Peter Vallentyne

Act teleological theories are theories that judge an action permissible just in case its outcome is maximally good.[1] It is usually assumed that act teleological theories cannot be @i, i.e., make the permissibility of actions depend on what the past was like (e.g., on what promises were made, what wrong doings were done, and more generally on what actions were performed).[2] I shall argue that this is not so. Although @u act teleological theories, such as classical act utilitarianism, are not past-regarding, there are other types of act teleological theories that are past-regarding.

In 1991 Mark Nelson argued that if time is infinitely long towards the future, then under certain easily met conditions traditional utilitarianism is unable to discriminate among actions. For under these conditions, each action produces the same infinite amount of utility, and thus it seems that utilitarianism must judge all actions permissible, judge all actions impermissible, or remain completely silent. In response to this criticism of utilitarianism, I argued that utilitarianism had the resources for dealing with at least some cases of infinite utility. More specifically, I defended the following principle as being part of the "spirit" of traditional (total) utilitarianism: PMU*: An action a1 has better consequences than an action a2 if and only if there is a time t such that for any later time t' the cumulative amount of utility produced by a1 up to t' is greater than that produced by action a2 up to t'. For the usual finite cases, this principle agrees exactly with the standard approach of comparing totals. For infinite cases, however, it can distinguish among two actions each of which produces an infinite amount of utility. It says, for example, that an action that produces 2 units of utility at each time has better consequences than an action that produces 1 unit of utility at each time -- even though they both produce the same infinite amount of utility. Of course, cases where one action produces more utility than a second at each time are going to be rather rare. PMU* is not limited to such cases, however; it also has bite in cases such as the following: Time a1: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, ... a2: 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ... For although the cumulative utility of a1 up to and including the fourth time is only 4 utiles and a2's is 12, a1 starts catching up after that, ties a2 in the 12th time, and stays ahead after that. Thus, PMU* judges a1 as having better consequences than a2. I claimed that PMU* better captured the "spirit" of traditional utilitarianism than the usual sum total view -- on the grounds that almost anyone inclined to defend traditional utilitarianism would, upon reflection, want to hold, for example, that 2 utiles at every time is indeed better than 1 utile at each time. Two responses to my view have since been given in this journal. Luc Van Liederkerke has argued that PMU* violates an anonymity (neutrality, impartiality) condition that is central to utilitarianism. And James Cain has argued that PMU* is not person-centered, and that being so is central to utilitarianism. Here I will reply to the criticisms. Basically, I will acknowledge that each is right about an important point, but deny that this establishes that the core idea underlying PMU* is less plausible than the standard sum-ranking versions of utilitarianism.

The teleological/deontological distinction was introduced in 1930 by C.D. Broad] and since then it has come to be accepted as the fundamental classificatory distinction for moral philosophy. I shall argue that the presupposition that there is a single fundamental classificatory distinction is false. There are too many features of moral theories that matter for that to be so. I shall argue furthermore that as it is usually drawn the teleological/deontological distinction is not even a fundamental distinction. Another distinction, that between theories that make the right depend solely on considerations of goodness (axiological theories) and those that do not, is significantly more important

David Gauthier's book represents the culmination of his work over the last twenty years on the theory of rational choice and on contractarian moral theory. It is the most important book on contractarianisni since Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice' and is mandatory reading for anyone specializing in contemporary moral theory. Gauthier does two distinct, although closely related, things in his book: (l) he defends a theory of rational choice, and (2) he defends a contractarian theory of morality. The two are related, since on his view moral principles are rational and impartial constraints on the pursuit of self—interest

IBERTARIANS hold that we have such duties as: not to directly and significantly harm others or their property, to keep agreements, to refrain from lying and certain other sorts of deception, and to compensate those whom we wrong. They also hold that we have a duty not to interfere with the liberty of others as long as they are fulfilling these duties. This duty of non-interference, they have thought, has protected the privacy of the home, and hence parental autonomy, for it insures that others have no authority over or responsibility for (except in extreme circumstances) how parents raise or treat their children. (Why parental autonomy has been held to be protected by this duty of non—in_terference should be clear enough: for if (as is surely plausible) the main effect of that duty is to secure for adults the liberty (within limits) to live their private lives as they choose, then, on the natural assumption that the matter of how to raise one`s children falls within the domain of the private lives of adults, intervention by others, and in particular by the state, for the purpose of ensuring that children get raised in one way rather than another, would be impermissible.) More specifically to our purposes now, libertarians have supposed that the duty of non-interference leaves intact parents` perogative to decide if, and in what way, their children are to be educated. That this is crucial both to the degree and to the point of parental autonomy is clear enough. For it goes both to the matter of keeping out of the private home those who would provide education for children (if such is the wish of the parents), and to the matter of parents` entitlement to instill in their children the values that they (the parents) wish their children to have. Libertarians, however, have not had very much specific to say about the moral status of children. Are children owned by their parents? Do they have all the rights and duties that normal adults have'? Or is their status somewhere in between these extremes? Given that libertarians haven't said, there are different possible ways of extending traditional libertarian theory so as to cover children..

In Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, Susan Hurley defends a reason-responsive account of responsibility, argues that appeals to responsibility cannot provide a justification or non-trivial specification of brute luck egalitarian theories of justice, and sketches her own cognitive-bias-neutralizing theory of justice. Throughout, Hurley is concerned with normative (as opposed to causal) responsibility, where this is understood as that which licenses (moral or prudential) praise, blame, and other reactive attitudes and which implies at least partial (substantive) moral accountability in principle for choices and their results. I shall focus on her arguments about the role of responsibility in brute luck egalitarian theories of justice.

The teleological/deontological distinction is generally considered to be the fundamental classificatory distinction for ethics. I have argued elsewhere (Vallentyne forthcoming (a), and Ch.2 of Vallentyne 1984) that the distinction is ill understood and not as important as is generally supposed. Some authors have advocated a moral radical thesis. Oldenquist (1966) and Piper (1982) have both argued that the purported distinction is a pseudo distinction in that any theory can be represented both as teleological and as deontological. Smart (1973, p.13, and 1982) has also expressed views along these lines. Elsewhere (Vallentyne 1984, Ch.3) I have shown that these arguments fail because the authors draw inadequate characterizations of the teleological/deontological distinction. Here I want to consider a challenge to the logical status of the distinction that raises deep and important questions about the structure of moral theories in general.

John Locke (1690), libertarians, and others have held that agents are self-owners in the sense that they have private property rights over themselves in the same way that people can have private property rights over inanimate objects. This private ownership is typically taken to include (1) control rights over (power to grant and deny permission for) the use of their persons (e.g., what things are done to them), (2) rights to transfer the rights they have to others (by sale, rental, gift, or loan), and (3) tax immunities for the possession and exercise of these rights (so that, unlike renters, for example, they owe no payment for these rights). The property rights in question are moral rights, and need not be legally recognized. Thus, a country that allows involuntary slavery fails to recognize the (moral) self-ownership of the slaves.

A contractarian moral theory states that an action (practice, social structure, etc.) is morally permissible if and only if it (or rules to which if conforms) would be agreed to by the members of society under certain circumstances. What people will agree to depends on what their desires are like. Most contractarian theories - for example those of Rawls (1971) and Gauthier (1986) - specify that parties to the agreement are mutually unconcerned (take no interest in each other's interests). Contractarian theorists, do not, of course, believe that this is true of real people, but they insist (with Kant) that the basic moral constraints on conduct (if there are any) apply independently of whether individuals care about each other. I shall here argue against the appropriateness of the assumption of mutual unconcern for contractarian theories, such as Gauthier's, that are supposed to ground morality solely in rationality.

Maximizing act consequentialism holds that actions are morally permissible if and only if they maximize the value of consequences—if and only if, that is, no alternative action in the given choice situation has more valuable consequences.1 It is subject to two main objections. One is that it fails to recognize that morality imposes certain constraints on how we may promote value. Maximizing act consequentialism fails to recognize, I shall argue, that the ends do not always justify the means. Actions with maximally valuable consequences are not always permissible. The second main objection to maximizing act consequentialism is that it mistakenly holds that morality requires us to maximize value. Morality, I shall argue, only requires that we satisfice (promote sufficiently) value, and thus leaves us a greater range of options than maximizing act consequentialism recognizes. The issues discussed are, of course, highly complex, and space limitations prevent me from addressing them fully. Thus, the argument presented should be understood merely as the outline of an argument.

At various universities across the country, philosophers are organizing faculty development workshops for non-philosophy faculty members who want to incorporate critical thinking about ethical and social justice issues into their courses. The demand for such programs is reasonably strong. In part this is due to the increasing pressure from professional associations (e.g., those of nursing and accounting) for the inclusion of ethics in the curriculum. In part, however, it is simply due to the recognition by faculty members across the university that an adequate education must include some reflection on ethical issues. In this article we discuss some of the reasons for philosophers to become involved, describe a faculty development program that we are running, and offer some advice about how to succeed in such endeavors.

I shall develop and defend a view of the reparation (e.g., rights to compensation) and enforcement rights (i.e., rights to use force) that individuals have in response to rights-transgressions. The general nature of the account is intermediate to two well-developed alternatives. Pure responsibility accounts hold that reparation and enforcement rights hold only to the extent that the transgressor is culpable, or in some way responsible, for the transgression or resulting harm. Strict liability accounts hold that reparation and enforcement rights hold merely in virtue of the transgression and independently of the agent’s culpability orresponsibility. I shall defend an account according to which: (1) in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, there are reparation rights against a transgressor only to the extent that the transgressor is responsible for transgression-harm (i.e., harm from a transgression), and (2) in agreement with strict liability accounts, there are enforcement rights even against innocent transgressors—although, in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, the extent of the enforcement rights depends in general on the extent to which the transgressor is responsible for the harm and for acting wrongfully. The central feature of the proposed account is that reparation and enforcement rights in a particular context are sensitive to the extent to which their implementation will reduce (in a way specified below) direct transgression-harm.

In Child versus Childmaker Melinda Roberts provides an enlightening analysis and a cogent defense of a version of the person-affecting restriction in ethics. The rough idea of this restriction is that an action, state of affairs, or world, cannot be wrong, or bad, unless it would wrong, or be bad for, someone. I shall focus solely on Roberts’s core principles, and thus shall not address her interesting chapter-length discussions of wrongful life cases and of human cloning cases. The person-affecting intuition can be spelled out in a deontic and in an axiological form: Deontic Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is wrong only if it would wrong someone. Axiological Person-Affecting Restriction: An action, state of affairs, or world is worse than another only if it is worse for someone. Roberts develops and defends the deontic version of the person-affecting restriction. Indeed, as her discussion (and those of others) makes clear, it is quite unlikely that there is a coherent version of the axiological form of the intuition (e.g., because of problems of transitivity). Roberts rightly rejects any appeal to impersonal ranking of worlds, and appeals only to the (many) personal rankings of worlds of the individuals involved. Roberts defends the view that worlds in which a person does not exist can be ranked in terms of that person’s well-being (how good that world would be for him/her) along with the worlds in which he/she does exist. Worlds in which the person has a life worth living are ranked more highly for that person than worlds in which he/she doesn’t exist (along with some worlds with indifferent existence), and the latter worlds are ranked more highly than worlds in which the person exists but doesn’t have a life worth living. Although this is somewhat controversial (some would deny that we can assess how good a world is for a person who doesn’t exist in it), it seems exactly right to me. Throughout I shall assume, as does Roberts, that non-existence has a value of zero (and thus that lives worth living have positive values, and that lives not worth living have negative values). In what follows I shall formulate Roberts’s theory as a theory of the permissibility of actions. In most of the book, Roberts formulates her theory as one of the permissibility of worlds, but, as I shall argue below, such assessments have little normative relevance, since they ignore the probabilities of realization (which depend on what actions are performed). The core of Roberts’s theory is just as plausible, and in some ways more powerful, when (as is sometimes the case in the book) it takes actions to be the objects of assessment. To start with, however, I shall make a highly restrictive assumption (not made by Roberts) that will effectively eliminate the difference between assessing actions and assessing worlds within the sort of welfaristic consequentialist framework that Roberts presupposes. I shall assume that if a given action were performed, then a specific world would be realized. We shall assume, that is, that there are no uncertainties involved. Everything is completely determined by which of the feasible actions is performed. Later in this paper, I will address the problems that arise once this simplifying assumption is dropped.

This book contains the historically most important discussions of the philosophical foundations of left-libertarianism. Like the more familiar right-libertarianism (such as that of Nozick), left-libertarianism holds that agents own themselves (and thus owe no service the others expect as the result of voluntary action). Unlike right-libertarianism, however, left-libertarianism holds that natural resources are owned by the members of society in some egalitarian manner, and may be appropriated only with their permission, or with a significant payment to them.

In his paper "Motivational Ties"[i] Al Mele addresses the question of how intentional behavior is possible in "Buridan’s ass" choice situations. This is the question of how an agent could make a choice between two or more (equally) maximally attractive options (such as choosing one, rather than another, of two effectively identical copies of a desired book). For if, as is commonly supposed, choices and intentions are based on the attractiveness of options (roughly, how strongly one is motivated to perform them), then there seems little basis for choosing, or intending, one rather than another of two or more (equally) maximally attractive options.

Child liberationism holds that children are entitled to more freedom from interference than we currently acknowledge socially or legally. It holds, for example, that "the law [should] grant and guarantee to the young the freedom that it now grants to adults to make certain kinds of choices, do certain kinds of things, and accept certain kinds of responsibilities. This means in turn that the law [should] take action against anyone who interferes with young people's rights to do such things".1 Call an agent minimally rational just in case he/she is capable of basic means-ends reasoning and of basic reflection on his/her beliefs and desires. No plausible form of child liberationism advocates full freedom from interference (i.e., as much as normal adults) for children that are not yet minimally rational. Some child liberationists do, however, advocate full freedom from interference for all minimally rational children -- typically those over age 5, say. Call this position radical child libera tionism . Other child liberationists only advocate full freedom from interference for older children -- typically those over age 12, say. Call this position moderate child libera tionism .2 For the sake of argument we shall grant that even young minimally rational children (e.g., 5 year olds) have full rights of non-interference. We shall argue that there are nonetheless a wide range of paternalistic practices regarding such children that are legitimate. In short, even granting the radical child liberationist thesis that young children have the same formal rights to freedom as competent adults, it does not follow that young children should enjoy the same effective freedom. Indeed, there are good reasons for holding that they should enjoy less freedom. Or so we shall..