This paper investigates Bentham’s declaration in an unpublished manuscript of the first chapter of Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) that he “had” the “Principle of Utility” from, among other sources, the ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus and Carneades. The paper confirms Epicurus’ influence on Bentham’s development of the “Principle of Utility” by identifying deep connections and similarities in the philosophical doctrines expressed by Epicurus with Bentham’s views relating to three key issues: the goal in life and what has value for human beings; how human beings make choices to act; and what actions are right or just, and what is justice. The paper also shows that Bentham developed the “Principle of Utility” to satisfy Carneades’ three requirements for any ethical theory: a criterion for choices in every action, what constitutes a right action; grounded on a consideration external to the theory; and adapted to a motivating factor originally present in human nature.

Vegans face a problem, at least if they base their arguments upon principles against causing harm. As Donald Bruckner (2020) has pointed out, these same principles risk ruling out a great many other practices – even eating dessert. Eating dessert risks being impermissible because of the crop deaths associated with agricultural practices, especially the use of insecticides and rodenticides. I suggest that the extent to which this problem emerges depends on the exact principle vegans appeal to. Under some principles against causing harm, the problem indeed stands. I suggest that the vegan has a couple of options for escaping this problem. She might appeal to a principle that doesn’t have such implications. Alternatively, she might simply bite the bullet and accept that morality really is much more demanding here than we might have thought. I’ll give some reasons why biting this bullet isn’t as bad an option as one might suppose.

The claim is commonplace that harm-benefit analysis (HBA), a weighing procedure widely used in ethics reviews of animal experiments, is utilitarian. We argue this is false and misleading for three reasons: (1) HBA does not compare, let alone maximize, utility across different options, but merely assesses whether the consequences of one option are net-positive, thereby ignoring opportunity costs; (2) HBA does not aggregate utility coherently, as it allows for varying degrees of speculation in the assessment of harms and benefits; (3) HBA is not concerned with moral evaluation or moral goodness. From our discussion, we derive positive suggestions for how to improve animal experimentation policy and public communications about it. Most straightforwardly, scholars and institutions should stop claiming that HBA is “utilitarian.”

In his ‘The Countefactual Argument Against Abortion’ (2023) Ryan Kulesa argues that it is prima facie wrong to kill a ‘counterfactual person’. Some early foetuses, though still lacking consciousness, are counterfactual persons. Hence, it is prima facie wrong to kill (abort) these foetuses. Kulesa’s aim is to reconcile apparently conflicting intuitions about abortion and related acts, e.g., the failure to rescue frozen foetuses in abortion rescue cases, which philosophers writing about abortion find it hard to reconcile. I argue that he does not succeed because his argument does not establish that the mere fact that an entity is a counterfactual person is a sufficient condition of the prima face wrongness of killing it. More generally, Kulesa does not establish that the concept of counterfactual personhood is of utility in the debates he is concerned with at all.

Does Benatar’s anti-natalism – the view that it is better never to have been – imply that death is better than continued living? This is known as the pro-mortalist question, a compelling, unresolved question surrounding anti-natalist discourse. In order to answer this question, I analyse two theories about the badness of death that Benatar uses to argue against the idea that anti-natalism implies pro-mortalism. The first is that death deprives one of the good things in life. The second is that death annihilates the person. However, I argue that these theories fail to block pro-mortalism. As such, I conclude that Benatar’s anti-natalism implies pro-mortalism, suggesting that if it is better never to have been, then it is better to cease to be.

Pleasure is widely thought to have intrinsic value. However, this thesis has been threatened by the argument that pleasure is a mental state that essentially involves the subject’s conative attitudes. Its value, then, would be subjective. Though the existing version of the argument can be resisted by simply rejecting the attitudinal theories of pleasure on which it is based, I will develop a new and more general version based on the reasonable hypothesis that the phenomenal character of pleasure is reducible to a physical or functional property. If this new version is convincing, then the most promising way to secure the intrinsicality of the value of pleasure and to escape all versions of the subjectivity argument might be to embrace a non-reductionist account of pleasure and its value.

Many believe that relationships can make a constitutive difference to the moral status of paternalistic treatment. For example, it is often assumed that it’s easier to justify paternalizing a spouse than a stranger. But although this thought is widespread, there exists no detailed account of how relationships could mitigate paternalistic complaints. The aim of this paper is to develop an account of this phenomenon, drawing on the work of Margaret Gilbert and the notion of joint commitments. According to the resulting view, close relations can constitutively mitigate paternalistic complaints by rendering paternalistic interference consistent with the will of the paternalized agent.

On the Dual View, absolute and comparative welfare provide moral reasons to make individuals well off and better off. Given that dual reason-giving force, what reason does welfare provide overall? I explore two approaches. The Collective Approach first aggregates the absolute and comparative reasons separately before combining them at the collective level. However, it implies that, if an individual gains or loses enough welfare, we have reasons to create an unhappy rather than another happy individual. The Individual Approach combines the absolute and comparative reasons for each individual before aggregating across all individuals. It avoids the objection if comparative reasons mitigate but don’t outweigh absolute reasons. That, however, implies hypersensitivity and contradicts the prioritarian idea. We could also restrict comparative reasons, but only on pain of effectively abandoning the Dual View. Or we accept one half of the objection and adopt an asymmetry for comparative welfare to avoid the other half.

What is it to treat people with respect when commenting upon their appearance? What duties does widespread vulnerability to body anxiety impose on us concerning the remarks we make about people’s looks? I provide partial answers to these questions by engaging with three proposals. First, the account of aesthetic exploration developed by Sherri Irvin. Second, the principle of the unmodified body defended by Clare Chambers. Third, the ideal of body reflexivity advocated by Kate Manne. I argue that none of the moral duties these accounts point towards can be justified straightforwardly as a requirement of treating people with equal respect, but the idea that it is disrespectful to treat a person’s appearance as inadequate can be defended when hierarchies of attractiveness translate into differences in perceived moral status. Furthermore, qualified versions of each can be justified by the protection they provide when body shaming is liable to cause debilitating anxiety.

Many of the most significant goods in human life are fleeting, fragile, and subject to loss. But this aspect of such goods, what I call their preciousness, is undertheorized. Here I provide an account of the nature of precious goods, and argue that this category of goods is significant. I argue that while the preciousness of goods is not a consistent contributor to their intrinsic value, preciousness nevertheless calls for a distinct attitudinal response on the part of rational agents: a focused, joyful attention I refer to as cherishing.

This paper highlights the fundamental importance of the family as a pre-political institution for moral education and a signaling mechanism for cooperation in Locke’s state of nature. Conjugal societies moderate children by teaching them to follow the law of nature. They also serve as signaling mechanisms that enable moderate individuals to trust others and collectively enforce the law of nature. The family, as a pre-political moderating institution, underpins the fragile peace in Locke’s state of nature. Contrary to common beliefs, I argue that the family makes Locke’s depiction of the state of nature more credible than Hobbes’s. This has significant implications: exegetically, it explains why individuals in Locke’s state of nature (imperfectly) follow the law of nature; normatively, it provides reasons to prefer Locke’s liberalism over Hobbes’s authoritarianism; and speculatively, it invites social contract theorists to seriously consider the extent to which liberal political institutions rely on informal institutions.

This paper reevaluates the importance of John Taurek’s article “Should the Numbers Count?” putting his arguments in the context of work on the role of love in ethics. We can fruitfully read Taurek as attempting to ground a duty of beneficence in love. Taurek’s article should be read as having three distinct strands of thought. It articulates beneficence as responding to a value that is non-aggregative, criticizes the aggregation of human value as such, and assumes that beneficence has a very wide scope – from ordinary helping actions to disaster cases. What critics overlook is that even if there is some aggregative account of human value, Taurek gives powerful reasons for thinking that it is patently not the value typically taken to underlie our duty of beneficence. This leaves us, however, with difficult questions about the scope and limits of the duty of beneficence – and so of love – in ethics.

Critical-Level Utilitarianism entails one of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, depending on the critical level. Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism is a version of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where it is indeterminate which well-being level is the critical level. Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Critical-Level Utilitarianism where additions of lives in a range of well-being between the good and the bad lives make the resulting outcome incomparable to the original outcome. These views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, they avoid the Sadistic Conclusion, and they agree on all outcome comparisons not involving indeterminacy or incomparability. So it may seem unclear whether we have any reason to favour one of these theories over the other. But I argue that Indeterminate Critical-Level Utilitarianism still entails the disjunction of the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion, which is also repugnant. By contrast, Undistinguished Critical-Range Utilitarianism does not entail this conclusion.