•  8
    Comments on “The Impossibility of Hypocritical Advice”
    Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 79-83. 2023.
  •  7
    Killing and Letting Die
    In R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics, Blackwell. 2005.
  •  195
    Torturing Puppies and Eating Meat
    Southwest Philosophy Review 20 (1): 117-123. 2004.
  •  16
    Letters to the Editor
    with Anto Knezevic, Frank B. Dilley, C. Tabor Fisher, Eric Hoffman, Thomas Urban, Dick Howard, Adrian Kuzminski, and William J. Massicotte
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (6). 1994.
  • Two dogmas of deontology : aggregation, rights, and the separateness of persons
    In Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller & Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Utilitarianism: the aggregation question, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
  •  1
    Killing and Letting Die (edited book)
    with Bonnie Steinbock
    Fordham University Press. 1994.
    This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller…Read more
  •  204
    The Impotence of the Causal Impotence Objection
    Southwest Philosophy Review 36 (1): 161-168. 2020.
    Many significant harms, such as the mass suffering of animals on factory farms, can only be prevented, or at least lessened, by the collective action of thousands, or in some cases millions, of individual agents. In the face of this, it can seem as if individuals are powerless to make a difference, and thus that they lack reasons, at least from the consequentialist perspective, to refrain from eating meat. This has become known as the “causal impotence” problem. The standard response is to appea…Read more
  •  50
    Morality by Degrees: Reasons Without Demands
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Alastair Norcross argues that the basic judgments of morality are essentially comparative: alternatives are judged to be better or worse than each other. Notions such as right and wrong are not part of the fundamental subject matter of moral theory, but are constructed in a context-relative fashion out of the basic comparative judgments.
  •  1
    Moral Conflicts and Moral Psychology
    Dissertation, Syracuse University. 1991.
    I examine several claims about the nature of values that have been made with respect to moral conflict, i.e., that the existence of moral conflict shows that values are incomparable; values are incommensurable but comparable; there are plural values. ;Strong moral conflicts involve an agent in a choice between two or more impermissible alternatives. They have been thought to pose serious problems for ethical theories, in particular for consequentialist theories. According to consequentialist eth…Read more
  •  119
    Contractualism and Aggregation
    Social Theory and Practice 28 (2): 303-314. 2002.
  •  3
    Scalar ActUtilitarianism
    In Henry West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 217. 2008.
  •  33
    Peacemaking Philosophy or Appeasement? Sterba’s Argument for Compromise
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (2): 285-296. 2005.
    In The Triumph of Practice over Theory in Ethics James Sterba is not concerned merely to show that there is much convergence in the practical application of Utilitarianism, Kantianism, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. His project is the much more ambitious one of arguing that the theories do not really diverge very much at the theoretical level, and thus supplying an explanation for the apparent convergence at the practical level. Although I applaud him for the boldness, some might even say audac…Read more
  •  52
    Intending and Foreseeing Death
    Southwest Philosophy Review 15 (1): 115-123. 1999.
  •  33
    A reply to Margery Naylor
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49 (4): 715-719. 1989.
  •  208
    In these comments on Fred Feldman's Pleasure and the Good Life, I first challenge the dichotomy between sensory and attitudinal hedonisms as perhaps presenting a false dilemma. I suggest that there may be a form of hedonism that employs the concept of a that is not purely sensory. Next, I raise some problems for several of the versions of hedonism explored in the book
  •  265
    Frances Kamm's aptly titled Intricate Ethics is a tour de force of what Peter Unger calls the ‘preservationist’ approach to ethical theory. Here is some of what she says about her methodology: Consider as many case-based judgments of yours as prove necessary. Do not ignore some case-based judgments, assuming they are errors, just because they conflict with simple or intuitively plausible principles that account for some subset of your case-based judgments. Work on the assumption that a different…Read more
  •  210
    Suppose that a very large number of people, say one billion, will suffer a moderately severe headache for the next twenty-four hours. For these billion people, the next twenty-four hours will be fairly unpleasant, though by no means unbearable. However, there will be no side-effects from these headaches; no drop in productivity in the work-place, no lapses in concentration leading to accidents, no unkind words spoken to loved ones that will later fester. Nonetheless, it is clearly desirable that…Read more
  •  103
    If consequentialism is understood as claiming, at least, that the moral character of an action depends only on the consequences of the action, it might be thought that the difficulty of knowing what all the consequences of any action will be poses a problem for consequentialism. J. J. C. Smart writes that in most cases..
  •  223
    Killing and letting die (edited book)
    with Bonnie Steinbock
    Fordham University Press. 1994.
    This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller…Read more
  •  32
    A Consequentialist Case for Rejecting the Right
    Journal 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
  •  301
    One of the currently popular dogmata of anti-consequentialism is that consequentialism doesn't respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less argued for. In this paper I explain what I take to be the most plausible interpretation of the separateness of persons charge. I argue that the charge itself can be deconstructed into at least two further objections to consequentialist theories. The…Read more
  •  144
    Intransitivity and the person-affecting principle
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 769-776. 1999.
    Philosophy journals and conferences have recently seen several attempts to argue that 'all-things-considered better than' does not obey strict transitivity. This paper focuses on Larry Temkin's argument in "Intransitivity and the Mere Addition Paradox." Although his argument is not aimed just at utilitarians or even consequentialists in general, it is of prticular significance to consequentialists. If 'all-things-considered better than' does not obey transitivity, there may be choice situations …Read more
  •  156
    Causal Impotence and Eating Meat
    Southwest Philosophy Review 24 (2): 5-10. 2008.
  •  76
    Beastly Violence, or How Kant Screws Everything up Yet Again
    Southwest Philosophy Review 27 (2): 63-66. 2011.
  •  43
  •  82
    Reasons without demands: Rethinking rightness
    In James Lawrence Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, Blackwell. pp. 38--54. 2006.