Stephen Kershnar

Sexual fantasy is a non-perceptual thought that is sexually arousing. It has several paradigmatic features. The structure of a fantasy involves an agent taking pleasure in an object that is often a visual depiction of an event. The fantasy is under the agent’s control and has a semantic content. Since mere sexual fantasizing about someone respects the individual who are depicted in the fantasy, the rightness of a sexual fantasy depends on whether consequentialism is true and, if so, whether the particular fantasy brings about better results an alternative activities. Sexual fantasies can be intrinsically good or bad depending on whether the pleasure is malicious and whether the fantasy contains a false statement. The vast majority are not intrinsically bad since they neither involve an unfitting attitude toward something that is itself bad nor commit the subject to a falsity. Hence, if one rejects consequentialism, then most sexual fantasies, including many of the most violent ones, are neither wrong nor intrinsically bad.

In this paper, I argue that Threshold-Hell Christianity conflicts with the pro-life position on abortion. The specific type of Christianity is that which also accepts threshold deontology and the existence of hell. Threshold deontology is the view that ordinarily moral duties consist of non-consequentialist side-constraints on the pursuit of the good but that in some cases these side-constraints are overridden. My strategy is to establish that a person who brings about an abortion guarantees that the aborted individual goes to heaven and that it is morally permissible to guarantee someone goes to heaven. It follows that if Threshold-Hell Christianity is true, then abortion is morally permissible.

If the ground of punishment is a culpable wronging, what is it about a culpable wrongdoing that allows it to morally justify deserved punishment? In particular, we want to know what it is about a culpable wrongdoing that accounts for the intrinsic value of punitive desert or the punitive-desert-related duties that comprise retributivism. I analyze both together in the context of seeking a justification for The Principle of Deserved Punishment, (1). (1) The Principle of Deserved Punishment. A person deserves punishment because, and only because, she has performed a culpable wrongdoing. One approach is that more general moral principles justify it. On this approach, these moral principles support the claim that deserved punishment is morally justified and the claim that it is justified on the ground of a culpable wrongdoing. In this article, I argue against this approach. Elsewhere I argue for the truth of retributivism (which focuses on deserved punishment) based on its being the best explanation of our considered moral judgments. This latter account allows punitive desert and retributivism to function as more fundamental normative entities than is suggested by theories that attempt to derive it from other moral principles.

In this essay, I argue that colleges and universities should permit hazing. I argue that if hazing is wrong, then it wrongs someone and if it wrongs someone then it violates someone’s right. Hazing does not violate someone’s right when the person who is hazed gives informed consent. I then argue that because hazing is permissible, colleges should permit it. I consider and respond to objections that hazing is wrong for reasons that are not right-based. Here I consider objections relating to deception, coercion, unnecessary harm, degradation, and exploitation. I also consider two more objections. First, hazing is wrong because it violates the colleges’ rights. Second, colleges need not permit hazing because they own the rights to the groups or the materials that the groups use and hence they may exercise their property rights in such a way as to make hazing wrong.

In this essay, I argue for the claim that the MVP is the player who provides the greatest net benefit to his team. I then argued for the following model of a player’s net benefit to her team. (1) A person’s, X’s, net benefit to the team is a function of the difference in team success when X plays and when her actual or likely backup plays. I argued that this model best satisfies our intuitions, measures actual value rather than expected value, does not depend on arbitrary assumptions, and tends to track the way in which a team would economically value a player. The two do not align exactly, since economic valuation is future looking and net benefit is backward looking. Leaving aside concerns about player-related contribution, this model provides a right answer to the question of who is a league’s MVP. It also captures the comparative value of players within a team.

In David Boonin’s Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions, Boonin addresses some of the most controversial race-policies. Specifically, he addresses reparations for slavery, affirmative action, hate-speech penalties, hate-crime laws, and racial profiling. The book is excellent, but in the end the arguments do not succeed. Consider first his argument on reparations for slavery. In general, problems with the relevant compensation-counterfactuals undermine our ability to gage the amount of compensation owed. Similarly, because no one knows how much of the black-white gap is due to genetics or African cultural influence or other factors, judging the amount of the black-white gap due to slavery and subsequent oppression is nearly impossible. When paid via tax dollars, both unwarranted compensation and unpaid compensatory debts are unjust. Hence, when it is murky whether or to what extent compensation is owed, compensatory justice pulls us in two directions. Consider, also, how much of the debt has been paid off already via affirmative action and disproportionately filling government jobs with blacks. If blacks are doing better than how they would in the absence of slavery and past discrimination because of government benefits, then it is not clear if further compensation is owed. Boonin needs to consider whether blacks occupy more professional roles or have more income than they would have but for past discrimination. This might come about if we discovered that affirmative action was widely applied or that large numbers were hired by the government and it pays a lot more than the private sector.

Carl Cohen’s and James Sterba’s debate is an impressive discussion of the legality and morality of various types of affirmative action and a must read for researchers in this field. These two issues bifurcate. The legality of preferential treatment consists of two different issues: Is preferential treatment Constitutional? Does preferential treatment violate laws other than the Constitution? The morality of preferential treatment also consists of two issues: Is preferential treatment right? Is it good? The discussion in this book is wide-ranging and the authors provide a fascinating set of legal and empirical arguments that are a nice complement to the moral arguments that underlie their positions on affirmative action. The only problem with the book is that the moral arguments are somewhat abbreviated. In summary, the debate between Cohen and Sterba is insightful, well researched, and worth reading. Their legal arguments are particularly interesting. In the end, however, neither Cohen nor Sterba provide a plausible argument with regard to whether preferential treatment has effects that make it worth pursuing. Nor does either provide a strong moral case for or against preferential treatment as compensation.

We should adopt the following principle with regard to compensatory justice. (1) If an unjust act benefits an innocent person and there is no reasonable way to assess the amount of damages to the victim, then compensatory justice does not require that the innocent beneficiary pay compensation for those damages. We cannot reasonably assess the amount of damages to current racial minorities that have resulted from past discriminatory acts. Problems arise in determining the identity of the injured parties, the identity of the injuring agents and injuring acts (and omissions), and the degree of injury that directly resulted from these acts (or omissions). Since such compensable damages cannot be accurately estimated and since white male applicants are innocent beneficiaries of past discriminatory acts, the value of compensatory justice does not justify strong affirmative action programs.

In this paper, I argue for the Complex Experiential Theory. It asserts that pleasure is a pro-attitude toward a de se experience. I argue that it is better than its competitors. In particular, it is better than monadic theories that view pleasure as a distinct type of experience or a pro-attitude in isolation. It is also better than other non-monadic theories. In particular, it is better than accounts that involve pro-attitudes and beliefs in states of affairs or propositions (or ones that obtain, are true, or that focus on the subject’s own life). When conjoined with hedonism, this theory fits nicely into a building block theory of well-being.

This book provides a philosophical analysis of adult-child sex and pedophilia. The sex intuitively strikes many people, including myself, as sick, disgusting, and wrong. The problem is that it is not clear whether these judgments are justified and whether they are aesthetic or moral. By analogy, many people find it disgusting to view images of obese people having sex, but it is hard to see what is morally undesirable about such sex. Here the judgment is aesthetic. This book looks at the moral status of such adult-child sex. In particular, it explores whether those who engage in adult-child sex have a disease, act wrongly, or are vicious. In addition, it looks at how the law should respond to such sex given the above analyses.

Violation pornography is pornography where the depicted behavior includes unjust sexual acts, e.g., rape. In this paper I argue that it is unclear whether the enjoyment of violation pornography is bad for the viewer. My essay has three parts. First, I set out an account of flourishing. I adopt a composite account, whereby flourishing is a function of the degree to which an individual has pleasure and various objective-list elements. Objective-list elements are things (e.g., knowledge and meaningful relationships) that make my life go better independently of their effects on pleasure and desire-fulfillment. In the next two parts, I relate violation pornography to each component of flourishing. Thus, in the second part, I explore whether violation pornography promotes or hinders pleasure. In the third part I explore whether pornography is compatible with these objective-list elements, particularly virtue.

Stephen Kershnar’s model of the most valuable player fails. It does not track total value and this is what a team values, although perhaps the best model should focus on player-related value. In any case, the model does not succeed as a model of player-value because player-value is indeterminate. The indeterminacy results from boundary problems with the player-role and, perhaps also, indeterminacy in the baseline state. In addition, Kershnar’s framework is misguided because winning is not intrinsically valuable and is not even something wanted for its own sake. The MVP problem remains unsolved.

George Sher's theory of deserved punishment is unable to account for cases in which wrongdoing does not result in unfair advantages. Sher attempts to connect punishment with distributive justice by suggesting that punishment is deserved inasmuch as the unfair advantage gained by wrongdoing is offset. According to Sher's diachronic theory of fairness, punishment is also deserved when it occurs in response to transgression of a first-order ethical norm. A problem for the theory concerns the justification it provides for disparate treatment of wrongdoers who are morally indistinguishable.

Slavery harmed the slaves but not their descendants since slavery brought about their existence. The descendants gain the slaves’ claims via inheritance. However, collecting the inheritance-based claim runs into a number of difficulties. First, every descendant usually has no more than a portion of the slave’s claim because the claim is often divided over generations. Second, there are epistemic difficulties involving the ownership of the claim since it is unlikely that a descendant of a slave several generations removed would have retained the claim of inheritance given the loss of wealth and disinheritance that often characterizes families. There are also problems in determining the amount of inheritance. This is in part because of the problems of calculating in the effects of offsets, especially crime-related offsets, which are owed by a significant portion of the descendants. Even if this inheritance claim can be established with sufficient confidence certain entities may not be asked to pay it. The federal government does not owe compensation since as a historical matter it permitted but did not cause enslavement. The beneficiaries of slavery do not owe compensation since merely receiving the benefit of an unjust activity does not by itself generate a debt of compensation. When combined these problems constitute an overwhelming case against reparations.