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47Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headachesAnalysis 58 (2): 152-158. 1998.
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87Contractualism and the Ethical Status of AnimalsSouthwest Philosophy Review 17 (1): 137-143. 2000.
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70Animal experimentationIn Bonnie Steinbock (ed.), The Oxford handbook of bioethics, Oxford University Press. 2007.This article takes the central issue concerning the ethics of animal experimentation to be the moral status of animals. Since most animal experimentation involves treating experimental subjects in ways that would clearly not be morally acceptable if the subjects were human, and since no animal experimentation involves the informed consent of the experimental subject, any attempt to justify such experimentation must include a defense of the claim that the moral status of animals differs significa…Read more
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38Rationality and the sure-thing principleAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (2). 1996.This Article does not have an abstract
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449Killing, abortion, and contraception: A reply to MarquisJournal of Philosophy 87 (5): 268-277. 1990.
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51Death for animalsIn Jens Johansson Fred Feldman Ben Bradley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, . pp. 465. 2013.
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82Speed Limits, Human Lives, and Convenience: A Reply to RidgePhilosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1): 59-64. 1998.
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90Puppies, Pigs, and Potency: A Response to Galvin and HarrisEthics, Policy and Environment 15 (3). 2012.
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103Contextualism for consequentialistsActa Analytica 20 (2): 80-90. 2005.If, as I have argued elsewhere, consequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, obligation, moral requirements, goodness (as applied to actions), and harm, what, if anything, does it have to say about such notions? While such notions have no part to play at the deepest level of the theory, they may nonetheless be of practical significance. By way of explanation I provide a linguistic contextualist account of these notions. A contextualist app…Read more
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538“The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism”In Henry West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 217--32. 2008.This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Demandingness Objection Scalar Utilitarianism Wrongness as Blameworthiness Rightness and Goodness as Guides to Action.
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111Aggregation, Rights, and the Separateness of PersonsSouthwest Philosophy Review 22 (1): 1-15. 2006.
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172Good and bad actionsPhilosophical Review 106 (1): 1-34. 1997.It is usually assumed to be possible, and sometimes even desirable, for consequentialists to make judgments about both the rightness and the goodness of actions. Whether a particular action is right or wrong is one question addressed by a consequentialist theory such as utilitarianism. Whether the action is good or bad, and how good or bad it is, are two others. I will argue in this paper that consequentialism cannot provide a satisfactory account of the goodness of actions, on the most natural …Read more
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114Consequentialism and commitmentPacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (4). 1997.It is sometimes claimed that a consequentialist theory such as utilitarianism has problems accommodating the importance of personal commitments to other people. However, by emphasizing the distinction between criteria of rightness and decision procedures, a consequentialist can allow for non-consequentialist decision procedures, such as acting directly on the promptings of natural affection. Furthermore, such non-consequentialist motivational structures can co-exist happily with a commitment to …Read more
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92A Consequentialist Case for Rejecting the RightJournal of Philosophical Research 18 109-125. 1993.Satisficing and maximizing versions of consequentialism have both assumed that rightness is an alI-or-nothing property. We argue thal this is inimical to the spirit of consequentialism, and that, from the point of view of the consequentialist, actions should be evaluated purely in terms that admit of degree. We first consider the suggestion that rightness and wrongness are a matter of degree. If so, this raises the question of whether the claim that something is wrong says any more than that it …Read more
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Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
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