Michael Ridge

Much contemporary first-order moral theory revolves around the debate between consequentialists and deontologists. Depressingly, this debate often seems to come down to irresolvable first-order intuition mongering about runaway trolleys, drowning children in shallow ponds, lying to murderers at doors, and the like. Prima facie, common sense morality contains both consequentialist and deontological elements, so it may be no surprise that direct appeal to first-order intuitions tend towards stalemate. One might infer from this that we should simply embrace some sort of pluralism in the style of W.D. Ross, but there are problems with this approach too.I of course have in mind the sort of view defended by W.D. Ross. See W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). For one thing, pluralism provides precious little guidance in hard cases. For another, there is something inherently conservative about giving Rossian pluralism any sort of default status as the corr

Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this distinction are either implausible or else insufficient to help the particularist avoid flattening the moral landscape. The difficulty can be avoided, however, if we reject particularism's extremely ecumenical view of reasons

An important worry about what Simon Blackburn has called ‘quasi-realism’ is that it collapses into realism full-stop. Edward Harcourt has recently pressed the worry about collapse into realism in an original way. Harcourt presents the challenge in the form of a dilemma. Either ethical discourse appears to ordinary speakers to express representational states or not. If the former then expressivism means that this appearance is not saved after all, in which case quasi-realism fails in its own terms. If the latter, then we lose our grip on the idea that ordinary descriptive utterances are somehow paradigmatic assertions of fact and with it our ability to explain why such utterances really do express representational states. Finally, Harcourt argues that the expressivist’s only hope for meeting these concerns relies on a distinction between states of mind with a ‘world-directed’ direction of fit and those with a ‘state-directed’ direction of fit, the thesis that no state of mind has both directions of fit, and the thesis that a state-directed direction of fit entails no truth-conditions. Previous critics have attacked and, but Harcourt takes a novel turn and attacks. The challenge is a bracing one. If Harcourt is right, then the quasi-realist project inevitably destroys the very distinction in terms of which his position is cast – roughly, the distinction between beliefs and desires. I argue that Harcourt’s challenge can be met. To anticipate, I argue that Harcourt’s critique presumes that the quasi-realist’s fundamental distinction is best understood semantically, whereas I shall argue that it is better understood functionally

One might have thought that any right-thinking utilitarian would hold that motives and intentions are morally on a par, as either might influence the consequences of one's actions. However, in a neglected passage of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claims that the rightness of an action depends 'entirely upon the intention' but does not at all depend upon the motive. In this paper I try to make sense of Mill's initially puzzling remarks about the relative importance of intentions and motives in a way that highlights the importance of other elements of his moral philosophy and action theory

This paper contends that a Kantian universalizability constraint on theories of practical reason in conjunction with the possibility of collective rational agents entails the surprisingly strong conclusion that no fully agent‐relative theory of practical reason can be sound. The basic point is that a Kantian universalizability constraint, the thesis that all reasons for action are agent‐relative and the possibility of collective rational agents gives rise to a contradiction. This contradiction can be avoided by either rejecting Kantian universalizability, the possibility of collective rational agents, or the tenability of a fully agent‐relative theory of practical reason; we cannot have all three.

This chapter explores the idea that intuitions often characterized in terms of ‘demandingness’ are better understood in terms of fairness. It focuses on the case of duties of beneficence. This approach is a compromise between unconstrained maximizing beneficence (as defended, e.g., by Singer and Unger) and beneficence as strictly constrained in conditions of partial compliance by fair shares under full compliance (as defended by Liam Murphy). Like Murphy, the account offered takes fairness seriously. Like Singer and Unger, this account also insists that we may sometimes have a duty to pick up some of the slack of those who do not fully comply. For Singer and Unger, the perspective of those in absolute poverty seems to be completely dominant in determining our duties in conditions of partial compliance, while for Murphy the perspective of the affluent seems more dominant. The approach attempts to do adequate justice to both perspectives by analyzing such cases in terms of a fair distribution of what he calls the ‘burdens of non-compliance’.