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196Causal Accounts of HarmingPacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2): 420-445. 2021.A popular view of harming is the causal account (CA), on which harming is causing harm. CA has several attractive features. In particular, it appears well equipped to deal with the most important problems for its main competitor, the counterfactual comparative account (CCA). However, we argue that, despite its advantages, CA is ultimately an unacceptable theory of harming. Indeed, while CA avoids several counterexamples to CCA, it is vulnerable to close variants of some of the problems that bese…Read more
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243Counterexamples to Principle Beta: A Response to Crisp and WarfieldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3): 730-737. 2003.The well-known “Consequence Argument” for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism relies on a certain rule of inference; “Principle Beta”. Thomas Crisp and Ted Warfield have recently argued that all hitherto suggested counterexamples to Beta can be easily circumvented by proponents of the Consequence Argument. I present a new counterexample which, I argue, is free from the flaws Crisp and Warfield detect in earlier examples.
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71Consequentialism ReconsideredSpringer. 1995.In Consequentialism Reconsidered, Carlson strives to find a plausible formulation of the structural part of consequentialism. Key notions are analyzed, such as outcomes, alternatives and performability. Carlson argues that consequentialism should be understood as a maximizing rather than a satisficing theory, and as temporally neutral rather than future oriented. He also shows that certain moral theories cannot be reformulated as consequentialist theories. The relevant alternatives for an agent …Read more
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86Bontly on Harm and the Non-Identity ProblemUtilitas 31 (4): 477-481. 2019.The ‘non-identity problem’ raises a well-known challenge to the person-affecting view, according to which an action can be wrong only if it affects someone for the worse. In a recent article, however, Thomas D. Bontly proposes a novel way to solve the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms. Bontly's argument is based on a contrastive causal account of harm. In this response, we argue that Bontly's argument fails even assuming that the contrastive causal account is correct.
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192Aggregating Harms - Should We Kill to Avoid Headaches?Theoria 66 (3): 246-255. 2000.It is plausible to claim that it is morally worse to kill an innocent person than to give any number of people a mild one‐hour headache. Alaistar Norcross has argued that consequentialists, at least, should reject this claim. According to him, any harm that can befall a person can be morally outweighed by a sufficient number of very small harms. He gives a general argument for this view, and tries to show, by means of an argument from analogy, that it is less counter‐intuitive than it appears. I…Read more
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314Broome's argument against value incomparabilityUtilitas 16 (2): 220-224. 2004.John Broome has argued that alleged cases of value incomparability are really examples of vagueness in the betterness relation. The main premiss of his argument is ‘the collapsing principle’. I argue that this principle is dubious, and that Broome's argument is therefore unconvincing. Correspondence:c1 [email protected].
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84A Refutation of Spectrum Arguments for Nontransitive BetternessPhilosophia 51 (4): 2147-2150. 2023.This short paper states a new objection against “spectrum arguments” for nontransitive betterness. It is shown that defenders of such arguments must reject one of two very plausible principles.
