Ivar Labukt

According to common sense and a majority of philosophers, death can be bad for the person who dies. This is because it can deprive the dying person of life worth living. I accept that death can be bad in this way, but argue that most people greatly overestimate the magnitude of this form of badness. They do so because they significantly overestimate the goodness of what death deprives us of: ordinary human survival. I proceed by examining four philosophical theories of why human survival matters: (1) non-reductionism, (2) the psychological continuity view, (3) the continuity of consciousness view, and (4) the physical continuity view. I argue that all these theories fail to offer something that is both deeply egoistically important and found in ordinary human survival. In the final section, I discuss how we should think about preventing deaths from a policy perspective if death is a lesser personal evil than what is typically assumed.

I explore and defend the unusual view that the replacement of matter taking place in the human body undermines egoistic reasons, and that we therefore have little or no basis for long-term egoistic concern. I begin by arguing that you should not have egoistic concern for a replica, i.e. a person resulting from a complete and sudden replacement of matter. I then argue that when it comes to egoistic concern, replication is not relevantly different from the slower and more gradual form of replacement found in human metabolism: if the former undermines egoistic reasons, so does the latter. I grant that the resulting view is, in some respects, hard to accept, but I conclude that we should at least treat it as a serious possibility.

I present some problems for phenomenal (i.e. consciousness-based) accounts of personal identity and egoistic concern. These accounts typically rely on continuity in the capacity for consciousness to explain how we survive ordinary periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep. I offer some thought experiments where continuity in the capacity for consciousness does not seem sufficient for survival and some where it does not seem necessary. There are ways of modifying the standard phenomenal approach so as to avoid these difficulties, but I argue that they all lead to other problems that are no less serious.

Logic is widely held to be a normative discipline. Various claims have been offered in support of this view, but they all revolve around the idea that logic is concerned with how one ought to reason. I argue that most of these claims—while perhaps correct—only entail that logic is normative in a way that many, if not all, intellectual disciplines are normative. I also identify some claims whose correctness would make logic normative in a way that sets it apart from other disciplines. I argue that we have no reason think that these claims are correct. In other words, logic is not a distinctively normative discipline.

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain

John Rawls's claim to have demonstrated the superiority of his own two principles of justice to the principle of utility has generated fairly extensive critical discussion. However, this discussion has almost completely disregarded those of Rawls's arguments that are concerned with practicability, despite the significance accorded to them by Rawls himself. This article addresses the three most important of Rawls's objections against the practicability of utilitarianism: that utilitarianism would generate too much disagreement to be politically workable, that a utilitarian society would be vulnerable to social instability, and that publicly adopting the principle of utility as the ultimate criterion of right and wrong would undermine the self-respect of some citizens. It is argued that Rawls's objections are either exaggerated or mistaken, and that this may have an impact on the assessment of `justice as fairness' as well as the utilitarian doctrine. Key Words: justice as fairness • feasibility • disagreement • stability • self-respect