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45Critical Notice (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 443-459. 2004.In this exceptional new book, Jeff McMahan sets out to provide such an account. Along the way, he offers nuanced and illuminating accounts of personal identity, human nature, the badness of death, the wrongness of killing, the rights of animals, abortion, and euthanasia. This book is a major contribution to both moral theory and applied ethics, and makes a strong case for the relevance of the former to the latter. It is also beautifully written and a joy to read.
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328The demands of consequentialismOxford University Press. 2001.Tim Mulgan presents a penetrating examination of consequentialism: the theory that human behavior must be judged in terms of the goodness or badness of its consequences. The problem with consequentialism is that it seems unreasonably demanding, leaving us no room for our own aims and interests. In response, Mulgan offers his own, more practical version of consequentialism--one that will surely appeal to philosophers and laypersons alike.
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17Replies to CriticsPhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche. 2014.Download
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30Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality - by David WigginsPhilosophical Books 48 (4): 373-376. 2007.
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174Future people: a moderate consequentialist account of our obligations to future generationsOxford University Press. 2006.What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? Tim Mulgan develops a new theory of our obligations to future generations, based on a new rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. He also brings together several different contemporary philosophical discussions, including the demands of morality and international justice. His aim is to produce a coherent, intuitively plausible moral theory that is not unreasonably demanding, even w…Read more
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35Teaching Future GenerationsTeaching Philosophy 22 (3): 259-273. 1999.An introductory ethics course serves many and often disparate ends, so much so that it may be difficult to find a theme or question that can tie these ends together in a coherent course narrative. This paper shares the author’s attempt to do so. In addition to high student interest in the subject, the topic of our obligation to future generations has the advantage of naturally leading a course through several systematic areas of philosophical importance. This topic lends itself not only to moral…Read more
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103Answering to Future People: Responsibility for Climate Change in a Breaking WorldJournal of Applied Philosophy 34 (2). 2017.Our everyday notions of responsibility are often driven by our need to justify ourselves to specific others – especially those we harm, wrong, or otherwise affect. One challenge for contemporary ethics is to extend this interpersonal urgency to our relations with those future people who are harmed or affected by our actions. In this article, I explore our responsibility for climate change by imagining a possible ‘broken future’, damaged by the carbon emissions of previous generations, and then a…Read more
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93Review: Christopher Woodard: Reasons, Patterns, and Cooperation (review)Mind 118 (470): 539-542. 2009.