Intention and Wrongdoing

According to the principle of double effect, there is a strict moral constraint against bringing about serious harm to the innocent intentionally, but it is permissible in a wider range of circumstances to act in a way that brings about harm as a foreseen but non-intended side effect. This idea plays an important role in just war theory and international law, and in the twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot invoked it as a way of resisting consequentialism. However, many moral philosophers now regard the principle with hostility or suspicion. Challenging the philosophical orthodoxy, Joshua Stuchlik defends the principle of double effect, situating it within a moral framework of human solidarity and responding to philosophical objections to it. His study uncovers links between ethics, philosophy of action, and moral psychology, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the moral relevance of intention.

Suffering and Moral Status

It is a common claim in debates about abortion and the killing of animals that individuals, such as foetuses and non-human animals, that have psychological capacities significantly lower than those of adult human persons also have a moral status lower than that of persons. And those who defend this claim typically assume that it implies that the moral constraint against killing a foetus or animal is, if other things are equal, weaker than the constraint against killing a person. Many of these same people also claim, however, that the difference in moral status makes no difference to the strength of the constraint against causing suffering. They argue that the reason not to cause suffering to an individual who neither deserves nor is liable to be caused to suffer is equally strong whatever the nature or moral status of the potential victim is. There is, however, a type of individual whose psychological capacities and moral status are such that it is plausible to believe that the reason not to cause them to suffer is weaker than the reason not to cause equivalent suffering to a person. Most non-human animals are psychologically intermediate between these low-status individuals and persons. This raises the question, which is explored in this chapter, whether most animals have an intermediate moral status that makes their suffering matter more than that of the low-status individuals but less than that of persons.

Morality, Uncertainty

Non-Consequentialist moral theories posit the existence of moral constraints: prohibitions on performing particular kinds of wrongful acts, regardless of the good those acts could produce. Many have argued that such theories cannot give satisfactory verdicts about what we morally ought to do when there is some probability that we will violate a moral constraint. In this article, I defend Non-Consequentialist theories from this critique. Using a general choice-theoretic framework, I identify various types of Non-Consequentialism that have otherwise been conflated in the debate. I then prove a number of formal possibility and impossibility results establishing which types of Non-Consequentialism can—and which cannot—give us adequate guidance through through a risky world.

Moral Rights

The concept of moral rights is prominent in much ethical and political thought. This chapter argues that utilitarians can and should give an account of the existence of moral rights. It surveys existing utilitarian accounts of rights, before developing a novel indirect theory of them. According to this theory, rights are structures of reasons and abilities to change reasons. These reasons are pattern-based reasons to participate in beneficial patterns of behaviour and motivation. If we can explain moral rights in this way, we can explain one important kind of moral constraint, such as the constraint against torture, and we can also explain the distinction between acting wrongly and wronging someone. The chapter ends by discussing whether rights are, on this view, too contingent on facts.

Neurointerventions, Morality, and Children

Is the political community morally permitted to use neurointerventions to improve the moral conduct of children? Putting aside difficult questions concerning the institutionalization of moral enhancement, the authors address this question, first, by arguing that is not, in itself, always morally impermissible for the community to impose neurointerventions on adults. Although certain ideals, such as the ideal of individual autonomy, limit the permissible employment of neurointerventions, they do not generate a moral constraint that always forbids their use. Thereafter, they argue that because young children lack certain moral capacities that adults possess, the moral limits that pertain to the use of neurointerventions to improve their moral behaviour are, in principle, less restrictive than they are for adults.

Refugees and Other Necessitous Migrants

Chapter 7 considers the substance of immigration policy. It argues that the duty to protect refugees and other forcibly displaced migrants is a moral constraint on the state’s right to control immigration. The chapter examines the grounds of the obligation toward refugees, who should be regarded as a refugee, what the duty to assist refugees entails, how the duty should be shared among states, and what the limits on the duty to refugees might be. It concludes by considering some implications for contemporary policy toward refugees.

From Night to Survival: Nihilism and the Living Dead

This chapter scrutinizes the structure of George Romero’s Living Dead films in light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between passive and active nihilism. The films analysed include Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. It is argued that in this series there is a progressively building ambiguity in Romero’s attitude toward the passive forces of the zombie invasion and the active efforts of the human survivors. Initially, Romero’s sympathy seems to be with the humans; especially with minorities, women and the disabled. Yet as the films progress, sympathy shifts toward the undead, who are increasingly depicted as targets of human cruelty and abuse. What begins as a nightmare of nihilistic passivity eventually ends with a nightmarish scenario of nihilistic activity, exposing the awful potential of human power unleashed from moral constraint.

The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy

This chapter discusses the ethical limits of global democracy, which are here understood as the conditions under which global democracy should be construed (formulated and justified) and promoted in real politics. The aim is not to develop and defend a substantive account of global democracy, but to bring up some basic concerns that are essential to address when analysing the limits of global democracy as well as to suggest some fruitful ways to approach them. The chapter focuses on two types of moral constraint on construing and promoting global democracy. The first type of constraint is set by empirical concerns, which highlights central methodological discussions of the role of ideal and non-ideal theorizing in International Political Theory (IPT). The second type of constraint is set by normative concerns, which highlights questions about the role of principles of democratic legitimacy and their applicability.

A Unified Moral Terrain?

In his book What We Owe to Each Other, Thomas Scanlon proposes what he calls a ‘contractualist’ explanation of what he describes as ‘a central part of the territory called morality’, i.e. our duties to other rational creatures. If Scanlon is right, the fact that another creature is rational generates a particular kind of moral constraint on how we may act towards it: one should ‘treat rational creatures only in ways that would be allowed by principles that they could not reasonably reject insofar as they too were seeking principles of mutual governance which other rational creatures could not reasonably reject’. This is then used to explain what makes actions right, at least within his central moral area. Such actions will be right because they are permitted by principles that cannot reasonably be rejected. In this essay, I question both whether Scanlon succeeds in identifying a proper part of the moral terrain as a subject for his account and also what, if any, is the contractualist content of that account. I argue that he equivocates between two distinct and incompatible conceptions of the justifiability of principles. According to the first, justifiability is a relation between principles and people, whilst according to the second, for a principle to be justifiable is for it to be justified. For his explanation of morality to have any contractualist force, justifiability needs to be understood as a relation, but for that explanation to have any plausibility, justifiability must be understood nonrelationally. Because of this, the account is unstable and fails to describe any part of the moral landscape.