•  5
    In this thesis, I investigate two challenges for Act Consequentialism which arise in situations where many agents together can make a difference in the world. Act Consequentialism holds that agents morally ought to perform those actions which have the best expected consequences. The first challenge for Act Consequentialism is that it often asks too much. This problem arises in situations where agents can individually make a difference for the better, e.g. by donating money to charities that figh…Read more
  •  9
    States act wrongly. Sometimes, they are held responsible, or take responsibility of their own accord, to remediate their wrongdoing: they cease to act wron.
  • When are collective obligations too demanding?
    In Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski & Tracy Lynn Isaacs (eds.), Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
  •  98
    Procreation, Footprint and Responsibility for Climate Change
    The Journal of Ethics 25 (3): 293-321. 2020.
    Several climate ethicists have recently argued that having children is morally equivalent to over-consumption, and contributes greatly to parents’ personal carbon footprints. We show that these claims are mistaken, for two reasons. First, including procreation in parents’ carbon footprints double-counts children’s consumption emissions, once towards their own, and once towards their parents’ footprints. We show that such double-counting defeats the chief purpose of the concept of carbon footprin…Read more
  •  22
    What We Together Can (Be Required to) Do
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1): 187-202. 2014.
    In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under whic…Read more
  •  32
    What If I Cannot Make a Difference (and Know It)
    Ethics 125 (4): 971-998. 2015.
    When several agents together produce suboptimal outcomes, yet no individual could have made a difference for the better, Act Consequentialism counterintuitively judges that all involved agents act rightly. I address this problem by supplementing Act Consequentialism with a requirement of modal robustness: Agents not only ought to produce best consequences in the actual world, but they also ought to be such that they would act optimally in certain counterfactual scenarios. I interpret this Modall…Read more