Theron Pummer

According to prioritarianism, benefiting a person is more morally important, the worse off this person is. This view seems plausible: good as it is to give a large benefit to a person, it seems better to give a slightly smaller benefit to someone else who is substantially worse off. Nonetheless, I argue that it is difficult for prioritarianism to avoid giving implausibly extreme priority to the extremely worse off. It is difficult for the view to avoid the counterintuitive implication that it is better to give a tiny benefit to one badly off person than to give a very large benefit to another badly off person, if the first person is sufficiently worse off than the second. I present a version of prioritarianism that avoids this implication, but it is unclear whether it can be given a plausible rationale.

It is commonly held that unexcused impermissible acts are necessarily blameworthy, not praiseworthy. I argue that unexcused impermissible acts can not only be pro tanto praiseworthy, but overall praiseworthy—and even more so than permissible alternatives. For example, there are cases in which it is impermissible to at great cost to yourself rescue fewer rather than more strangers, yet overall praiseworthy, and more so than permissibly rescuing no one. I develop a general framework illuminating how praiseworthiness can so radically come apart from deontic status.

It is sometimes morally permissible not to help others even when doing so is overall better for you. For example, you are not morally required to take a career in medicine over a career in music, even if the former is both better for others and better for you. I argue that the permissibility of not helping in a range of cases of “compensated altruism” is explained by the existence of autonomy-based considerations. I sketch a view according to which you can have autonomy-based permissions to choose between alternatives when these alternatives differ in terms of the valuable features they instantiate. Along the way, I argue that considerations of moral autonomy do not support rejecting the plausible view that we each constantly face reasons with morally requiring strength to help (distant) strangers.

To your left, three strangers are drowning. To your right, one other stranger is drowning. You can effortlessly save the three by throwing a lifebuoy to your left. Alternatively, you can save the one by throwing the lifebuoy to your right. You cannot save all four. What should you do? It’s wrong to do nothing, but is it wrong to save just the one stranger? Are you morally required to save the three? Many claim that, when those you can help are innocent strangers with similar interests at stake, you’re required to save the greater number. Is this claim justified? This essay reviews some doubts.

There are plenty of classic paradoxes about conditional obligations, like the duty to be gentle if one is to murder, and about “supererogatory” deeds beyond the call of duty. But little has been said about the intersection of these topics. We develop the first general account of conditional supererogation, with the power to solve familiar puzzles as well as several that we introduce. Our account, moreover, flows from two familiar ideas: that conditionals restrict quantification and that supererogation emerges from a clash between justifying and requiring reasons.

Intuitively there are many different things that non-derivatively contribute to well-being: pleasure, desire satisfaction, knowledge, friendship, love, rationality, freedom, moral virtue, and appreciation of true beauty. According to pluralism, at least two different types of things non-derivatively contribute to well-being. Lopsided lives score very low in terms of some types of things that putatively non-derivatively contribute to well-being, but very high in terms of other such types of things. I argue that pluralists essentially face a trilemma about lopsided lives: they must either make implausible claims about how they compare in terms of overall well-being with more balanced lives, allow overall well-being to be implausibly hypersensitive to very slight nonevaluative differences, or else adopt implausible seeming limits on what things lives can contain or how much they can contribute to overall well-being. Such problems about lopsided lives thus push us away from pluralism and toward simpler theories of well-being, toward hedonism in particular. (This piece is the subject of Eden Lin’s paper “Well-Being and Hedonic Indispensability”.)