Christian Coons

While many doubt that purely empirical claims can entail any moral claim, moral premises often appear to have empirical entailments. However, unless the moral premises are treated as stipulated assumptions, it seems like a serious mistake to _infer_ empirical conclusions from moral premises that entail them. The puzzle is trying to plausibly explain why this is so. This chapter surveys and rejects some proposed solutions. Learning what we can from these failed solutions, a proposal is advanced. The chapter argues that every attempted moral science inference faces a dilemma. The moral premise(s), if true, will be contingent on some empirical fact or not. If not, the moral scientist must employ a false premise or rely on non-moral assumptions that already entail the conclusion. On the other horn, if the moral premises are independent of empirical facts, the premises will entail that some fact we know to be contingent is necessary.

Welfarism is a general view about value and the foundations of morality: it is the view that only well-being is intrinsically valuable, and nothing but well-being matters, basically or ultimately, for ethics. This chapter argues that the best normative theory of this type is a kind of _caring ideal observer theory_. Its inspiration is not nostalgia for the benevolent spectators of early proto-utilitarian history, but Elizabeth Anderson, Steven Darwall, and David Velleman's insight that there is a difference between _valuing well-being_ and _valuing well-being for the sake of those to whom it accrues_. Valuing well-being in this second way is valuing it out of “sympathetic concern” or _care_ for those to whom it accrues. The chapter explains how reflection about _when_ and _why_ well-being matters reveals that we value well-being in this second way. Welfarists, it is argued, should conclude that though well-being remains the only intrinsic good it is only _conditionally_ good; specifically, it is worth promoting only insofar as it is worth promoting for the sake of individuals who merit care. Recognizing this fact about well-being's value allows welfarists to finally address their deepest challenge: developing an axiology that can avoid Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion and Non-Identity Problem while retaining the transitivity of the _better-than_ relation. This axiology uses the preferences of an _idealized carer_ to rank states of affairs. Furthermore, it is argued that welfarists should appeal to the idealized carer not just at the axiological level but also in accounting for different categories of moral assessment, including the _right_, the _permissible_, the _optimal_, and the _supererogatory_. Finally, appealing to the dispositions of an ideal carer offers unique epistemic advantages; it does not require independent knowledge of what well-being consists in or how to measure it _intra-_ or _inter-_personally. The chapter closes with a discussion of how epistemic access to the responses of the idealized carer is possible.

This paper has two aims. First, it uses a novel approach to estimate how many police shootings are “tragic mistakes”—i.e. killings of individuals that posed no threat. The approach is novel because it estimates based on the proportion of police killed by civilians versus civilians killed by police. This allows us to see beyond the individual cases (and conflicting accounts about them) to reveal the national scale of the problem. However, the scale does not tell us whether our policing practices are unjust; a shooting can be both a tragic mistake and fully justified. Coons’s second aim, accordingly, is to suggest that these deaths are more than a public health problem, they constitute a serious institutional injustice.

This introductory chapter has several relatively modest aims, all in the service of preparing readers for the substantive chapters in the volume. First, we provide a basic summary of the contours of debate about the ethics of self-defense. In so doing, we highlight and explain some of the central terms in the debate, as there is a complex, specialized vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to some readers. Second, we distinguish and discuss the different contexts in which the need for self-defense might arise. Third, we describe and briefly discuss how the discussion of the ethics of self-defense is typically carried out—the predominant methodology employed by the authors in this volume.

We argue that the dead donor rule, which states that multiple vital organs should only be taken from dead patients, is justified neither in principle nor in practice. We use a thought experiment and a guiding assumption in the literature about the justification of moral principles to undermine the theoretical justification for the rule. We then offer two real world analogues to this thought experiment, voluntary active euthanasia and capital punishment, and argue that the moral permissibility of terminating any patient through the removal of vital organs cannot turn on whether or not the practice violates the dead donor rule.Next, we consider practical justifications for the dead donor rule. Specifically, we consider whether there are compelling reasons to promulgate the rule even though its corresponding moral principle is not theoretically justified. We argue that there are no such reasons. In fact, we argue that promulgating the rule may actually decrease public trust in organ procurement procedures and medical institutions generally – even in states that do not permit capital punishment or voluntary active euthanasia.Finally, we examine our case against the dead donor rule in the light of common arguments for it. We find that these arguments are often misplaced – they do not support the dead donor rule. Instead, they support the quite different rule that patients should not be killed for their vital organs.

The fifteen new essays collected in this volume address questions concerning the ethics of self-defense, most centrally when and to what extent the use of defensive force, especially lethal force, can be justified. Scholarly interest in this topic reflects public concern stemming from controversial cases of the use of force by police, and military force exercised in the name of defending against transnational terrorism. The contributors pay special attention to determining when a threat is liable to defensive harm, though doubts about this emphasis are also raised. The legitimacy of so-called "stand your ground" policies and laws is also addressed. This volume will be of great interest to readers in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

Is it allowable for your government, or anyone else, to influence or coerce you 'for your own sake'? This is a question about paternalism, or interference with a person's liberty or autonomy with the intention of promoting their good or averting harm, which has created considerable controversy at least since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Mill famously decried paternalism of any kind, whether carried out by private individuals or the state. In this volume of new essays, leading moral, political and legal philosophers address how to define paternalism, its justification, and the implications for public policy, professional ethics and criminal law. So-called 'libertarian' or non-coercive paternalism receives considerable attention. The discussion addresses the nature of freedom and autonomy and the relation of individuals to law, policy and the state. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy, public policy and the philosophy of law.

In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal runs headlong into the now familiar “bootstrapping” objection that helped illuminate the need to vindicate the normativity of rationality in the first place. Lastly, even if Southwood is right—the demands of rationality just are the demands or our first-personal standpoints—the explanation as to why our standpoints generate reasons will entail that we sometimes have no reason at all to be rational.

I first argue that there are many true claims of the form: Φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is. I then explain why the following conditional-type is true: If φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is, then anything is actually morally required. These results allow us to construct valid proofs for the existence of some substantive moral facts—proofs that some particular acts really are morally required. Most importantly, none of my argumentation presupposes any substantive moral claim; I use only plausible claims that most moral skeptics and error theorists can and do accept. The final section diagnoses why my arguments work. Here, I offer an explanation for the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral that may help those worried that the strategy is a sophisticated trick. I conclude by considering two objections. In replying to these objections, I explain why the strategy may allow us to demonstrate more than “obvious” moral truths, and why it may also address a stronger version of error theory, according to which, moral truths are not possible.