Alessio Vaccari

In chapter five of Utilitarianism, the notion of justice is explained through a nar- rative that can be described as a form of genealogy. In doing so, Mill’s inquiry reveals a normative dimension. I argue that this dimension is in service of a perfectionist reading of justice that calls for sustaining an open and ongoing public debate about the rights that it both recognizes and protects. This scenario sheds light on the ways in which Mill’s justice proves promising for addressing the issues at the heart of the bioethical debate.

This paper investigates the role of the passions in Hume’s moral philosophy by focusing on resentment, its nature, and its contribution to justice. Drawing on the Treatise of Human Nature and the second Enquiry, I first argue that Hume offers a nuanced and plausible account of this passion, illuminating key aspects of our moral psychology and everyday evaluative practices. Building on this account, I then show how resentment shapes Hume’s theory of justice in two ways: first, by playing a central role in the moralization of justice, and second, by acting as a stabilizing force that sustains moral sentiments once justice is moralized. This second task requires explaining why violations of property are experienced as injuries, which I address through the connection between property and a particular class of virtues—helping to clarify why disruptions of property relations are morally significant.

The subject of the ethical vocation of Nietzsche’s thinking is arousing increasing interest in the history of the ethics of the analytic tradition. Recent studies have sought above all to dissolve the conflicts that arise from the attempt to reconcile his open immoralism with his project of revaluing all values. According to John Rawls, Nietzsche is a moral elitist: the value that he attributes to the lives of great men such as Socrates or Goethe shows that the search for knowledge and the cultivation of the arts by a few capable individuals is important enough to justify the sacrifice of values such as freedom and justice. This reading cannot account for the special educational role that Nietzsche recognizes in the great artists and great philosophers. In order to ground this hypothesis, I shall examine the significance of the subject of self-elevation in Schopenhauer as Educator. Following James Conant’s reading, I want to support the view that Nietzsche can be placed within that register of the moral life that Stanley Cavell called moral perfectionism. My conjecture is that the perfectionist line runs through the entire arc of Nietzsche’s thinking and is the basis of the various lines of criticism in his critique of morality

The debate on personal identity has profoundly modified the approach to the analysis of prudence, its structure and its links with rationality and morality. While in ethics of 18th and 19th centuries the problem of justifying prudent behaviour rationally did not exist, in contemporary ethics it seems no longer possible to justify it rationally. Particularly, from the perspective of the complex account of personal identity it seems that the only way to condemn great imprudence is from the point of view of morality. In this way we assist to a slow erosion of the clear-cut distinction between prudence and morality. The paper illustrates this change contrasting the analysis of prudence made by Joseph Butler, and then followed by his heir Henry Sidgwick, with that recently made by Derek Parfit

The present article reviews the state of public debate and legal provisions concerning end‐of‐life decision‐making in Italy and offers an evaluation of the moral and legal issues involved. The article further examines the content of a recent law concerning informed consent and advance treatment directives, the main court pronouncements that formed the basis for the law, and developments in the public debate and important jurisprudential acts subsequent to its approval. The moral and legal grounds for a positive evaluation of this law, which attests that the patient may withhold or withdraw from life‐prolonging treatment, will be offered with reference to liberal approaches and particularly to the frameworks of care and virtue ethics; but reasons will also be offered in order to consider not only the latter but also broader range of end‐of‐life treatment decisions as morally apt options. In this light, we argue in favour of a further development of the Italian legislation to encompass forms of assisted suicide and active euthanasia.