When writing Limits, Bentham introduced the idea of laws in principem: they are duty-imposing commands, receiving determination from a sovereign, and prescribing to him what he shall do. Hart argues that Bentham’s laws in principem are not duty-imposing, but power-conferring or disability-imposing, which courts accept as reasons for invalidating enactments conflicting with them. After presenting several major criticisms, he concludes that Bentham’s idea of laws in principem cannot be reconciled with his command theory, and that a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the latter is required to accommodate the former. I show that Bentham correctly regards laws in principem as essentially duty-imposing, and that his command theory can easily survive Hart’s criticisms. I conclude that it not only can accommodate laws in principem, but can better explain their nature and operation.

An important strand of argument in Alastair Norcross's Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands is the rejection of the standard account of harm, which underwrites non-comparative statements of the form “act A harms person X.” According to Norcross, the correct account of harm is a contextualist one that only underwrites comparative statements of the form “act A results in a worse world for X than alternative act B, and a better world than alternative act C.” This article criticizes Norcross's contextualist account and his rejection of the standard account. It follows that moral theorists of all kinds should not be deterred by Norcross's arguments from continuing to rely on the standard account and using it to non-comparatively categorize some acts as harmings.

Most people believe that animal agriculture for food production is permissible. At the same time, bestiality enjoys neither widespread social endorsement nor practice. It would be surprising, then, if it turned out that a commitment to the permissibility of one implied the permissibility of the other. This is the case that I make in this paper. Given the truth of some very plausible moral premises, I show that in a wide range of possible instantiations, if a social practice of raising animals for food is permissible, then so too is a social practice of raising animals for sex. While I don’t explicitly argue for this, my hope is that this compels readers to reject the permissibility of animal agriculture rather than endorse the social practice of bestiality.

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross presents contextualist accounts of good and right acts as well as harm and free will. All of his analyses compare what is assessed with “the appropriate alternative,” which is supposed to vary with context. This paper clarifies Norcross's approach, distinguishes it from previous versions of moral contextualism and contrastivism, and reveals difficulties in adequately specifying the context and the appropriate alternative. It also shows how these difficulties can be avoided by moving from contextualism to a kind of contrastivism that does not claim that any alternative is or is not appropriate or relevant.

Paradigm cases of disappointment occur when we fail to attain the object of our desire, or when doing so frustrates some of our other desires. However, some non-standard cases seem not to fit this pattern. We occasionally find ourselves disappointed despite perceiving that our desire has been fulfilled. Experiences of this sort are sometimes called ‘Dead Sea apples’. Such cases threaten the viability of theories that claim that fulfilling our desires always makes our lives go better for us. This paper considers what reflection on the nature of Dead Sea apples can teach us about the structure of desire and its relationship to well-being. I argue that this type of disappointment often occurs when we have a frustrated conjunctive desire that contains some satisfied conjuncts. The fact that the desire contains some satisfied conjuncts explains why we are prone to misidentifying it as fulfilled.

Climate change is to a large extent a collective action problem, but many believe that individual action is also required. But what if no individual contribution to climate change is necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change-induced harms? This issue is known as the problem of inconsequentialism. It is particularly problematic for act consequentialism because the theory does not seem to judge such inconsequential contributions negatively. In this paper, we apply Henry Sidgwick's idea of esoteric morality to climate change and assess whether what we call a climate esoteric morality could help to deal with the problem of inconsequentialism from an act consequentialist perspective. Consequentialists ought then to promote what we call nonconsequentialist faux principles; exaggerate existing consequentialist principles that pro tanto forbid contributing to climate change whenever strictly consequentialist principles fail to do so; and refrain from criticising nonconsequentialist principles that forbid contributing to climate change.

A textbook objection to consequentialism is that it is too demanding—on the assumption that a moral theory which is excessively demanding thereby loses plausibility. In this paper, I assess whether the mechanisms employed by two versions of rule consequentialism, those of Brad Hooker and Tim Mulgan, adequately meet the requirement of not being too demanding. I also examine whether the concept of human nature might help determine what should count as demanding for a moral theory. While this suggestion also faces significant challenges, I contend that prescribing less partiality towards the present generation may not be a drawback for the consequentialist frameworks under consideration.

A common assumption is that psychological egoism, the view that a person can do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest, combined with ought-implies-can, the view that a person morally ought to do an act only if she can do it, entails the view – call it OIB – that a person morally ought to do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest. I argue that psychological egoism and ought-implies-can, interpreted fairly, use “can” in different ways; consequently, they do not entail OIB. They entail something similar to OIB, but not OIB itself. From these facts several significant results follow, each concerning arguments or assumptions about psychological, ethical, or rational egoism. For instance, they undermine the view that psychological egoism rules out those other two forms of egoism.

Norcross's recent book has a two-part title: Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands. In this essay I focus on the second part of the title – the idea that there are moral reasons without demands. I do not think that it is at all obvious what this means, and whether it is distinct from Norcross's central (and compelling) idea, that moral reasons come in degrees. I explore several possible ways of cashing out a distinctive claim that morality does not make demands, and argue that we should not accept that morality does not make demands. It does make demands, but it sometimes makes them in degrees.

Two important tasks for theorists of justice are to determine the bounds of justice, which explain why some claims are matters of justice and others are not, and to determine the demands of justice, which settle conflicts that fall within those bounds. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between bounds and demands, revealing two striking things. First, while thresholds have typically been understood to be demands of justice, their use as such is confusing and arguably implausible. Second, thresholds appear to be better understood as demarcating the bounds of justice, if a suitable explanation for their use can be found. We explore three explanations for why thresholds can demarcate bounds and assess the prospects for seeing thresholds in this new and different role. These are satiability of the value of goods, satiability of justice, and conceptual engineering.

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross defends a view he calls “scalar consequentialism.” I argue, first, that Norcross does not use the term consistently, since in most passages this seems to refer to a version of consequentialism that rejects all claims about rightness altogether, yet in other passages Norcross claims that scalar consequentialists should nonetheless embrace his favored “contextualist” account of rightness. I also argue, second, that the particular arguments offered by Norcross as to why consequentialists should forgo more traditional consequentialist accounts of rightness (such as maximizing or satisficing) are unpersuasive.

Moral condemnation of hypocrisy is both ubiquitous and peculiar. Its incessant focus on word–action consistency gives rise to two properties that distinguish it from other types of moral judgment: non-additivity and content independence. Non-additivity refers to the fact that, in judgments of hypocrisy, good words do not offset bad actions, nor do good actions offset bad words. Content independence refers to the fact that we condemn hypocrisy regardless of whether we would condemn the words or actions in isolation from one another. To make sense of these peculiar properties, we present a costly signaling model of social cooperation, in which hypocrisy norms allow a separating equilibrium to emerge, thus facilitating reliable communication and higher levels of social trust. We compare our functionalist account of hypocrisy to other philosophical accounts, arguing that a functionalist analysis better illuminates our moral practices and public discourse.

According to the asymmetry, creating a miserable person is morally impermissible but failing to create a happy person is morally permissible, other things being equal. Some attempt to underwrite the asymmetry by appealing to a choice-dependent moral theory according to which the deontic status of an act depends on whether the agent performs it. We show that all choice-dependent moral theories in the literature are vulnerable to what we call ‘The Parent Trap’. These theories imply that the presence of morally impermissible options can generate a moral requirement to create happy people, even at the cost of the procreator’s well-being. We consider two new choice-dependent theories that avoid this result but show that they generate an implausible moral permission to create miserable people. Choice-dependent theories therefore fail to do justice to the intuitions that motivate the asymmetry.

Eggleston claims that my account of harm suffers from more problems than his preferred account. I clarify my account, and explain how his account suffers from some of the supposed problems he charges my account with. Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that his contrastivist approach is preferable to my contextualism. I clarify the role of linguistic context, and suggest that our positions are quite close to each other. Mason worries that my scalar approach does not properly accommodate the notions of blame and moral responsibility. I maintain that such notions have only a derivative status, but are nonetheless important, and I suggest fruitful avenues for the scalar consequentialist to pursue. Kagan claims that the addition of a contextualist account of “right” renders my view not importantly different from maximizing or satisficing views. I explain why this is mistaken, and why neither maximizing nor satisficing versions of rightness can explain its supposed moral significance.

Daniel Immerman has recently put forward a novel account of harm, the Worse than Nothing Account. We argue that this account faces fatal problems in cases in which an agent performs several simultaneous actions. We also argue that our criticism is considerably more powerful than another one that has recently been advanced.

Melina Constantine Bell (2021) argues that J. S. Mill's harm principle permits society to coercively interfere with the use of bigoted insults, since these insults are harmful on “a more expansive, modern, conception of harm.” According to Bell, these insults are harmful in virtue of their contributing to detrimental objective states like health problems. I argue that people with illiberal dispositions might have intense and sustained negative subjective reactions to behavior that the harm principle ought to protect, reactions intense enough to affect their health or other objective interests. Bell's way of thinking about harm therefore has illiberal implications. Yet I agree with her that bigoted insults should be regarded as harmful. I therefore propose an alternative way of understanding harm according to which subjective pain is a harm when it is intentionally caused.