In this article I attempt to show conclusively that the apparent intrinsic difference between causing collateral damage and directly attacking innocents is an illusion. I show how eleven morally irrelevant alterations can transform an apparently permissible case of harming as a side-effect into an apparently impermissible case of harming as a means. The alterations are as obviously irrelevant as the victims’ skin colour, and consistently treating them as relevant would have unacceptable implications for choices between more and less harmful ways of securing greater goods. This shows not only how the principles philosophers have proposed for distinguishing between these cases cannot withstand scrutiny, but how we can be sure that there are no relevant differences yet to be discovered. I conclude by considering reasons to think that there are deontological constraints against harming, but that they apply just as forcefully against collateral harms as they do against intended harms.

In a recent article, Joyce L. Jenkins challenges the common belief that desire satisfactionists are committed to the view that a person's welfare can be affected by posthumous events. Jenkins argues that desire satisfactionists can and should say that posthumous events only play an epistemic role: though such events cannot harm me, they can reveal that I have already been harmed by something else. In this response, however, we show that Jenkins's approach collapses into the view she aims to avoid.

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour.

In the ‘Concluding note’ to An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML), added in January 1789 to the original 1780 text, Bentham addresses highly theoretical questions in jurisprudence: ‘What is a law? What are the different parts of a law?’ He then demonstrates that only an imperative theory of legislation can provide adequate answers and provide the means to establish a precise nomenclature of legal phenomena. These broad questions sum up the work conducted in the manuscripts Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, which remained at that time unpublished. After such abstract matter, Bentham concludes on a much lighter note: