Dale Dorsey

Actions are usually grouped into one of several moral categories. Familiar ones include the morally required, the morally permitted, and the morally prohibited. These categories have been expanded and/or refined to include the supererogatory and the “suberogatory”. Some eschew deontic categories such as the above, but nevertheless allow the existence of two comparative moral categories, i.e., the morally better or morally worse. At the risk of adding to the clutter, I want to explore the possibility of yet a further category, viz., amoral action, or actions that, strictly speaking, lack any moral status whatsoever. I think admitting the existence of amoral actions is not only plausible in its own right, but has consequences for our understanding the nature of moral obligation.

A common presupposition in metaethical theory is that moral assessment comes in (at least) two flavors, one of which is sensitive to our epistemic circumstances, the second of which is not so sensitive. Though this thought is popular, a number of questions arise. In this paper, I limit my discussion to what I dub the "explanatory question": how one might understand the construction of subjective moral assessment given an explanatorily prior objective assessment. I argue that a proper answer to this question is important not simply for its own sake, but because it also sheds new light on important challenges to the existence of both objective and subjective moral obligations.

A practical reason is the sort of thing that is supposed to, as it were, “count in favor of” my doing something. That a proposition p is true is reason for me to believe it. In the same way, the fact that some act is, say, morally required, prudentially required, aesthetically beautiful, etc., might be reasons to perform it. Intuitively speaking, if I could save millions from devastating poverty, I have a reason to do it–a reason that, again intuitively speaking, appears decisive. In this way it is proper to say that practical reasons are normative: they appear to answer the question: “how ought I to live?”.

The shape of a life hypothesis holds, very roughly, that lives are better when they have an upward, rather than downward, slope in terms of momentary well-being. This hypothesis is plausible and has been thought to cause problems for traditional principles of prudential value/rationality. In this article, I conduct an inquiry into the shape of a life hypothesis that addresses two crucial questions. The first question is: what is the most plausible underlying explanation of the significance of a life’s shape? The second question is: given its most plausible explanation, what does the shape of a life hypothesis teach us about the nature of prudential value?

An important constraint on the nature of intrinsic value---the “Supervenience Principle” (SP)---holds that some object, event, or state of affairs ϕ is intrinsically valuable only if the value of ϕ supervenes entirely on ϕ 's intrinsic properties. In this paper, I argue that SP should be rejected. SP is inordinately restrictive. In particular, I argue that no SP-respecting conception of intrinsic value can accept the importance of psychological resonance, or the positive endorsement of persons, in explaining value.

The preferences of ordinary folks typically display a future‐bias. For instance, we care more about pains and pleasures in our future than pains and pleasures in our past. Indeed, this future‐bias is so pervasive, many have taken it for granted that the preferences of rational agents will, or at least can, display this future‐bias to some degree or other. However, the rationality of future‐biased preferences has recently come in for critique. However, in this article, I offer a defense of future‐biased preferences against three recent attempts – offered by David Brink, Preston Greene and Meghan Sullivan, and Tom Dougherty – to show such preferences irrational.