In this article I argue for a particular analysis of paternalism. I start by examining Dworkin's conditions for the paternalist act and make a case for alternative conditions. I argue that the paternalist actor acts irrespective of what she believes the wishes of the target of her action are and the paternalist actor acts because she has a positive epistemic standing that the act may or will improve the welfare of the target of her action. I also argue that it is consistent with my analysis that there are paternalist acts that don't interfere with the autonomy of the object of the paternalist act. I describe some such acts and make the case that such acts, when they are paternalist acts, may be morally permissible and outline the factors that bear on their permissibility. Finally I locate my analysis in the literature by comparing it to a number of other accounts.

According to Wlodek Rabinowicz's fitting-attitude analysis of comparative value, it is possible to analyse both standard and non-standard value relations in terms of the standard preference relations and two levels of normativity. In a recent article, however, Johan Gustafsson has argued that Rabinowicz's analysis violates a principle of value–preference symmetry, according to which for any value relation, there is a corresponding preference relation. Gustafsson has proposed an alternative analysis which respects this principle and which allegedly accounts for the idea that originally motivated Rabinowicz's analysis, namely, that in some cases different preference relations between a pair of items are equally permissible. The goal of my article is to show that the arguments offered by Gustafsson in favour of his account do not succeed. In particular, I argue that Gustafsson faces a dilemma: either he abandons the principle of value–preference symmetry or he cannot make conceptual room for multiple permissible preferences.

Mental health acts allow for interference with the liberty of the individual. As such, they serve as test cases for theories of liberty, and thus the question of what Mill would think about them arises. My aim is to answer this question. I argue that Mill would embrace mental health acts to protect mentally disturbed individuals from themselves and others from them, and that they should have broad admission criteria, allow capable patients to refuse treatment, and have treatment decisions made by patients or their families on the basis of substituted judgements rather than representatives of the state acting on best interest judgements. This interpretation will show that many writers who claim Mill's support cannot properly do so. It is also a combination of views that cannot be readily found in mental health acts themselves, but which, as Mill's reasons for it show, is a serious candidate for legislative adoption.

It's been argued that better-than is non-transitive – that there are some value bearers for which better-than fails to generate an acyclic ordering. Michael Huemer has offered a powerful objection to this view, which he dubs ‘The Dominance Argument’. In what follows, I consider the extent to which there is a plausible response to be made on behalf of those who hold that better-than is non-transitive. I conclude that there is.

Given that a person's death is bad for her, when is it bad? I defend subsequentism, the view that things that are bad in the relevant way are bad after they occur. Some have objected to this view on the grounds that it requires us to compare the amount of well-being the victim would have enjoyed, had she not died, with the amount she receives while dead; however, we cannot assign any level of well-being, not even zero, to a dead person. In the population ethics literature, many philosophers have argued along similar lines that bringing someone into existence can neither harm nor benefit her. Working within the comparative framework (on which harms make us worse off), I respond by proposing a good sense in which we can say that dead people, and actual people at alternatives in which they do not exist, have a well-being level of zero.

Contemporary theorists tend to think that the basic justification of human rights is instrumental, as efficient means for producing the theorist's preferred ultimate value or values. Contemporary theorists also tend to think that human rights have a distinctive normative force, correlating with categorical duties. This article shows that instrumentalist accounts of human rights face a dilemma. The very structure of any instrumentalist account means that such an account faces extraordinary difficulties accommodating categorical duties to respect the human rights of others. If so, one should either reject instrumentalism about human rights or do away with categorical duties. But doing away with categorical duties comes at a high cost. The dilemma, then, should question the prevalent assumption that instrumentalist accounts of human rights can accommodate categorical duties. The dilemma should serve either to sharpen instrumentalist theories or to motivate non-instrumentalism about human rights.

John Stuart Mill thought himself more indebted to Plato for his mental culture than to any other author. A study of his Gorgias translation and notes shows that arguments in On Liberty and Utilitarianism for individuality, freedom of discussion and the superiority of higher pleasures were probably shaped by that dialogue.

John Harsanyi has offered an argument grounded in Bayesian decision theory that purports to show that John Rawls's original position analysis leads directly to utilitarian conclusions. After explaining why a prominent Rawlsian line of response to Harsanyi's argument fails, I argue that a seemingly innocuous Bayesian rationality assumption, the continuity axiom, is at the heart of a fundamental disagreement between Harsanyi and Rawls. The most natural way for a Rawlsian to respond to Harsanyi's line of analysis, I argue, is to reject continuity. I then argue that this Rawlsian response fails as a defence of the difference principle, and I raise some concerns about whether it makes sense to posit the discontinuities needed to support the other elements of Rawls's view, although I suggest that Rawls may be able to invoke discontinuity to vindicate part of his first principle of justice.

In The Second Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall makes a new argument against consequentialism, appealing to: (a) the conceptual tie between obligation and accountability, and (b) the ‘right kind of reasons’ for holding others accountable. I argue that Darwall's argument, as it stands, fails against indirect consequentialism, because it relies on a confusion between our being right to establish practices, and our having a right to do so. I also explore two ways of augmenting Darwall's argument. However, while the second of these ways is more promising than the first, neither provides a convincing argument against indirect consequentialism.

In Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality, Douglas Portmore introduces a novel position regarding the actualist–possibilist controversies in consequentialist thought – securitism – a position he argues is theoretically superior to the standard views in both the actualist and possibilist camps. After distinguishing the two camps through an examination of the original Procrastinate case, I present Portmore's securitism (a new species of actualism) and its implications regarding his modified Procrastinate case. I level two serious objections against securitism: (i) that it implausibly implies that morality is radically more demanding for the virtuous than it is for the vicious and (ii) that it fails to recognize moral vice in a wide range of cases. I close by arguing that a possibilist variant of Portmore's securitist view is impervious to such objections and thus appears theoretically superior to the actualist version Portmore promotes.

To evaluate the overall good/welfare of any action, policy or institutional choice we need some way of comparing the benefits and losses to those affected: we need to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet sceptics have worried either: (1) that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals, getting ‘into their minds’; (2) that they are indeterminate as individual-level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or (3) that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume the existence either of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such things exist. This article argues that such scepticism can potentially be addressed if we view the problem of interpersonal comparisons as fundamentally an epistemic problem – that is, as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence of the individual good.

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’.

It is plausible to think that there exist acts of supererogation (acts that are morally optional and morally better than the minimum that morality demands). It also seems plausible that there is a close connection between what we are morally required to do and what it would be morally good to do. Despite being independently plausible these two claims are hard to reconcile. My aim in this article will be to respond to a recent solution to this puzzle proposed by Dale Dorsey. Dorsey's solution to this problem is to posit a new account of supererogation. I will argue that Dorsey's account fails to succeed in achieving what an account of supererogation is supposed to achieve.

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of using the experience machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine.

The question whether distributive justice is at bottom practice-dependent or practice-independent has received much attention in recent years. I argue that the problem of intergenerational justice resolves this dispute in favour of practice-independence. Many believe that we owe more to our descendants than leaving them a world in which they can merely lead minimally decent lives. This thought is particularly convincing given the fact that it is us who determine to a significant extent what this future world will look like. However, no practices that would trigger distributive obligations exist between distant generations. Thus, if we have to leave more than a minimum for future generations, we cannot conceive of distributive justice in terms of the justification of ongoing social interactions. Rather we have to think of the entire concept as an idea based on persons’ legitimate interests and capacity for well-being, and which abstracts from participation in particular practices.

Recent formulations of rule-consequentialism (RC) have attempted to select the ideal moral code based on realistic assumptions of imperfect acceptance. But this introduces further problems. What assumptions about acceptance would be realistic? And what criterion should we use to identify the ideal code? The solutions suggested in the recent literature – Fixed Rate RC, Variable Rate RC, Optimum Rate RC and Maximizing Expectation Rate RC – all calculate a code's value using formulas that stipulate some uniform rate(s) of acceptance. After pointing out a number of difficulties with these approaches, I introduce a formulation of RC on which non-uniform acceptance rates are calculated rather than stipulated. In addition to making more realistic assumptions about acceptance rates, Calculated Rates RC has several other advantages: it gives equal consideration to both acceptance and compliance rates and it brings RC more in line with our intuitive ways of thinking about rules and their consequences.

Is the relation ‘is a morally permissible alternative to’ transitive? The answer seems to be a straightforward yes. If Act B is a morally permissible alternative to Act A and Act C is a morally permissible alternative to B then how could C fail to be a morally permissible alternative to A? However, there are cases where this transitivity appears problematic. My aim in this article is to provide a solution to this problem. I will then investigate two ways in which we might justify rejecting the transitivity of the ‘is a permissible alternative to’ relation. Next, I will look at Dorsey's solution, which involves a reinterpretation of the intuitions used to generate the problem. I will argue that none of these solutions are fully satisfying, before going on to provide a novel solution to the problem and to argue that it avoids the problems facing the alternative solutions.

There is a common view that the utilitarian theory of John Stuart Mill is morally realist and involves a strong kind of practical obligation. This article argues for two negative theses and a positive thesis. The negative theses are that Mill is not a moral realist and that he does not believe in certain kinds of obligations, those involving external reasons and those I call robust obligations, obligations with a particular, strong kind of practical authority. The positive thesis is that Mill's metaethical position can be interpreted as a Humean constructivist view, a metaethical view that is constructivist about value and entails the existence of practical reasons, but not external reasons or robust obligations. I argue that a Humean constructivist reading of Mill's theory is reasonable, and strengthens Mill's argument from desire for the value of happiness, an important but notoriously weak aspect of his theory.

I argue that there are two distinct views called ‘value pluralism’ in contemporary axiology, but that these positions have not been properly distinguished. The first kind of pluralism, weak pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they say that there are many things that are valuable. It is also the kind of pluralism that philosophers like Moore, Brentano and Chisholm were interested in. The second kind of pluralism, strong pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they say there are many values, or many kinds of value. It is also the kind of pluralism that philosophers like Stocker, Kekes and Nussbaum have advanced. I separate and elucidate these views, and show how the distinction between them affects the contemporary debate about value pluralism.

There is a tension between our need for associative control and our need for social connections. This tension creates ethical dilemmas that we can call each-we dilemmas of sociability. To resolve these dilemmas, we must prioritize either negative moral rights to dissociate or positive moral rights to social inclusion. This article shows that we must prioritize positive social rights. This has implications both for personal morality and for political theory. As persons, we must attend to each other's basic social needs. As a society, we must adopt a sufficientarian approach to the regulation of social resources.