Stephen Kershnar

A particular amount of punishment is justified if and only if that amount of punishment is deserved and the desert claim is not overridden. In the case of some multiple murderers or people who perform serious violent acts in addition to murder, the deserved punishment must involve torture. I argue that this legitimate desert claim is not overridden by objections based on notions of brutality and inhumanity, the Kantian concern that persons be treated as ends, the intuitive distaste that many persons have for torture, the negative consequences of institutionalized torture, the concern for bias in the imposition of punishment, and the need for accuracy in measuring harms.

The most qualified applicant is the one who has the propensity to maximally satisfy the employer’s preferences. An applicant’s propensity is a function of her willingness to work hard together with the relevant capacity or potentiality to do the tasks constituting a job. Given this account of the most qualified applicant, there is only a weak duty, if any, to hire persons based on their being the most qualified. Such a duty is not justified by reference to rights, desert, fairness, or the maximization of welfare. However, such a duty may come about via promises made by the employer or the employee who does the hiring. These results suggest that anti-discrimination laws cannot be justified based on merit, although other justifications might still be available.

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.

Affirmative action programs are not justified by compensatory justice. They place a disproportionate burden on white-male applicants. White-male applicants do not owe compensation because they committed a relevant wrongdoing or because they benefitted from another’s wrongdoing. They did not commit a relevant wrongdoing. Receipt of an unjust benefit, when unavoidable and mixed with hard work, does not justify a duty to compensate a victim of the injustice. Thus, the compensatory-justice argument for affirmative action fails.

This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating theories of the good. It proposes evaluating these theories on the basis of their compatibility with the most plausible ways of calculating overall intrinsic value of a world. The paper evaluates the plausibility of egalitarianism using this approach, arguing that egalitarianism runs afoul of the more plausible ways of calculating the overall intrinsic value of a world. Egalitarianism conflicts with the general motivation for totalism and critical-level totalism, which is that independent contributions of each individual’s life should be counted separately. It conflicts with the most plausible version of averagism because only the highly implausible simultaneous life-segment version of egalitarianism can make sense of inequality being disvaluable at a time. Egalitarianism combined with a diminishing marginal value theory also fails because it holds that, other things equal, the world is a better place when we reduce inequality by adding many people whose lives go very badly but whose sheer numbers lessen inequality. The discussion moves the debate about egalitarianism forward by circumventing the oft-discussed, but intractable, debate concerning the leveling down objection. It also reveals a promising new approach to critiquing theories of the good.

In two recent cases, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306. and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244., the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause permitted state schools to use race-sensitive admissions in order to obtain the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. The diversity-based argument for race-sensitive admissions, scholarships, awards, and other opportunities at universities should have been rejected because it does not consider the full range of costs and benefits and because the more narrow educational effects probably weigh against such programs. However, this does not suggest that applicants' race, ethnicity, and gender should be ignored. Rather the same consideration that led to the defeat of the diversity argument, i.e., reasoning capacity, supports the consideration of demographic factors. However, attention to such factors further undermines the consequentialist case for affirmative action

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.

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 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.

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 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.