Drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham, we can forward a parity thesis concerning formal and substantive legal invalidity. Formal and substantive invalidity are, according to this thesis, traceable to the same source, namely, the sovereign's inability to adjust expectations to motivate obedience. The parity thesis, if defensible, has great appeal for positivists. Explaining why contradictory or contrary mandates yield invalidity is unproblematic. But providing an account of content-based invalidity invites the collapse of the separation between what the law is and what the law ought to be. Grounding formal and substantive invalidity in a unified source – the sovereign's inability to adjust expectations to motivate obedience – allows us to avoid bringing in any additional apparatus that might compromise this separation. This essay fleshes out and defends the parity thesis.

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral cognition has revealed that political liberals moralize mostly in terms of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives moralize in terms of those plus loyalty to Ingroup, respect for Authority, and Purity (or IAP). Some have concluded that the norms of morality encompass a wide variety of subject matters with no deep unity. To the contrary, I argue that the conservative position is partially debunked by its own lights. IAP norms’ moral relevance depends on their tendency to promote welfare (especially to prevent harm). I argue that all moral agents, including conservatives, are committed to that claim at least implicitly. I then argue that an evolutionary account of moral cognition partially debunks the view that welfare-irrelevant IAP norms have moral force. Haidt's own normative commitments are harmonized by this view: IAP norms are more important than liberals often realize, yet morality is at bottom all about promoting welfare.

Prioritarianism is supposed to be a theory of the overall good that captures the common intuition of ‘priority to the worse off’. But it is difficult to give precise content to the prioritarian claim. Over the past few decades, prioritarians have increasingly responded to this ‘content problem’ by formulating prioritarianism not in terms of an alleged primitive notion of quantity of well-being, but instead in terms of von Neumann–Morgenstern utility. The resulting two forms of prioritarianism (respectively, ‘Primitivist’ and ‘Technical’ prioritarianism) are not mere variants on a theme, but are entirely distinct theories, amenable to different motivating arguments and open to different objections. This article argues that the basic intuition of ‘priority to the worse off’ provides no support for Technical Prioritarianism: qua attempt to capture that intuition, the turn to von Neumann–Morgenstern utility is a retrograde step.

Seemingly every theory of population ethics is confronted with unpalatable implications. While various approaches to the subject have been taken, including non-consequentialist approaches, this area has been dominated by utilitarian thought. The two main approaches to population ethics have been total utilitarianism (‘TU’) and average utilitarianism (‘AU’). According to TU, we should seek to bring about the state of affairs that maximizes the total amount of happiness. According to AU, we should seek to bring about the state of affairs that maximizes average per capita happiness. Both theories have been afflicted by seemingly strong objections, and as a result, numerous variations and hybrids have been introduced. Despite the widespread disagreement in the field, though, a near consensus has developed in rejecting AU as an absurd view. In this article, however, I will go against the grain and argue that AU is the theory of population ethics that we should endorse.

According to Jeremy Bentham's account of happiness, pleasure is understood as homogeneous, without qualitative differences between pleasures, and the relation between pleasure and its objects is understood as morally and psychologically arbitrary. John Stuart Mill's ‘mental crisis’ emerged as he realized the psychological impossibility of living according to this view. His recovery was aided by engagement with the poetry of Wordsworth, through which he developed the notion that the cultivation of character and sentiments is an essential element of a good life. I aim to explore Mill's engagement with Wordsworth, and shed light on how Mill felt able to reconcile hedonic utilitarianism with his new view of the ‘inner life’ of the individual.

Most discussions of population control focus on how many children people should have, but ignore issues to do with the timing, so there is little discussion of the value of delaying childbearing. Once we recognize that delaying childbearing can have a significant impact on the size of the population, and, therefore, on CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions, our perspective on egg freezing changes significantly. In this article, I argue that, if we focus on future generations in general, rather than focusing only on the children who would be conceived using frozen eggs, policies permitting or encouraging the freezing of eggs may reduce potential harms to future generations. This, I argue, may block the objections to egg freezing for non-medical reasons which focus on the potential risks to the child (without requiring an appeal to the non-identity problem).

According to standard comparativist views, death is bad in so far as it deprives someone of goods she would otherwise have had. In The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan argues against such views and in favour of a gradualist account according to which how bad it is to die is a function of both the future goods of which the decedent is deprived and her cognitive development when she dies. Comparativists and gradualists therefore disagree about how bad it is to die at different ages. In this article I examine two prominent criticisms of gradualism and show that both misconstrue McMahan. I develop a related criticism that seems to show that a gradualist cannot coherently relate morbidity and mortality. This criticism also fails, but has an instructive implication for how policy-makers setting priorities for health care investments should regard choices between life-saving interventions and interventions against non-fatal diseases in the very young.

I propose an analysis of harm in terms of causation: harm is when a subject is caused to be worse off. The pay-off from this lies in the details. In particular, importing influential recent work from the causation literature yields a contrastive-counterfactual account. This enables us to incorporate harm's multiple senses into a unified scheme, and to provide that scheme with theoretical ballast. It also enables us to respond effectively to previous criticisms of counterfactual accounts, as well as to sharpen criticisms of rival views.

I argue that a notorious passage from Utilitarianism concerning the relationship between morality and blameworthiness need not be an obstacle to a consistent act-utilitarian interpretation of Mill's moral theory. First, the Art of Life provides a framework for reconciling Mill's evaluation of conduct in terms of both expediency and blameworthiness. Like contemporary sophisticated act-utilitarians, Mill treats expediency as the more fundamental category of evaluation. Second, textual evidence suggests that, on Mill's view, evaluations of blameworthiness are not strictly bound by rules, despite rule-ish considerations about punishment and discretion. Third, Mill's own jurisdictional account in terms of competent decision-making remains consistent with the act-utilitarian interpretation.

What is it for a life to be meaningful? In this article, I defend what I call Consequentialism about Meaning in Life (or CML for short), the view that (1) one's life is meaningful at time t just in case one's surviving at t would be good in some way, and (2) one's life was meaningful considered as a whole just in case the world was (or will be) made better in some way for one's having existed.

Prioritarianism is the moral view that a fixed improvement in someone's well-being matters more the worse off they are. Its supporters argue that it best captures our intuitions about unequal distributions of well-being. I show that prioritarianism sometimes recommends acts that will make things more unequal while simultaneously lowering the total well-being and making things worse for everyone ex ante. Intuitively, there is little to recommend such acts and I take this to be a serious counterexample for prioritarianism.

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.

Sometimes, two unfair distributions cancel out in aggregate. Paradoxically, two distributions each of which is fair in isolation may give rise to aggregate unfairness. When assessing the fairness of distributions, it therefore matters whether we assess transactions piecemeal or focus only on the overall result. This piece illustrates these difficulties for two leading theories of fairness (proportionality and shortfall minimization) before offering a formal proof that no non-trivial theory guarantees aggregativity. This is not intended as a criticism of any particular theory, but as a datum that must be taken into account in constructing a theory of fairness.

In On Liberty, Mill introduced the concept of ‘experiments in living’. I will provide an account of what Mill saw to be the basic problem he was addressing – the extensive pressure to fit in with the crowd, and how this bred mediocrity. I connect this to worries about public reason models of justification. I argue that a generalized version of Mill's argument offers us a better path to political justification stemming from experimentation. Rather than grounding political justification on shared political reasons, we justify our political culture on our ability to reject consensus views and try alternatives.

John Broome argues that fairness requires that claims are satisfied in proportion to their strength. Broome holds that, when distributing indivisible goods, fairness requires the use of weighted lotteries as a surrogate to satisfy proportionally each candidate's claims. In this article, we present two arguments against Broome's account of fairness. First, we argue that it is almost impossible to calculate the weights of the lotteries in accordance with the requirements of fairness. Second, we argue that Broome rules out those methods whose use might provide some resolution to this problem. From these arguments, we conclude that, contra Broome, fairness does not require the proportional satisfaction of claims.

In this article I show the shortcomings of autonomy-based justifications for exemptions from paternalism and appeal to the value of settling to defend an alternative well-being-based justification. My well-being-based justification, unlike autonomy-based justifications, can (1) explain why adults but not children are exempt from paternalism; (2) show which kinds of paternalism are justified for children; (3) explain the value of the capacity of autonomy; (4) offer a plausible relationship between autonomy and exemption from paternalism; and (5) give political philosophers a justification for exempting persons from paternalism even if broad scepticism about the capacity for autonomy is justified.

Many philosophers have argued that agents must be irrational to lose out in a ‘value pump’ or ‘money pump’. A number of different conclusions have been drawn from this claim. The ‘Value Pump’ (VP) has been one of the main arguments offered for the axioms of expected utility theory; it has been used to show that options cannot be incomparable or on a par; and it has been used to show that our past choices have normative significance for our subsequent choices. In this article, I argue that the fact that someone loses out in a value pump provides no reason to believe that they are irrational. The VP is impotent.

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.

This article offers a new theory about how using lotteries to distribute scarce benefits satisfies beneficiaries' claims. In the first section of the article I criticize John Broome's view and on the basis of these criticisms set out four desiderata for a philosophically adequate account of claim satisfaction by lottery. In section II I propose and defend a new view called the dual structure view, so called because it posits that claimants have two types of claims in the relevant scarce benefit distribution cases under discussion. This view meets all the desiderata set out in section I. Section III draws out the practical implications of my view for a variety of temporally extended cases, including the distribution of corneas to patients who have suffered corneal degeneration.

Drawing on the author's recent book Ethics for a Broken World, this article explores the philosophical implications of the fact that climate change – or something like it – might lead to a broken world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs, and where our affluent way of life is no longer an option. It argues that the broken world has an impact, not only on applied ethics, but also on moral theory. It then explores that impact. The article first argues that the broken world creates severe difficulties for both libertarians and contractualists. It then explores the impact of the broken world on utilitarianism – and especially on reflective equilibrium arguments for rule-utilitarianism. The article concludes that, while such arguments may still be viable, the form of rule-utilitarianism that results will be less moderate and less liberal than contemporary rule-utilitarians might hope.