By making use of Aurel Kolnai's ethical writings I want to offer a more adequate understanding of moral conflicts and moral dilemmas. Insisting on Kolnai's phenomenological method, in particular, focussing on the agent's moral awareness (or conscience) and his deliberation, results in an understanding of moral conflicts as moments of moral choice rather than anomalies of moral theory. In this way, I argue that one can account for Bernard Williams's phenomenological description of moral conflicts without having to accept his anti-realist conclusions. Moreover, this approach indicates the adequacy of ordinary moral reasoning for decision-making and action guidance. Lastly and importantly, the essay illustrates the relevance of Kolnai's writings to contemporary moral philosophy.

W.V.Quine and Philip Kitcher have both developed naturalistic approaches to the philosophy of science which are partially based on a skeptical view about the possibility of rational inquiry into certain questions of value. Nonetheless, both Quine and Kitcher do not wish to give up on the normative dimension of the philosophy of science. I argue that Kitcher's recent argument against the specification of the goal of science in terms of truth raises a problem for Quine's account of the normative dimensions of the discipline. However Kitcher's alternative suggestion, that the goal of science is to be specified in terms of an ideal democratic procedure, does not escape this problem, given Kitcher's own limited skepticism about rational inquiry into certain questions of value.

Your mother was wise to teach you that just because everybody's doing it, that doesn't make it right. She would have been wise to add that just because everybody thinks it, that doesn't make it right, either. On the other hand, she would not have been wise to add (and probably did not) that when everybody agrees, that is no evidence whatsoever. When nearly everybody believes something, that's a reason in its favor.

The standard view holds that the degree to which an individual's preferences are satisfied is simply the degree to which the individual prefers the prospect that is realized to the other prospects in her preference domain. In this article, I reject the standard view by showing that it violates one fundamental intuition about degrees of preference satisfaction.

Do victims of moral wrongdoing have moral grounds to complain if they have freely committed a similar wrongdoing in the past? This question explores the connection between the moral standing of complainers and their previous deeds. According to Saul Smilansky two equally justifiable competing views create an antinomy with respect to the said question. In this article I present two arguments that attempt to undermine Smilansky's alleged paradox, presenting it as no more than a resolvable moral conflict. My first argument attempts to resolve the conflict in cases where the complaining wrongdoers have already been sanctioned for their past transgression. My second argument challenges the validity of the alleged paradox, based on an alternative explanation of the seemingly paradoxical moral results.

This article argues that, in light of Dead Sea apple cases, we should reject desire-fulfillment welfare theories (DF theories). Dead Sea apples are apples that look attractive while hanging on the tree, but which dissolve into smoke or ashes once plucked. Accordingly, Dead Sea apple cases are cases where an agent desires something and then gets it, only to find herself disappointed by what she has gotten. This article covers both actual DF theories and hypothetical (or idealized) DF theories. On actual DF theories the agent's well-being is determined by her actual desires, while on hypothetical DF theories the agent's well-being is determined by the desires that she would have if she were fully and vividly informed with respect to non-evaluative information. Various actual and hypothetical DF theory responses to Dead Sea apple objections are considered, and all such responses are argued to be inadequate.

The contention of this article is that parents have an obligation to care for their children, but for reasons that are not typically offered. I argue that this obligation can be unfair to parents but not unjust. I do not provide an account of what our specific obligations are to our children. Rather, I focus on providing a justification for any obligation to care for them at all. My argument turns on providing an external description of the parent–child relationship in order to establish that parents are in a unique position among adults in their ability to help and harm their own children. Given that children are deserving of moral regard, I conclude that parents are obligated – in a way that is often unfair – to provide this care. I end by considering implications for social policy.

Unrejectability is the property shared by things no one could reasonably reject. Following the lead of T. M. Scanlon, modern contractualists hold Principle Contractualism: An act is obligatory when conformity to unrejectable principles requires its performance. This article entertains Act Contractualism: An act is obligatory when its performance is unrejectable. The article hypothesizes that Principle Contractualism owes its initial plausibility to the assumption that following it somehow realizes unrejectability, if only indirectly. The article then argues that, whereas following Act Contractualism realizes unrejectability, following Principle Contractualism realizes a convoluted, principle-mediated, non-causal conformity relation between acts and unrejectability. But then the notion that this relation is what matters ultimately in action does not seem to enjoy independent plausibility. After interrogating Scanlon's objection that the challenge to the principle-based nature of contractualism is ‘misconceived’, I conclude that Act Contractualism is the more fitting contractualist theory of obligation.

This discussion attempts to show that the elusive solution to the trolley problem lies hidden in the solution to another perennial problem in moral philosophy: the ducking puzzle. The key to solving the ducking puzzle is an important, but overlooked, exception to our obligation not to harm others, an exception for ‘fair competition’, which, it is argued here, is also the key to solving the trolley problem.

One form of scepticism about the possibility of moral theory does not deny that there is something describable as ‘the conduct of life’, but it argues that there is no special ethical account to be given of this since conduct has no identifiably moral dimension. Here I explore the possibility that the problem of identifying distinctively moral aspects of action is explained by the thesis that the moral is ubiquitous; that every human action is – not ‘may be’ – morally significant. To say, however, that morality is all pervasive is not to say anything about how demanding moral considerations may be. Reasons for action ultimately relate to promoting or protecting the human good, and their relative strength and urgency derives from the manner, extent and immediacy of their bearing upon this end and not from belonging to some logically distinct category.

Many of us think that we have duties of distributive justice towards our fellow citizens that we do not have towards foreigners. Is that thought justified? This article considers the nature of the state's relationship to distributive justice from the perspective of utilitarianism, a theory that is barely represented in contemporary philosophical debates on this question. My strategy is to mount a utilitarian case for state-specific duties of distributive justice that is similar in its basic structure to the one that is standardly mounted for special duties towards the near and dear. I begin with a discussion of whether or not the co-citizen relationship can be justified in terms of its welfare consequences. I then consider what the answer to that first question implies concerning the duties of distributive justice that arise within that relationship.

According to Railton: x is good for me iff my Fully Informed Self (FIS) while contemplating my situation would want me to want x. I offer four interpretations of this view. The first three are inadequate. Their inadequacy rests on the following two facts: (a) my FIS cannot want me to want what would be irrational for me to want, (b) when contemplating what is rational for me to want we must specify a particular way in which I could rationally acquire the recommended desire. As a result, what my FIS could reasonably want me to want is limited by what information my FIS could reliably convey to me. And therefore what my FIS could reasonably want me to want cannot be grounded in changes in desires that my FIS cannot publicly justify. The fourth interpretation limits the scope of what my FIS could want me to want in a way that avoids these problems, but conflicts with standard intuitions about what is a non-moral good.

This article develops an account of how economic and political institutions can limit the applicability of principles of justice even in non-relational cosmopolitan conceptions. It shows that fundamental principles of justice underdetermine fair distributive shares as well as justice-based requirements. It argues that institutions partially constitute the content of justice by determining distributive shares and by resolving indeterminacies about justice-based requirements resulting from strategic interaction and disagreement. In the absence of existing institutions principles of justice might not be applicable for assessing distributions or guiding individual action and institutional design. Hence, accepting a specific cosmopolitan conception of justice is insufficient to settle global distributive questions.