Krister Bykvist

It has been proved to be extremely difficult to find a theory of beneficence that would provide both a coherent and plausible account of our responsibilities to future generations. Matters seem to be even worse if we adopt a desire-based theory of well-being. If we assume that the well-being of a person crucially depends on how well her preferences are satisfied, then we need to worry not only about which persons to create, but also which desires to create. A satisfactory desire-theory, it is argue here, must define what is better for a person in terms of his absolute desires, not his comparative ones, and discriminate between desires on the basis of the values of their objects.

Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman and Michael Ridge responded independently. Andrew Sepielli has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of being for to account for normative certitude. We shall argue that the being for account of normative certitude is vulnerable to many problems shared by other noncognitivist theories. Furthermore, we shall argue that Sepielli’s account has its own problems: His favored normalization procedure for degrees of being for has highly problematic implications.

It seems paradoxical to say that an action's normative status ‐ whether it is right, wrong, or obligatory ‐ depends on whether or not it is performed. In this paper, I shall argue that in itself this dependency is not paradoxical. I shall argue that we should not reject a normative theory just because it implies this kind of dependency. Not all dependencies of this kind are bad, or at least not bad enough to warrant wholesale rejection. Instead, we should reject a theory when this dependency makes it a poor guide to action, in particular, when the dependency makes it impossible for agents to comply with the theory.