Ben Bradley

A standard view about prudence states that an act is prudent if and only if it results in the best life for the agent. Recently this view has been rejected. According to Richard Pettigrew, it is sometimes prudent to refuse to sacrifice one’s present values for the values one will have in the future, even if this results in a worse life overall. According to Dale Dorsey, it is often prudent to refuse to change one’s present values to ones that would be better fulfilled in the future. This chapter argues that these views are mistaken. Against Pettigrew, it is argued that there is a tight connection between prudence and beneficence: roughly, a choice is prudent if and only if it would be chosen by one’s ideal benefactor. Time-relative views such as Pettigrew’s must deny this. Dorsey’s view, on the other hand, is committed to an implausible sort of prudential and beneficial inertia. The standard view does not have these problems, so we are better off keeping it.

In this chapter I introduce a view that has not been explored in detail and argue that it is a more plausible version of gradualism than extant views. It is based on the following simple thoughts: there is a difference between individuals that are susceptible to harm (by death or anything else) and individuals that are not. This difference is just the difference between individuals that are _subjects of well-being_ and individuals that are not. And there is no sharp boundary between the individuals that are subjects of well-being and those that are not. In many cases it is vague whether an individual is a welfare subject. I attempt to formulate a view about the badness of death that takes account of this vagueness. I argue that this view, the _Partial Welfare Subject View_, has advantages over other gradualist views about death’s badness such as the Time-Relative Interest Account.

This chapter defends the provocative claim that if a certain popular view of virtue is true, then virtue has no intrinsic value, and so it can play no useful role in moral theory. The view in question is virtue consequentialism—roughly, the idea that virtues are good because of the good consequences they bring. Versions of the view can be found in the works of Julia Driver, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse. This chapter argues that the only tenable variant of virtue consequentialism is contrastivism: the idea that a character trait is or is not a virtue only in comparison with another trait. The problem is that if this view is right, then virtues cannot be used in evaluating either people or outcomes. So if virtue ought to play a role in such evaluation, then virtue consequentialism ought to be rejected.

Bernard Williams argued for the importance of what he called “categorical desires” in understanding the evil of death and the unattractiveness of immortality. He claimed that a being who lived long enough would lose the ability to form such desires; she would not choose to live, nor would she have reason to live, nor would her death be bad for her. This promises to have implications for the badness of the deaths of nonhumans, fetuses, and infants, and for the wrongness of killing them. We examine several ways of explicating the notion of a categorical desire. We conclude that it is a mistake to take categorical desires to be relevant to understanding the evil of death or the wrongness of abortion, infanticide, or carnivorism.

Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics--such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death--as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics.

A popular view in population ethics is the procreation asymmetry, according to which we have strong reasons not to bring a miserable life into existence but no reason to bring a good life into existence. Several philosophers have recently defended this asymmetry by arguing for incommensurability between a good life and nonexistence, on the grounds that the values of positive welfare goods are conditional on the existence of the person who receives them. In this paper I present an argument against incommensurability between good lives and nonexistence, show how an appeal to conditional intrinsic value can avoid that argument, and present a problem for that solution.

Death is not intrinsically bad, but can be extrinsically bad by virtue of preventing us from having a good life. Hence, we should not have a negative attitude toward death. Rather, our attitudes should be directed at what is intrinsically good or bad for us There is a simple Epicurean argument that we should not worry about death. Death marks the end of existence. If you don’t exist, you can’t experience any pain. So it is not bad to be dead, and your death won’t bring about anything else bad for you. If something isn’t bad for you in itself, and it doesn’t bring about anything else bad for you, then it is not bad for you in any way. If something is not bad for you in any way, you shouldn’t worry about it. So you shouldn’t worry about death. A standard reply to Epicurus is to adopt a deprivation account of the badness of death. According to this account, death is bad in virtue of depriving its victim of a good future life; the better the future that is deprived, the worse the death. Thus death can be bad for us without being bad in itself and without causing them pain. bringing about anything bad for us. This reply blocks the Epicurean argument, but it does not show that any negative attitude is appropriate to feel towards death. If the deprivation account is true, as I believe it is, what attitude should we have towards death? I will defend the view that we should prefer a good life to an early death, but that no further negative attitudes towards death are warranted. The chapter will proceed as follows. First I will clarify the question I am attempting to answer. Then I will present the argument for my view. Finally I will discuss some possible objections.

The concept of intrinsic value is central to ethical theory, yet in recent years high-quality book-length treatments of the subject have been scarce. This makes the arrival of Zimmerman’s book quite welcome. Zimmerman takes up several of the themes Moore was concerned with in Principia Ethica, but often reaches different conclusions; for example, Zimmerman argues that intrinsic goodness can be analyzed, and rejects Moore’s principle of organic unities. The book is rich with arguments, and I can mention only a few of them in this space.

Suppose that at the moment of death, a person goes out of existence.1 This has been thought to pose a problem for the idea that death is bad for its victim. But what exactly is the problem? Harry Silverstein says the problem stems from the truth of the “Values Connect with Feelings” thesis (VCF), according to which it must be possible for someone to have feelings about a thing in order for that thing to be bad for that person (2000, 122). But in order for a person to have feelings about a thing, the person and the thing must coexist in some way. Thus Silverstein feels compelled to endorse a metaphysical view he calls “four-dimensionalism,” but which I prefer to call “eternalism”: the view that purely past and purely future objects and events exist.2 I agree with Silverstein that the badness of death entails eternalism. But the reason is different. Eternalism must be true in order for there to be a time at which death is bad for its victim. Death is bad for its victim at all those times when the victim is worse off for having died: namely, the times when he would have been living a good life had that death not occurred.3 Silverstein rejects this view; he thinks there is something wrong with the very question of when death is bad for its victim. In what follows I argue that Silverstein has not shown the relevance of eternalism to VCF or the badness of death, and I defend my view about the time of death’s badness against Silverstein’s arguments.

The concept of well-being plays a central role in moral and political theory. Policies and actions are justified or criticized on the grounds that they make people better or worse off. But is there really such a thing as well-being, and if so, what is it? Is it pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, virtue, achievement, some combination of these, or something else entirely? How can we measure well-being, amongst individuals and society? And how can we use it to make moral judgements about people, policies and institutions? In this entertaining and accessible new book, Ben Bradley guides readers through the various philosophical theories of well-being, such as hedonism, perfectionism and pluralism, showing the benefits and drawbacks of each theory. He explores the role of well-being in moral and political theory, and the limitations of welfare-based approaches to ethics such as utilitarianism and welfare egalitarianism. Finally, he introduces puzzles about well-being that arise in moral and prudential deliberations about procreation and death. Well-Being is an ideal introduction to these topics for those with no philosophical background, or for philosophers looking for an overview of current thinking about the subject.

The move to satisficing has been thought to help consequentialists avoid the problem of demandingness. But this is a mistake. In this article I formulate several versions of satisficing consequentialism. I show that every version is unacceptable, because every version permits agents to bring about a submaximal outcome in order to prevent a better outcome from obtaining. Some satisficers try to avoid this problem by incorporating a notion of personal sacrifice into the view. I show that these attempts are unsuccessful. I conclude that, if satisficing consequentialism is to remain a position worth considering, satisficers must show (i) that the move to satisficing is necessary to solve some problem, whether it be the demandingness problem or some other problem, and (ii) that there is a version of the view that does not permit the gratuitous prevention of goodness.

Suppose you find yourself in a situation in which you can either save both A and B or save only C. A, B and C are relevantly similar—all are strangers to you, none is more deserving of life than any other, none is responsible for being in a life-threatening situation, and so on. John Taurek argued that when deciding what to do in such a situation, you should flip a coin, thereby giving each of A, B and C a 50% chance of survival. Only by doing this can we treat each person with the appropriate degree of respect. Taurek seemed to be employing the Equal Greatest Chance principle (EGC), according to which, when deciding whom to save, one must give each person the greatest possible chance of survival consistent with everyone else having the same chance. An obvious alternative is the Save the Greater Number principle (SGN). I describe an example that shows that EGC is false. I show that the example also demonstrates the falsity of other related views, including Jens Timmermann’s “Individualist Lottery Principle.” I conclude that SGN is true. And I extend the argument to other kinds of cases, showing that which person should be saved may depend on whether some additional well-being may be gained for someone in the process.

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.

Virtue consequentialism has been held by many prominent philosophers, but has never been properly formulated. I criticize Julia Driver's formulation of virtue consequentialism and offer an alternative. I maintain that according to the best version of virtue consequentialism, attributions of virtue are really disguised comparisons between two character traits, and the consequences of a trait in non-actual circumstances may affect its actual status as a virtue or vice. Such a view best enables the consequentialist to account for moral luck, unexemplified virtues, and virtues and vices involving the prevention of goodness and badness.