In a famous passage in What We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon introduced a case where we have to choose between saving one person from a terrible harm and saving an enormous number of people from much smaller harms. » …Read more
Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Chap. 2 of J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism is widely interpreted as defending qualitative hedonism, as a view about the nature of personal well-being. » …Read more
Undoubtedly, philosophers do make moral judgments about particular cases. For example, they make judgments about actual historical cases – as G.E.M. Anscombe famously judged that it was wrong of President Truman to order the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. » …Read more
Most contemporary work in population ethics operates within the framework of welfarism – the assumption that individual welfare is the fundamental value. But this framework is a straitjacket, » …Read more
In this post, I shall argue for the conclusion that there is no such thing as moral vagueness. The argument rests on a certain assumption, » …Read more
Both Hume and Kant advocated extreme and implausible views of motivation; the same is also true of many of their contemporary followers. The truth about motivation lies in between these two extremes. » …Read more
Suppose that there is both an objective ‘ought’ and a subjective ‘ought’. Which of these two kinds of ‘ought’ figures in the anti-akrasia principle that it is irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one ought not to do it? » …Read more
Some philosophers – let’s call them “teleologists” – believe that there is an intimate connection between deontic terms like ‘required’, ‘ought’, and ‘permissible’, on the one hand, » …Read more