In this paper I critically evaluate Ronald Dworkin's attempt in Life's Dominion to understand sacred value as a form of intrinsic value which is grounded in investment. I argue that there are two problems with Dworkin's conception of intrinsic value. First, it does not allow him to distinguish, as he must, between incremental and sacred values. Secondly, sacred value qua intrinsic value is not the kind of value which can be grounded in investment. I argue that both of these problems are an implication of a realist conception of intrinsic value. Nevertheless, investment does seem to play a role in our judgements about intrinsic value and in light of this I aim to develop an alternative account of intrinsic value whichcan make sense of this.

For both its enthusiastic adherents as well as its more generous opponents, liberalism commands considerable ethical appeal but at a price. And that price is its lack of systematic integrity or coherence. The charm of its ethical appeal stems from the great values which it celebrates. But for many these very values seem fatally incommensurable, seem to be forever colliding with and thwarting one another. As Isaiah Berlin has never tired of reminding us, liberty and equality continue to defy our best efforts to reconcile them, to weave them together in some kind of orderly and compelling way. Liberalism, in other words, is flawed, if not tragically flawed. For those who nevertheless remain charmed by its ethical appeal, the tragedy of the incommensurability of its basic values is disappointing and disturbing.

In the 1970s feminist scholars rediscovered J. S. Mill's writings on sexual equality. The new feminist appraisal confronted traditional Mill scholarship which had tended either to neglect Mill's writings on women or to concentrate on Harriet Taylor's influence on Mill's views on sexual equality. But even the most cursory review of the writings of feminist scholars reveals a lack of consensus.

Sidgwick argued that utilitarianism and egoism were in conflict, that neither theory was better justified than the other, and concluded that there was a ‘dualism of practical reason’ and all that remained to him was ‘universal scepticism’. The dualism argument introduced by Sidgwick is an extremely powerful sceptical argument that no theory of ethics is rationally required: it cannot be shown that a moral sceptic or an egoist ought to accept the moral theory, otherwise she is unreasonable. I explain two ways in which the significance of the dualism argument has been underestimated. First, I suggest that a hybrid theory such as utilitarianism with an egoist bias is not (as is sometimes thought) a solution to the dualism. Second, I argue that the dualism argument is not restricted to a conflict between hedonic egoism and utilitarianism, but applies to any attempt to show that a theory of ethics is rationally required.

What I call the Just Distribution theory of punishment holds that the justification of punishment is that it rectifies the social distribution of benefits and burdens which has been upset by the offender. I argue that a recent version of this theory is no more viable than earlier versions. Like them, it fails in its avowed intention to deliver fundamental intuitions about crime and punishment. The root problem is its foundation in Hart's Principle of Fair Play, a foundation which, I argue, is inappropriate for a theory of punishment.

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women.