The moral psychologist Joshua Greene has proposed a number of arguments for the normative significance of empirical research and for the unreliability of deontological intuitions. For these arguments, much hinges on the combination of various components of Greene's research – namely the dual-process theory of moral judgement, ‘personalness’ as a factor in moral decision-making, and his functional understanding of deontology and consequentialism. Incorporating these components, I reconstruct three distinct arguments and show that the Personalness Argument for the claim that empirical research can advance normative ethics and the Combined Argument against deontology are both sound and interesting in themselves. They do not, however, cast doubt on traditional deontology or reserve a specific role for neuroscience. The Indirect Route argument overcomes some of the other arguments’ limitations. It is, however, invalid. I conclude by pointing out the broader philosophical relevance of Greene's arguments as shedding light on second-order morality.

How should anti-paternalists deal with policies that seem to be simultaneously reasonable and paternalistic? In the literature, anti-paternalists have sought to show that many policies that prevent people from harming themselves can be justified without appeal to the good accruing to the people interfered with; that is, without appeal to paternalistic reasons. However, while perhaps identifying sufficient non-paternalistic reasons for supporting these policies under realistic circumstances, anti-paternalists often fail, I argue, to identify satisfactory reasons that adequately reflect our underlying concerns pertaining to such policies. Included in those concerns are arguably the interests and well-being of the people whose choices are restricted by the policy in question. In this way, this article reveals that the strategy of reconciling anti-paternalism with seemingly paternalistic policies is beset by serious problems.

Effective altruism (EA) is a movement devoted to the idea of doing good in the most effective way possible. EA has been the target of a number of critiques. In this article, I focus on one prominent critique: that EA fails to acknowledge the importance of institutional change. One version of this critique claims that EA relies on an overly individualistic approach to ethics. Defenders of EA have objected that this charge either fails to identify a problem with EA's core idea that each of us should do the most good we can, or makes unreasonable claims about what we should do. However, I argue that we can understand the critique in a way that is well motivated, and that can avoid these objections.

The principle known as ‘anonymous Pareto’ has it that an alternative A is better than another, B, in case it is (strictly, non-anonymously) Pareto superior to either B or a permutation of it. It is an attractive idea, offering to apply Pareto-based judgments to a broader range of cases while preserving some of the intuitive appeal of the standard, more familiar principle. This essay considers some ways in which anonymous Pareto is defended and argues against each separately, as well as in more general lines. It suggests that the reasons in light of which people find strict Pareto so compelling are the reasons for doubting the anonymous variation of that principle.

Theories of well-being that give an important role to satisfied pro-attitudes need to account for the fact that, intuitively, the scope of possible objects of pro-attitudes seems much wider than the scope of things, states or events that affect our well-being. Parfit famously illustrated this with his wish that a stranger may recover from an illness: it seems implausible that the stranger's recovery would constitute a benefit for Parfit. There is no consensus in the literature about how to rule out such well-being-irrelevant pro-attitudes. I argue, first, that there is no distinction in kind between well-being-relevant and irrelevant pro-attitudes. Instead, well-being-irrelevant pro-attitudes are the limiting cases on the scale measuring how much of a difference pro-attitudes make to the subject's well-being. Second, I propose a particular scalar model according to which the well-being-relevance of pro-attitudes is measured either by their hedonic tone, or by the subject's conative commitment.

It is widely thought that moral obligations are necessarily guidance giving. This supposed fact has been put to service in defence of the ‘ought-implies-can’ principle according to which one cannot be morally obligated to do the impossible, since impossible-to-satisfy obligations would not give guidance. It is argued here that the supposed fact is no such thing; moral obligations are not necessarily guiding giving, and so the ‘guidance argument’ for ought-implies-can fails.

If ‘F’ is a predicate, then ‘Fer than’ or ‘more F than’ is a corresponding comparative relational predicate. Concerning such comparative relations, John Broome's Collapsing Principle states that, for any x and y, if it is false that y is Fer than x and not false that x is Fer than y, then it is true that x is Fer than y. Luke Elson has recently put forward two counter-examples to this principle, allegedly showing that it yields contradictions if there are borderline cases. In this article, I argue that the Collapsing Principle does not rule out borderline cases, but I also argue that the principle is implausible.

Ben Bramble, Dan Haybron and others have endorsed the idea that there are unconscious, or unfelt, pleasures and pains. These would be sensory experiences that are genuine pleasures or pains, but experiences of which the subject is unaware. The idea that there are such things is worthy of attention in its own right; but I am interested in this alleged phenomenon for a further reason. I am attracted to an attitudinal theory of sensory pleasure and pain. Bramble has claimed that the existence of unconscious pleasures and pains reveals that attitudinal theories cannot be true. Chris Heathwood has offered a reply on behalf of attitudinalism. I think a better reply can be provided. In this article I explain why an attitudinal theory of pleasure and pain is consistent with whatever is plausible in the ‘unconscious pleasure and pain’ phenomenon.

Most of the literature on moral uncertainty has been oriented around the project of giving a normative theory for actions under moral uncertainty. The need for such a theory presupposes that internalist factors such as moral beliefs and evidence are relevant to what an agent ought to do. Some authors, including Elizabeth Harman, reject that presupposition. Harman advances an argument against all such internalist views on the grounds that they entail the exculpation of agents who should strike us as morally culpable. I argue that Harman's argument is only sound with respect to a small subset of internalist views, a subset that no one in fact defends. Though Harman's argument misses its mark, it raises important questions about how internalist theories should be understood. I argue that internalist theories should be understood as issuing rational, not moral, prescriptions.

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines.

Rule-Consequentialism faces ‘the problem of partialacceptance’: How should the ideal code be selected given thepossibility that its rules may not be universally accepted? A new contender,‘Calculated Rates’ Rule-Consequentialism claims to solvethis problem. However, I argue that Calculated Rates merely relocates thepartial acceptance question. Nevertheless, there is a significant lesson fromthis failure of Calculated Rates. Rule-Consequentialism's problem ofpartial acceptance is more helpfully understood as an instance of the broaderproblem of selecting the ideal code given various assumptions –assumptions about who will accept and comply with the rules, but also about howthe rules will be taught and enforced, and how similar the future will be.Previous rich discussions about partial acceptance provide a taxonomy andgroundwork for formulating the best version of Rule-Consequentialism.

Negative duties are duties not to perform an action, while positive duties are duties to perform an action. This article focuses on the question of who holds the positive duties correlative to human rights. I start by outlining the Universal Scope Thesis, which holds that these duties fall on everyone. In its support, I present an argument by analogy: positive and negative duties correlative to human rights perform the same function; correlative negative duties are generally thought to be universal; by analogy, we have reason to think that positive duties are held by everyone. I then consider three disanalogies that challenge the above argument. To address these worries, I introduce the notion of ‘aggregative duties’ – duties that can only be adequately grasped when we focus on the aggregate effect of the actions and omissions of different agents. This framework allows me to refine the initial thesis and address the objections.

Moral theories that demand that we do what is morally best leave no room for the supererogatory. One argument against such theories is that they fail to realize the value of autonomy: supererogatory acts allow for the exercise of autonomy because their omissions are not accompanied by any threats of sanctions, unlike obligatory ones. While this argument fails, I use the distinction it draws – between omissions of obligatory and supererogatory acts in terms of appropriate sanctions – to draw a parallel with psychological perfectionism. Through this parallel, I demonstrate that requiring what is morally best is in fact counter-productive. Thus, by its own lights, a theory that wants us to do what is best ought at the very least to tell us to believe that some actions are supererogatory. As the old adage goes, the best is the enemy of the good; I argue here that the supererogatory is the solution.