It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may (...) render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, valuewise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives (“sub-resilience” and “super-resilience”), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean. (shrink)

This book argues that political libertarianism can be grounded in widely shared, everyday moral beliefs--particularly in strictures against shifting our burdens onto others. It also seeks to connect these philosophical arguments with related work in economics, history, and politics for a wide-ranging discussion of political economy.

This article discusses the aesthetic concept of boringness, of which there has been relatively little philosophical discussion, especially along its objective, nonpsychological dimensions. I begin by confronting skepticism about the validity of judgments about boringness and rebut suggestions to the effect that these judgments are inevitably compromised by mistakes or vices of the audience. The article then develops an account focused on certain kinds of reasonable expectations we form in a given aesthetic context. I go on to confront the question (...) of whether boringness is inevitable given the internal imperatives of works of art and illustrate the discussion with Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Although I focus on art, I conclude by drawing some connections with the boring in everyday life. (shrink)

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Parfit (1984, 165) which I will paraphrase as follows: You are in the (...) hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe operation for which you can be given no anaesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your operation and it was the longest such operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your operation is imminent, but will last only one hour. 1. I wish to thank Sarah Broadie for comments on a version of this paper and Derek Parfit for conversations on this subject. (shrink)

Debates about political correctness often proceed as if proponents see nothing to fear in erecting norms that inhibit expression on the one side, and opponents see nothing but misguided efforts to silence political enemies on the other.1 Both views are mistaken. Political correctness, as I argue, is an important attempt to advance the legitimate interests of certain groups in the public sphere. However, this type of norm comes with costs that mustn’t be neglected–sometimes in the form of conflict with other (...) values we hold dear, but often by creating an internal schism that threatens us with collective irrationality. Political correctness thus sets up dilemmas I wish to set out (but not, alas, resolve). The cliché is that political correctness tramples on rights to free-speech, as if the potential loss were merely expressive; the real issue is that in filtering public discourse, political correctness may defeat our own substantive aims. (shrink)

There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married which deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence when we marry we are putting ourselves in the (...) position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. (shrink)

This paper addresses two questions: first, when making decisions about what to do, does the mere fact that we will feel regretful or guilty or proud afterward give us reason to act? I argue that these emotions of self-assessment give us little or no reason to act. The second question concerns emotional valence--how desirable or undesirable our emotions are. What is it that determines the valence of an emotion like regret? I argue that the valence of emotions, and indeed of (...) feelings like pain more broadly, is a function of the sensations they involve. As I suggest, understanding the point about emotional valence helps us answer the first question about anticipated emotions. The paper concludes with a discussion of death-bed regrets, and of whether teenagers should listen to their annoying parents. (shrink)

Early on in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (PH), Sextus Empiricus offers an account of τὸ τέλος τῆς σκεπτικῆς—the aim or final end of Pyrrhonian skepticism. Having previously explained such crucial aspects of Pyrrhonism as the sense in which Skeptics do not hold any beliefs and what its constitutive principles are, in sections I 25-30 Sextus turns to what he seems to regard as the equally important matter of what the aim of Skepticism is. He tells us, An aim [τέλος] is (...) that for the sake of which everything is done or considered, while it is not done or considered for the sake of anything else. Or: an aim is the final object of desire. Up to now we say the aim of the Skeptic is tranquility [ἀταραξία] in matters of opinion and moderation of feeling [μετριοπάθεια] in matters forced on us. (PH I.25)2 In the sense of ‘ethics’ relevant to the Ancients, this constitutes Sextus’ major pronouncement on ethics in the general survey of Skepticism contained in PH I, apart from the specific arguments of the Tenth Mode (PH I 145-163). It is perhaps unsurprising that Sextus’ ethics, the heart of which is evident even in the.. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple argument against life being the product of design. The argument rests on three points. We can conceive of the debate in terms of likelihoods, in the technical sense – how probable the design hypothesis renders our evidence, versus how probable the competing Darwinian hypothesis renders that evidence. God, as traditionally conceived, had many more options by which to bring about life as we observe it than were available to natural selection. That is, the relevant parameters (...) were, in many cases, far more constrained under natural selection. Utterly mundane features of the world, like that the earth is very old, are actually powerful evidence that the world was not designed, since that outcome was optional on the design hypothesis but nearly inevitable on natural selection. (shrink)

The Bachelor's Argument against marriage, as I described it in this journal,1 says that marriage involves taking an imprudent risk of finding oneself committed to a relationship with someone one does not love. The evidence indicates that many people who marry eventually find themselves without the feelings for the other person which made a marital relationship seem worthwhile in the first place; and were that to happen to us, it would seem highly undesirable nonetheless to be locked into a relationship (...) with our spouse as a result of the commitment we made when we married. I went on to argue that several obvious responses to this argument fail. In particular, if we enter into marriage without genuinely intending to keep our promise of maintaining a relationship with our spouse, we will be making an insincere promise. Alternatively, if our promise is sincere, but the morality of promise-keeping is such that when our feelings for the other person fade away the moral force of our commitment is canceled, then the commitment itself seems otiose. However, I did not consider all of the possible responses to the argument, and Iddo Landau has recently made an interesting suggestion about how to interpret the marriage commitment in a way that does not render it immoral or pointless.2 His proposal is that what we are committing ourselves to when we marry is ‘to invest work in performing certain acts that are likely to sustain the. (shrink)

:Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics of these (...) appeals, I don’t wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 13, Issue 3, pp 318 - 338 This paper spells out the following line of thought: How much we care about various things is in constant flux, even as the world remains as it was. Internal affective shifts due to changes in mood, arousal-states or even hunger cause us to be more or less concerned about something. Further, there often isn't any fact of the matter about how much we ought to care about something. As I argue, (...) it isn't the case that there are prudential or moral norms that fix how worried we should be about every state of affairs in the world. And this suggests that what we should do, both prudentially and morally, is often subject to our affective shifts, at least if how much we care about something is an important element of practical reasoning. (shrink)

This paper discusses two epistemic principles that are important to buyers and sellers: the appeal to popularity and the appeal to incentive structures. I point out the various ways these principles are defeasible, and then offer some examples of them at work in the contexts of hiring, politics and the arts. Finally, I consider why these principles are generally neglected, and conclude that our neglect is unwarranted on both epistemic and moral grounds.

_ Source: _Page Count 21 This paper spells out the following line of thought: How much we care about various things is in constant flux, even as the world remains as it was. Internal affective shifts due to changes in mood, arousal-states or even hunger cause us to be more or less concerned about something. Further, there often isn't any fact of the matter about how much we ought to care about something. As I argue, it isn't the case that (...) there are prudential or moral norms that fix how worried we should be about every state of affairs in the world. And this suggests that what we should do, both prudentially and morally, is often subject to our affective shifts, at least if how much we care about something is an important element of practical reasoning. (shrink)

It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, riskbased considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that killing a fully developed person is normally wrong. And there is similar agreement that death is bad for the one who dies, though philosophers have been puzzled about how to explain this.2 But how is the wrongness of killing related to the badness of dying? The trivial answer is that killing is wrong precisely because it inflicts the badness of death upon the victim. Or, to put it another way, killing is wrong because it harms the victim (...) by causing all that is bad about death. This is the harm-based view of the morality of killing. This view can seem platitudinous once we consider the link between the wrongness of killing and the badness of dying. Rejecting the harm-based view seems to involve severing that link, whereas many people are initially inclined to imagine that there must be some important connection between the two. Nonetheless, the harm-based view has several rivals.3 According to one of these, the respect-based view, killing is wrong not because of the harm it causes, but. (shrink)

Sometimes there is evidence about what we would decide to do from an improved deliberative position—one in which we have better information, say, or are subject to less bias, or are able to consider the relevant facts with greater vividness. I argue that in such situations we should act on that evidence, and that there are some important ethical and prudential applications for this idea. Following through with this suggestion allows us to respond to the fact that we are prone (...) to error by making the appropriate adjustments in our decision-making. A secondary goal is to explore the neglected role of vividness in our decision-making. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that just as moral reasons do not diminish in force across space, so they do not diminish across time, and that we should accordingly be neutral between the interests of present people and future people. This allows them to make the plausible claim that we should not discount the interests of future generations when making decisions about things like consuming scarce resources.1 However, when this outlook is combined with a small number of fairly weak assumptions, it becomes (...) difficult to resist answering the title-question in the affirmative.2 By analogy, it also becomes hard to deny that we should delay aid intended to prevent suffering short of death as well. Although I will be arguing that we should take this view seriously, my goal is to explain it, not to vindicate it. (shrink)

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depend- ing on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows.