumann–Morgenstern utility is then a substantive question, terms such as ‘well-being’ suffer (or suffered) from indeterminacy regarding precisely which quantity they refer to. If so, then (on the issue that this article focuses on) Harsanyi has gone as far towards defending ‘utilitarianism in the original sense’ as could coherently be asked.

Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this article is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of effort has been invoked in the philosophical analysis of a number of important concepts such as desert, attention, competence, and distributive justice, it has hardly ever been analysed itself. This article makes headway in this regard by discussing three ambiguities in the everyday notion of effort. It continues to develop two accounts of effort and shows how both of them are achievement-enhancing.

John Broome has developed an elegant and powerful theory of fairness. It is important to lay out his theory afresh because the basic structure of Broome's theory has been generally misunderstood. Once we understand its general structure, we are in a better position to assess what its normative implications are. In discussing objections that have been raised against Broome's theory, I will show that these implications are different from what his critics have commonly assumed.

The concept of liability is currently at the centre of contemporary debates on interpersonal defensive killing and war. This often leads to radically asymmetrical moral positions between aggressors and victims, and between just and unjust combatants. This article argues that the dichotomy liable/non-liable is too rigid to adequately capture the moral landscape in many relevant defensive killing situations. By contrast, it proposes a more granulated framework that takes seriously both the conceptual features of rights as essentially individualistic entities and their strength in moral reasoning. Finally, the article also shows that far from creating problems for the morality of killing in war, the proposed framework allows us to better accommodate for the position of unjust combatants than standard revisionist accounts of just war theory.

Many scholars have argued that well-being is the satisfaction of preferences, or of fully informed preferences, or of fully informed preferences about one's own life. But none of those theories can be true if it is possible to prefer, with full information, to decrease one's own well-being. And because it is possible to have such a preference, those theories cannot be true.

Most people believe that the rights of others sometimes require us to act in ways that have even substantially sub-optimal outcomes, as viewed from an axiological perspective that ranks outcomes objectively. Bringing about the optimal outcome, contrary to such a requirement, is an ‘optimific wronging’. It is less clear, however, that we are required to prevent optimific wrongings. Perhaps the value of the outcome, combined with the relative weakness of prohibitions on allowing harm as compared to those against doing harm, justifies non-intervention. In this article, I consider arguments to that effect, focusing on a recent paper in this journal by Andreas Mogensen. I argue that while we do not, in general, do wrong by failing to prevent optimific wrongings, we are nevertheless not permitted, in key cases, to refrain from intervening on the grounds that not intervening will secure the optimal outcome.

Perfectionism, the view that well-being is a matter of developing characteristically human capacities, has relatively few defenders in the literature, but plenty of critics. This article defends perfectionism against some recent formulations of classic objections, namely, the objection that perfectionism ignores the relevance of pleasure or preference for well-being, and a sophisticated version of the ‘wrong properties’ objection, according to which the intuitive plausibility of the perfectionist ideal is threatened by an absence of theoretical pressure to accept putative wrong properties cases. The article argues that these objections are unsuccessful, but introduce a new worry, the deep problem: perfectionism fails to offer a satisfying foundational justification for why developing the human essence is valuable. The article responds to the deep problem, ultimately arguing that it is a puzzle put to all theories of well-being to provide a justification for their normative significance.

Brad Hooker argues that the cost of inculcating in everyone the prevent disaster rule places a limit on its demandingness. My aim in this article is show that this is not true of existential risk reduction. However, this does not spell trouble for the reason that removing persistent global harms significantly improves our long-run chances of survival. We can expect things to get better, not worse, for our population.

One widespread argument against the efficacy of subjective well-being as a measure of well-being is the adaptation problem as formulated by Sen and Nussbaum: the phenomenon that people may adapt to deprivation and find satisfaction or happiness in objectively bad circumstances. It is not generally noticed that there are two distinct arguments for why the phenomenon of adaptation is a problem for subjective well-being as a measure of well-being. The Axiological Adaptation Argument is a counter-example to theories of well-being that rely on mental states. The Epistemic Adaptation Argument illustrates that levels of happiness or satisfaction cannot be measured well when people have adapted. I argue that the most serious threat to subjective well-being measures is not the Axiological Argument, but the Epistemic Argument. I reflect on the implications the epistemic problem has for the empirical literature in general, and for research on the phenomenon of adaptation in particular.

Comparative valuation of different policy interventions often requires interpersonal comparability of benefit. In the field of health economics, the metric commonly used for such comparison, quality adjusted life years (QALYs) gained, has been criticized for failing to respect the equality of all persons’ intrinsic worth, including particularly those with disabilities. A methodology is proposed that interprets ‘full quality of life’ as the best health prospect that is achievable for the particular individual within the relevant budget constraint. This calibration is challenging both conceptually and operationally as it shifts dramatically when technology or budget developments alter what can be achieved for incapacitated individuals. The proposal nevertheless ensures that the maximal achievable satisfaction of one person's preferences can carry no more intrinsic value than that of another. This approach, which can be applied to other domains of social valuation, thus prevents implicit discrimination against the elderly and those with irremediable incapacities.