Timothy Campbell

For counselors, the welfare of clients and the protection of the community are grounded in comprehension and implementation of ethical principles in practice. Counselors face increasing ethics complexity as organizational and political influences conflict with client’s self-interest. Two thought-experiments involving a Tarasoff-like dilemma were used to explore factors related to ethical decision-making by clinicians in definitive and ambiguous duty-to-warn situations. Outcomes demonstrated that legal, moral, and social factors influenced ethical decision-making in a non-probability sample of 221 U.S. counselors who participated in the thought-experiment study. Increasing ethical uncertainty was related to a decrease in direct action, stronger influence of moral and social factors, and the stronger influence of ethical self-efficacy on decision-making. This study bridges the cognitive model of moral reasoning and social cognitive theory, extending the concept of agency into the ethical domain and suggesting refinements to moral reasoning models. Implications are discussed.

On the Reductionist View, the fact of a person’s existence and that of her identity over time just consist in the holding of certain more particular facts about physical and mental events and the relations between these events. These more particular facts are impersonal—they do not presuppose or entail the existence of any person or mental subject. In _Reasons and Persons_, Derek Parfit claims that if the Reductionist View is true, then ‘it is … more plausible to focus, not on persons, but on experiences, and to claim that what matters morally is the nature of these experiences’. But why think that the Reductionist View has this implication? As critics such as Robert Adams, David Brink, Mark Johnston, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf have suggested, it is not clear why the Reductionist View should have any implications regarding the moral importance of persons. This chapter argues that in contrast to Non-reductionist views, Psychological Reductionism, a version of the Reductionist View that assumes a psychological criterion of personal identity, supports the kind of impersonal moral outlook that Parfit describes.

This chapter defends the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. It goes on to criticize animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning: dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus. In conclusion, the chapter finds that the too-many-subjects problem to which animalism is vulnerable is far more intractable than the one that faces the rival psychological accounts.

The concept of "the hinge of history" suggests a unique period in which human actions have unprecedented and potentially irreversible consequences for the long-term future of civilization. This paper critically examines the coherence and utility of this idea by assessing six candidate definitions drawn from philosophical, futurist, and activist literature, as well as proposing a novel decision-theoretic definition. Using three evaluative criteria—centering human agency, decision-relevance, and resource implications—we find that none of the definitions fully meet all criteria. While the hinge metaphor is rhetorically powerful, attempts to render it precise fail to provide actionable guidance or suffer from conceptual vagueness. We argue that, although current existential risks warrant urgent attention, identifying the present as the unique or most critical moment in history is not necessary for justifying strong action. Instead, a more productive approach focuses on specific risks and decisions without reliance on the hinge concept.

According to the asymmetry, creating a miserable person is morally impermissible but failing to create a happy person is morally permissible, other things being equal. Some attempt to underwrite the asymmetry by appealing to a choice-dependent moral theory according to which the deontic status of an act depends on whether the agent performs it. We show that all choice-dependent moral theories in the literature are vulnerable to what we call ‘The Parent Trap’. These theories imply that the presence of morally impermissible options can generate a moral requirement to create happy people, even at the cost of the procreator’s well-being. We consider two new choice-dependent theories that avoid this result but show that they generate an implausible moral permission to create miserable people. Choice-dependent theories therefore fail to do justice to the intuitions that motivate the asymmetry.

The Procreation Asymmetry, in strongest form, states (roughly) that while we have no reason to create happy people, we do have reason not to create unhappy people. Despite its popularity among non-utilitarian philosophers, it has been surprisingly difficult to give an adequate theoretical defense of this asymmetry. However, in a recent paper, Johann Frick attempts to provide a unified account of the asymmetry that avoids the problems with previous attempts. One of Frick’s novel claims is that a certain wide-scope conditional reasons principle, together with two plausible inference rules, serves to capture both conjuncts of the asymmetry. We argue that while Frick’s account is more plausible than previous accounts, it can explain the asymmetry only by appealing to a unexplained further asymmetry that in effect reaffirms the asymmetry, and that the wide-scope conditional reasons principle does not help to provide a satisfactory explanation of the asymmetry.

According to axiological retributivism, people can deserve what is bad for them and an outcome in which someone gets what she deserves, even if it is bad for her, can thereby have intrinsic positive value. A question seldom asked is how axiological retributivism should deal with comparisons of outcomes that differ with respect to the number and identities of deserving agents. Attempting to answer this question exposes a problem for axiological retributivism that parallels a well-known problem in population axiology introduced by John Broome. The problem for axiological retributivism is that it supports the existence of a range of negative wellbeing levels such that if a deserving person comes into existence at any of these levels, the resulting outcome is neither better nor worse with respect to desert. However, the existence of such a range is inconsistent with a set of very plausible axiological claims. I call this the desert neutrality paradox. After introducing the paradox, I consider several possible responses to it. I suggest that one reasonable response, though perhaps not the only one, is to reject axiological retributivism.

It is often acknowledged that public policies can constrain people's procreative opportunities, in some cases even infringing their procreative rights. However, a topic that is not often discussed is how the procreative choices of one generation can affect the procreative opportunities of later generations. In this article, we argue that the demographic fact that childbearing above the replacement fertility level is eventually unsustainable supports two constraints on universal procreation rights: a compossibility constraint and an egalitarian constraint. We explore the implications of these two constraints and suggest that there are reasons to think of procreative opportunity as a finite resource that can be distributed more or less equally across generations. We also briefly discuss possible ways of meeting demands of intergenerational justice with respect to procreative opportunity.

In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes (e.g. being a parent and being a non-parent) unless one can grasp what these outcomes are like; and (2) one can evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem.

This book is a collection of essays, most of which appear here for the first time, that were written in honour of the legendary moral philosopher, Derek Parfit. The essays are mainly concerned with issues that Parfit addressed in his book, Reasons and Persons. They include the relevance of personal identity to ethics, the rationality of different attitudes to time, the nature of well-being, the varieties of consequentialism, reasons for action, aggregation in ethics, causal overdetermination, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and supererogation.

Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work - in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book 'Reasons and Persons' (1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs.

This handbook presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of problems associated with the moral standing of future people in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of justice? Such questions are not only philosophically difficult and important, but also directly relevant to many practical decisions and policy issues, including on climate, health, population control and taxation. If we are to adequately assess such issues, we must be able to determine the value of differently sized populations. The aim of this handbook is to shed light on the value of population change and the nature of our obligations to future generations, and to offer practical guidance to policy-makers as to how our duties to future generations should be discharged. It contains an extensive and accessible introduction for those unfamiliar with the topic of population ethics as well as original work from key figures in academic debates on population ethics covering three main themes: ways out of the paradoxes of population ethics, questioning some philosophical and methodological assumptions underlying these paradoxes, and several applications of population ethics to real world issues.

According to Jeff McMahan, health care professionals ought to save an individual, A, from dying as a young adult (e.g., at age 30) rather than save some other individual, B, from dying as a newborn, even if the latter intervention would give B twice as many years of full-quality life as the former intervention would give A. Call this claim _Young Adults over Newborns_. In this chapter, I argue that if we accept Young Adults over Newborns, then we must reject at least one of three other more plausible claims. This constitutes a strong reason to reject Young Adults over Newborns.

Nicole Hassoun’s book Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines has three parts. Part 1 is about the right to health, Part 2 offers a concrete proposal for how to promote the ability of people in the developing world to live minimally good lives and Part 3 is concerned with consumer responsibility as it relates to global health. I argue that there is a philosophical tension between the respective projects of Parts 1 and 2. The project of Part 1 reflects a sufficientarian ideal, namely ensuring that each person in our global community has the ability to live a minimally good life. But, the concrete proposal offered in Part 2 reflects a different ideal, namely maximizing global health benefit. While these two ideals may often converge on a set of feasible health outcomes that we should aim to bring about, they can also diverge. The extent to which they diverge depends on our specification of the minimally good life. It is therefore crucial that we have a criterion for distinguishing lives that are at least minimally good from those that are not. Unfortunately, Hassoun’s proposed criterion is problematic in that no life satisfies it.

All else being equal, creating a miserable person makes the world worse, and creating an ecstatic person makes it better. Such claims are easily justified if it can be better, or worse, for a person to exist than not to exist. But that seems to require that things can be better, or worse, for a person even in a world in which she does not exist. Ingmar Persson defends this seemingly paradoxical claim in his latest book, Inclusive Ethics. He argues that persons that never exist are merely possible beings for whom non-existence is worse than existence with a good life. We argue that Persson's argument, as stated in his book, has false premises and is invalid. We reconstruct the argument to make it valid, but the premises remain highly problematic. Finally, we argue, one can make sense of our procreative obligations without letting merely possible beings into the moral club.