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Should we maximalize utility?: a debate about utilitarianismRoutledge. 2025.Utilitarianism directs us to act in ways that impartially maximize welfare or utility or at least aim to do that. Some find this view highly compelling. Others object that it has intuitively repugnant results; that it condones evildoing and injustice; that it is excessively imposing and controlling; that it is alienating; and that it fails to offer meaningful practical guidance. In this 'Little Debates' volume, James Lenman argues that utilitarianism's directive to improve the whole universe on …Read more
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708In this critique of longtermism, I attack its Heart, the idea that there is intrinsic value in the addition of each new happy being to the world. I provide new responses to longtermists' two main arguments for the Heart (The Argument from Extinction and The Argument from Miserable Beings). I then sketch an alternative view to longtermism, which I call Future Sentimentalism, a view that does a better job of explaining our future-regarding reasons. Finally, I consider an important objection to my …Read more
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348Against Flesh: Why We Should Eschew (Not Chew) Lab-Grown and ‘Happy’ MeatIn Cheryl Abbate & Christopher Bobier (eds.), New Omnivorism and Strict Veganism: Critical Perspectives, Routledge. 2023.Many people believe that if we could produce meat without animal suffering—say, in ‘humane’ or ‘happy’ farms, or by growing it in a lab from biopsied cells—there would be no moral problem with doing so. This chapter argues otherwise. There is something morally ‘off’ with eating the flesh of sentient beings however it is produced. It is ‘off’ because anyone who truly understands the intimate relationship that an animal’s body stands in to all the value and disvalue in their lives would not want t…Read more
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418Passé PainsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 46 21-32. 2022.Why are pains bad for us? A natural answer is that it is just because of how they feel (or their felt-qualities). But this answer is cast into doubt by cases of people who are unbothered by certain pains of theirs. These pains retain their felt-qualities, but do not seem bad for the people in question. In this paper, I offer a new response to this problem. I argue that in such cases, the pains in question have become “just more of the same,” and for this reason have ceased to be bad for the rele…Read more
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817The Defective Character Solution to the Non-identity ProblemJournal of Philosophy 118 (9): 504-520. 2021.The non-identity problem is that some actions seem morally wrong even though, by affecting future people’s identities, they are worse for nobody. In this paper, I further develop and defend a lesser-known solution to the problem, one according to which when such actions are wrong, it is not because of what they do or produce, but rather just because of why they were performed. In particular, I argue that the actions in non-identity cases are wrong just when and because they result from, or refle…Read more
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167The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.In a world of industralized farming and feed lots, is eating meat ever a morally responsible choice? Is eating organic or free range sufficient to change the moral equation? Is there a moral cost in not eating meat? As billions of animals continue to be raised and killed by human beings for human consumption, affecting the significance and urgency in answering these questions grow. This volume collects twelve new essays by leading moral philosophers who address the difficult questions surroundin…Read more
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1224Pandemia y Ética: Ocho grandes preguntas sobre el COVID-19Bartleby Books. 2020.PANDEMIA Y ÉTICA es una introducción clara y provocativa a los temas éticos del COVID-19, apropiada para estudiantes de nivel universitario, académicos y diseñadores de políticas públicas, así como para el público general. Es también una contribución original a la literatura emergente acerca de este importante tema. El autor ha lanzado este libro con acceso abierto para pueda ser descargado y leído en forma gratuita por todas las personas interesadas en estas cuestiones. Algunas de las caracter…Read more
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13123Pandemic Ethics: 8 Big Questions of COVID-19Bartleby Books. 2020.A clear and provocative introduction to the ethics of COVID-19, suitable for university-level students, academics, and policymakers, as well as the general reader. It is also an original contribution to the emerging literature on this important topic. The author has made it available Open Access, so that it can be downloaded and read for free by all those who are interested in these issues. Key features include: A neat organisation of the ethical issues raised by the pandemic. An exploration of …Read more
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593Food ethicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd print edition, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.Current food practices affect humans, animals, and the environment in ways that some regard as morally troubling. In this entry, I will explain the most important of these worries and what has been said in response to them. I will conclude with a brief discussion of one of the most interesting recent topics in food ethics, lab-grown meat, which has been proposed as a silver bullet solution to these worries.
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2752WelfarismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd print edition, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.Welfarism is a theory of value (or the good) simpliciter. Theories of value are fundamentally concerned with explaining what makes some possible worlds better than others. Welfarism is the view according to which the relative value of possible worlds is fully determined by how individuals are faring—or, in other words, by the facts about well-being that obtain—in these worlds. This entry begins by distinguishing between various forms of welfarism (pure vs. impure welfarism, and then narrow vs. w…Read more
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506Unknown pleasuresPhilosophical Studies 177 (5): 1333-1344. 2020.According to attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, what makes a given sensation count as a pleasure or a pain is just the attitudes of the experiencing agent toward it. In a previous article, I objected to such theories on the grounds that they cannot account for pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them at the time of experience. Recently, Chris Heathwood and Fred Feldman, the two leading contemporary defenders of attitudinal theories, have responded to this objection…Read more
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66The Philosophy of Well-Being: An IntroductionPhilosophical Quarterly 68 (271): 397-400. 2018.The Philosophy of Well-Being: An Introduction. By Fletcher Guy.
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1479Evaluative Beliefs FirstOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 8. forthcoming.Many philosophers think that it is only because we happen to want or care about things that we think some things of value. We start off caring about things, and then project these desires onto the external world. In this chapter, I make a preliminary case for the opposite view, that it is our evaluative thinking that is prior or comes first. On this view, it is only because we think some things of value that we care about or want anything at all. This view is highly explanatory. In particular, i…Read more
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1157Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and Our Shared Hatred of PainJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1): 94-101. 2017.This article responds to an argument from Katarzyna de Ladari-Radek and Peter Singer in their article, "The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason."
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387Review of David Sobel's From Valuing to Value (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201705. 2017.Review of Sobel's From Valuing to Value.
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721The Passing of Temporal Well-BeingRoutledge. 2017.The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being: - lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person's life was for him or her considered as a whole, and - temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, a day, month, year, or chapter of a li…Read more
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5654The Experience MachinePhilosophy Compass 11 (3): 136-145. 2016.In this paper, I reconstruct Robert Nozick's experience machine objection to hedonism about well-being. I then explain and briefly discuss the most important recent criticisms that have been made of it. Finally, I question the conventional wisdom that the experience machine, while it neatly disposes of hedonism, poses no problem for desire-based theories of well-being
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44Choosing Tomorrow’s Children: The Ethics of Selective Reproduction, by Stephen Wilkinson (review)Mind 125 (497): 281-284. 2016.
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1096The Role of Pleasure in Well-BeingIn Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, Routledge. 2015.What is the role of pleasure in determining a person’s well-being? I start by considering the nature of pleasure (i.e., what pleasure is). I then consider what factors, if any, can affect how much a given pleasure adds to a person’s lifetime well-being other than its degree of pleasurableness (i.e., how pleasurable it is). Finally, I consider whether it is plausible that there is any other way to add to somebody’s lifetime well-being than by giving him some pleasure or helping him to avoid some …Read more
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1085On Susan Wolf’s “Good-for-Nothings"Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5): 1071-1081. 2015.According to welfarism about value, something is good simpliciter just in case it is good for some being or beings. In her recent Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, “Good-For-Nothings”, Susan Wolf argues against welfarism by appeal to great works of art, literature, music, and philosophy. Wolf provides three main arguments against this view, which I call The Superfluity Argument, The Explanation of Benefit Argument, and The Welfarist’s Mistake. In this paper, I recon…Read more
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1063Whole-Life WelfarismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 51 (1): 63-74. 2014.In this paper, I set out and defend a new theory of value, whole-life welfarism. According to this theory, something is good only if it makes somebody better off in some way in his life considered as a whole. By focusing on lifetime, rather than momentary, well-being, a welfarist can solve two of the most vexing puzzles in value theory, The Badness of Death and The Problem of Additive Aggregation.
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777The distinctive feeling theory of pleasurePhilosophical Studies 162 (2): 201-217. 2013.In this article, I attempt to resuscitate the perennially unfashionable distinctive feeling theory of pleasure (and pain), according to which for an experience to be pleasant (or unpleasant) is just for it to involve or contain a distinctive kind of feeling. I do this in two ways. First, by offering powerful new arguments against its two chief rivals: attitude theories, on the one hand, and the phenomenological theories of Roger Crisp, Shelly Kagan, and Aaron Smuts, on the other. Second, by show…Read more
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827The Case Against MeatIn Ben Bramble & Bob Fischer (eds.), The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, Oxford University Press. 2015.There is a simple but powerful argument against the human practice of raising and killing animals for food (RKF for short). It goes like this: 1. RKF is extremely bad for animals. 2. RKF is only trivially good for human beings Therefore, 3. RKF should be stopped. While many consider this argument decisive, not everyone is convinced. There have been four main lines of objection to it. In this paper, I provide new responses to these four objections.
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1948Consequentialism about Meaning in LifeUtilitas 27 (4): 445-459. 2015.What is it for a life to be meaningful? In this article, I defend what I call Consequentialism about Meaning in Life, the view that one's life is meaningful at time t just in case one's surviving at t would be good in some way, and one's life was meaningful considered as a whole just in case the world was made better in some way for one's having existed
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Princeton UniversityLaurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Value Theory |
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
PhilPapers Editorships
The Value of Pleasure |
Hedonist Accounts of Well-Being |