Erik Zhang

In my view, the central disagreement in contemporary discussion of promissory obligation stems from two contrasting conceptions of the function of the obligation of promise keeping. Simply put, the disagreement is over whether to view promissory obligation as arising from the need to protect something of value or to view it as arising from the need to make attainable something of value. The main thesis for which I shall argue is that the Attainment View is problematic. To this end, I offer two lines of argument against the view, one negative and one positive. Negatively, I shall show that the perceived advantages of the Attainment View over the Protection View are more apparent than real. Positively, I shall argue that the Attainment View faces an irresolvable dilemma when it comes to a range of pertinent cases, cases that involve promises which are morally impermissible for the promisor to carry out. My thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 introduces the Practice View and the Expectation View of promissory obligation, supported respectively by Hume and Rawls on the one hand and Scanlon on the other. The views are unified by their conception of promissory obligation as serving a protection function. In Chapter 3, I discuss three variants of the Normative Power View of promissory obligation, advocated separately by Raz, Shiffrin and Owens. Common to all three is the idea that promissory obligation serves an attainment function. In the fourth and final Chapter, I spell out in more detail the contrast between the Protection View and the Attainment View, and I raise two lines of the argument against the latter position

In recent years policy makers and public health professionals have described obesity and its associated diseases as a major global public health problem. Bioethicists have tried to address the normative implications of proposed public health interventions by developing guidelines or proposing ethical principles that ethically grounded health policy responses should take into consideration. We are reviewing here relevant literature and conclude that while there are clearly health implications resulting from the increasing number of seriously obese people across the globe, there appear to be legitimate questions about the scope of the problem as well as questions about whether particular demonstrable correlations are indicative of causations. These empirical questions require further clinical and epidemiological research. We then review currently discussed public health ethics guidance documents and proposals. Suffering from the same conceptual problems that are known features of principle-based bioethics, insofar as their capacity to ground ethically justifiable policies is concerned, they are unsuitable for actual policy development. Even if the empirical questions were resolved, health policy makers could not rely on currently existing prominent public health ethics guidance documents to develop ethically defensible policies. Further empirical and ethics research is necessary to develop ethically defensible public health policies targeting obesity.

This article offers a solution to the numbers problem within an individualist moral framework. Its central aims are as follows: to rescue individualist moral theories, such as moral contractualism, from their long-standing problem with interpersonal aggregation; to demonstrate how, proceeding from an individualist mode of justification, we can nevertheless make the numbers count without directly counting the numbers; to provide an individualist rationale for accepting a partially aggregative criterion of adjudication for resolving interpersonal trade-offs; and finally, to develop an extensionally adequate version of partial aggregation that finds application in more structurally complex cases.