In On Liberty, Mill introduced the concept of ‘experiments in living’. I will provide an account of what Mill saw to be the basic problem he was addressing – the extensive pressure to fit in with the crowd, and how this bred mediocrity. I connect this to worries about public reason models of justification. I argue that a generalized version of Mill's argument offers us a better path to political justification stemming from experimentation. Rather than grounding political justification on shared political reasons, we justify our political culture on our ability to reject consensus views and try alternatives.

According to Jeremy Bentham's account of happiness, pleasure is understood as homogeneous, without qualitative differences between pleasures, and the relation between pleasure and its objects is understood as morally and psychologically arbitrary. John Stuart Mill's ‘mental crisis’ emerged as he realized the psychological impossibility of living according to this view. His recovery was aided by engagement with the poetry of Wordsworth, through which he developed the notion that the cultivation of character and sentiments is an essential element of a good life. I aim to explore Mill's engagement with Wordsworth, and shed light on how Mill felt able to reconcile hedonic utilitarianism with his new view of the ‘inner life’ of the individual.

Many philosophers have argued that agents must be irrational to lose out in a ‘value pump’ or ‘money pump’. A number of different conclusions have been drawn from this claim. The ‘Value Pump’ (VP) has been one of the main arguments offered for the axioms of expected utility theory; it has been used to show that options cannot be incomparable or on a par; and it has been used to show that our past choices have normative significance for our subsequent choices. In this article, I argue that the fact that someone loses out in a value pump provides no reason to believe that they are irrational. The VP is impotent.

I propose an analysis of harm in terms of causation: harm is when a subject is caused to be worse off. The pay-off from this lies in the details. In particular, importing influential recent work from the causation literature yields a contrastive-counterfactual account. This enables us to incorporate harm's multiple senses into a unified scheme, and to provide that scheme with theoretical ballast. It also enables us to respond effectively to previous criticisms of counterfactual accounts, as well as to sharpen criticisms of rival views.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott has been attacked in recent decades because his Terra Nova expedition (1910–1913) had to rely on substandard Siberian ponies. Certain commentators have argued that this was Scott's fault, but the available evidence indicates that blame should rest with the buyer Cecil Meares. Additionally, archive evidence indicates that Scott specifically requested Captain Lawrence Oates to travel to Siberia to assist Meares in 1910, and that Oates refused Scott's request.

Drawing on the author's recent book Ethics for a Broken World, this article explores the philosophical implications of the fact that climate change – or something like it – might lead to a broken world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs, and where our affluent way of life is no longer an option. It argues that the broken world has an impact, not only on applied ethics, but also on moral theory. It then explores that impact. The article first argues that the broken world creates severe difficulties for both libertarians and contractualists. It then explores the impact of the broken world on utilitarianism – and especially on reflective equilibrium arguments for rule-utilitarianism. The article concludes that, while such arguments may still be viable, the form of rule-utilitarianism that results will be less moderate and less liberal than contemporary rule-utilitarians might hope.

An account of G.R. De Wilde's contribution to Arctic photography is presented. His images from Sir Allen Young's 1875 voyage in Pandora are the earliest to be published from a British expedition, albeit in a volume that was privately printed.