Normative Ethics

Featured on New Work in Philosophy.

The focus of these essays is on actions that risk—or, in some cases, make inevitable—serious harm. In this essay our primary (though not exclusive) focus will be on social policy. In this connection we wish to explore a well-known alternative to consequentialism, namely contractualism. At a rough first pass, consequentialism looks at aggregate benefits and costs, while the contractualist tells us that our actions must be justifiable to each person potentially impacted. But there is an important divide within views belonging to that genus. According to the ex post version of contractualism, at least at a first pass, the relevant complaint that each individual has regarding an action has to do with the burdens that the action in fact ends up imposing on that individual. On the ex ante version, the relevant complaint turns on the risks for each individual generated by an action and does not depend on which eventualities in fact obtain. 

This chapter is divided into three main sections. Section 1 presents what we take to be a devastating problem for ex ante contractualism.  Section 2 explores ex post contractualism. As we shall see, the literature is frequently mistaken about the consequences of ex post contractualism and also insufficiently attentive to the varieties of ex post contractualism. Section 3 sets about devising decision theories appropriate to the various versions of contractualism. Some concluding remarks follow. 

In this paper, I present a novel contractualist analysis of risk-imposing activities. According to most ex ante contractualists, there is a principled distinction to be made between permissible risk-imposing activities such as medical treatments and impermissible risk-imposing activities such as medical experimentation. After demonstrating that previous attempts to make this distinction are implausible, I argue that the most promising version of ex ante contractualism generates similar verdicts with respect to the permissibility of both risky medical treatments and medical experimentation. With this in mind, if we think medical experimentation is never permissible, we may be moved to either judge risky medical treatments impermissible as well or to reject ex ante contractualism altogether.

In this article, I argue that there is a tension between our moral evaluation of risky actions and our moral evaluation of sequences of risky actions. In particular, I argue that both of the following may be true: (1) each particular risky action constituting the sequence is permissible, but (2) the sequence of risky actions is one that the agent ought not to perform. I show how these claims are compatible by distinguishing between the moral evaluation of actions and the moral evaluation of sequences of actions.

There’s more to meriting praise than doing what’s objectively right. After all, one might do what’s objectively right as the result of a fluke or with malicious intent. While doing what’s objectively right is not enough to merit praise, it’s natural to think that some list of sufficient conditions can be assembled. The most common approach to such lists entails that, when one does what is objectively right with the appropriate epistemic state and/or motivation, one merits praise for one’s action. In other words, according to the most influential extant views, if one both does what’s right and meets certain additional criteria, one will not only succeed in doing what is morality required but will also succeed in deserving positive moral evaluation for what one has done. In this paper, I use the example of extended actions to show that drawing any sort of link between doing what’s objectively right and being worthy of praise is much more difficult than has been previously appreciated.

In certain cases, it is natural to think that two or more individuals have an equal claim to some indivisible good. To take an example put forward by Broome, before a game both competitors may have an equal claim to the first move or the more advantageous position on the field. Along similar lines, there are many cases in which individuals have an equal claim to avoid some indivisible harm. To use another example from Broome, each member of a platoon of soldiers might have an equal claim to avoid a dangerous mission that is necessary to save the entire group or to advance the war effort more generally. In cases such as these, we face significant pressure to allocate the good or harm using a procedure that gives each individual an equal chance of obtaining that to which she possesses an equal claim.

In this paper, I aim to accomplish three tasks. First, I introduce the notion of procedural chances. This notion of procedural chances is important, I argue, because when individuals have an equal claim to some good (or to avoid some harm), each ought to have an equal procedural chance to obtain that good (or avoid the harm). Second, I show that this notion of procedural chances provides us with a fresh and interesting perspective on debates about statistical lives and the ex ante pareto principle. Lastly, I make clear that, in contrast to my systematic and unified treatment of these two topics, the views of other prominent thinkers on this topic are at war with themselves.

It’s widely accepted that whether or not an agent merits praise for performing a particular action importantly depends on her motivation in doing so. What has received less attention is the importance of an agent’s moral understanding to whether she merits praise for performing a particular action, or whether her action has ‘moral worth.’ The first task of this paper is relatively straightforward: to show that two prominent attempts to address the importance of moral understanding to moral worth, namely that of Zoe Johnson King and Paulina Sliwa, are unsuccessful. The second task of this paper, which is more novel and ambitious, is to show that agents who lack moral understanding are a challenge to more accounts of moral worth than has been previously recognized. My goal in this paper is largely negative: to show that extant accounts of such conditions are unable to account for the relevance of an agent’s understanding to her praiseworthiness for performing a particular action. In making clear these shortcomings, however, I also hope to make clear just how complicated it is to pin down exactly when an agent merits praise for her actions. 

Many accounts of moral responsibility have emerged recently that question the importance of conscious choice for moral responsibility. Instead of this ‘volitional’ requirement, these ‘attributionist’ accounts claim that agents are responsible for their actions when their actions reflect who they are and what they value. This paper argues that attributionist accounts are too quick to dismiss the connection between volition and moral responsibility. By excising conscious control from their accounts, attributionists leave open the undesirable possibility that an agent may fulfil all necessary conditions for moral responsibility even when she is under the conscious control of another person. Through analyzing situations in which attributionist conditions for moral responsibility are met while an agent is controlled by someone else, the link between an agent’s volition and her moral responsibility becomes more apparent.