Deprivation offers a plausible explanation for the badness of death, so fear is not unreasonable. But horror at the prospect of one's death is not just extreme fear because horror is structurally different than fear. Horror requires a different explanation. For Sartre, horror is possible only in unique circumstances. I argue that Sartre's view, when combined with the subjective incomprehensibility of one's annihilation, can explain horror and other negative emotions that are not contingent on deprivation. Further, I argue that while (...) fear can be reasonable if one's death will deprive, Lucretius's Symmetry Argument shows that horror is unreasonable. (shrink)

Environmental philosophers are often concerned to show that non-sentient things, such as plants or ecosystems, have interests and therefore are appropriate objects of moral concern. They deny that mentality is a necessary condition for having interests. Yet they also deny that they are committed to recognizing interests in things like machines. I argue that either machines have interests (and hence moral standing) too or mentality is a necessary condition for inclusion within the purview of morality. I go on to argue (...) that the aspect of mentality necessary for having interests is more complicated than mere sentience. (shrink)

Is there a morally relevant difference between a brain‐damaged human being and a nonhuman animal at the same cognitive and emotional level to justify, say, performing medical experiments on the animal but not the human being? Some hold that the misfortune of the human being allows us to distinguish between them. I consider the nature of misfortunate and argue that an appeal to misfortune fails to distinguish between the human being and the nonhuman animal when the treatment at issue is (...) equally morally serious, since the source of the limitation taken advantage of by performing the medical experiment, whether misfortunate or natural vulnerability, is irrelevant. (shrink)

Is there a morally relevant difference between a brain‐damaged human being and a nonhuman animal at the same cognitive and emotional level to justify, say, performing medical experiments on the animal but not the human being? Some hold that the misfortune of the human being allows us to distinguish between them. I consider the nature of misfortunate and argue that an appeal to misfortune fails to distinguish between the human being and the nonhuman animal when the treatment at issue is (...) equally morally serious, since the source of the limitation taken advantage of by performing the medical experiment, whether misfortunate or natural vulnerability, is irrelevant. (shrink)

Lucretius famously argued that if we think death is bad because it deprives us of time we could have had by living longer than we do, then when we are born must be bad too, since we could have been born earlier than we were, and so be deprived of that time as well. John Martin Fischer thinks Lucretius’s symmetry argument fails because we have a bias toward the future. I argue that Fischer’s approach does not answer Lucretius. In contrast (...) to Fischer, I think that we can show an objective difference between the time before our birth and the time after our death, which means that we are justified in adopting different attitudes towards them. I revise a point made by Thomas Nagel that while we might live longer than we do, we cannot exist earlier than we did and remain the same people throughout. (shrink)

I cannot possibly do justice to James Taylor's main contention that full-blooded epicureanism is true. But if it is true then, as he notes, this ‘bold’ philosophical position promises to revise our thinking about many areas in bioethics which presuppose that death is bad.1 Of course if Epicureanism is true, the implications run much wider and deeper than bioethics. Any human activity that in any way presupposes the badness of death will be groundless—killing or being killed in war will be (...) morally inconsequential, saving people from death will be without merit and execution could not count as punishment. But, Taylor assures us, the truth of Epicureanism need not force such drastic practical changes for two reasons: excising the mistaken non-epicurean portion of those practical matters might not exhaust our concerns with those questions, and in any case we might be hard-wired to think that death is bad, so we would be stuck with a view that we see on reflection is false .2 However, that much of our common sense practical thinking about life and death might remain intact despite being groundless is small comfort, since we would then be something like Christians trying to carry on who realise, on reflection, that there is no God.Taylor seeks to mitigate …. (shrink)

I argue that forgiveness necessarily involves overcoming resentment to which we are entitled when wronged. My view calls into question the standard understanding of forgiveness according to which resentment is no longer warranted once the transgressor apologizes or makes amends in some other way. If forgiveness entails relinquishing unwarranted resentment, as the standard account has it, then it is not freely given, since one must relinquish unwarranted resentments. On my view, forgiveness remains elective since one chooses to relinquish resentment to (...) which one has every right irrespective of whether the transgressor apologizes. (shrink)

For moral realists moral judgments will be a kind of factual judgment that involves the basically reliable apprehension of an objective moral reality. I argue that factual judgments display at least some degree of conceptual sensitivity to error, while moral judgments do not. Therefore moral judgments are not a kind of factual judgment.