Utilitas

ISSN: 0953-8208

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  1.  10
    The Parent Trap: Why Choice-Dependent Moral Theories Fail to Deliver the Asymmetry.Tim Campbell & Patrick Kaczmarek - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):141-155.
    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 (...)
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  2.  9
    Mark Fabian, A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. x + 305.Malte Dold - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):174-177.
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  3.  3
    M. A. Roberts, The Existence Puzzle: An Introduction to Population Axiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 280. [REVIEW]B. V. E. Hyde, Harriet Ball & Makan Nojoumian - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):171-174.
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  4.  14
    Bigoted Insults, Harm, and the Intentional Infliction of Pain: A Reply to Bell.Dale E. Miller - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):163-170.
    Melina Constantine Bell (2021) argues that J. S. Mill's harm principle permits society to coercively interfere with the use of bigoted insults, since these insults are harmful on “a more expansive, modern, conception of harm.” According to Bell, these insults are harmful in virtue of their contributing to detrimental objective states like health problems. I argue that people with illiberal dispositions might have intense and sustained negative subjective reactions to behavior that the harm principle ought to protect, reactions intense enough (...)
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  5.  18
    The Function of Hypocrisy Norms.Matthew Jeffers & Alexander Schaefer - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):123-140.
    Moral condemnation of hypocrisy is both ubiquitous and peculiar. Its incessant focus on word–action consistency gives rise to two properties that distinguish it from other types of moral judgment: non-additivity and content independence. Non-additivity refers to the fact that, in judgments of hypocrisy, good words do not offset bad actions, nor do good actions offset bad words. Content independence refers to the fact that we condemn hypocrisy regardless of whether we would condemn the words or actions in isolation from one (...)
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  6.  19
    The Worse than Nothing Account of Harm: A Fallen Hero.Jens Johansson & Olle Risberg - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):156-162.
    Daniel Immerman has recently put forward a novel account of harm, the Worse than Nothing Account. We argue that this account faces fatal problems in cases in which an agent performs several simultaneous actions. We also argue that our criticism is considerably more powerful than another one that has recently been advanced.
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  7.  6
    Steve Clarke, Hazem Zohny, and Julian Savulescu (eds.), Rethinking Moral Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xvii + 333. [REVIEW]Kęstutis Mosakas - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):177-180.
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  8. Psychological Egoism and Ought-Implies-Can: What Do They Entail?John J. Tilley - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):113–122.
    A common assumption is that psychological egoism, the view that a person can do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest, combined with ought-implies-can, the view that a person morally ought to do an act only if she can do it, entails the view – call it OIB – that a person morally ought to do an act only if she believes that the act is in her interest. I argue that psychological egoism and (...)
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  9.  16
    Climate Esoteric Morality and the Problem of Inconsequentialism.Ilias Voiron & Mikko M. Puumala - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):94-112.
    Climate change is to a large extent a collective action problem, but many believe that individual action is also required. But what if no individual contribution to climate change is necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change-induced harms? This issue is known as the problem of inconsequentialism. It is particularly problematic for act consequentialism because the theory does not seem to judge such inconsequential contributions negatively. In this paper, we apply Henry Sidgwick's idea of esoteric morality to climate change and (...)
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  10.  4
    Bentham’s Laws in Principem and his Command Theory: a Critique of Hart’s Criticisms.Xiaobo Zhai - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (2):75-93.
    When writing Limits, Bentham introduced the idea of laws in principem: they are duty-imposing commands, receiving determination from a sovereign, and prescribing to him what he shall do. Hart argues that Bentham’s laws in principem are not duty-imposing, but power-conferring or disability-imposing, which courts accept as reasons for invalidating enactments conflicting with them. After presenting several major criticisms, he concludes that Bentham’s idea of laws in principem cannot be reconciled with his command theory, and that a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the (...)
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  11.  10
    Some Acts Really Harm: A Defense of the Standard Account versus Norcross's Contextualism.Ben Eggleston - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (1):1-15.
    An important strand of argument in Alastair Norcross's Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands is the rejection of the standard account of harm, which underwrites non-comparative statements of the form “act A harms person X.” According to Norcross, the correct account of harm is a contextualist one that only underwrites comparative statements of the form “act A results in a worse world for X than alternative act B, and a better world than alternative act C.” This article criticizes Norcross's contextualist (...)
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  12.  46
    Is Norcross Right about Right?Shelly Kagan - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (1):44-56.
    In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross defends a view he calls “scalar consequentialism.” I argue, first, that Norcross does not use the term consistently, since in most passages this seems to refer to a version of consequentialism that rejects all claims about rightness altogether, yet in other passages Norcross claims that scalar consequentialists should nonetheless embrace his favored “contextualist” account of rightness. I also argue, second, that the particular arguments offered by Norcross as to why consequentialists should forgo more traditional (...)
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  13.  14
    Degrees and Demands.Elinor Mason - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (1):34-43.
    Norcross's recent book has a two-part title: Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands. In this essay I focus on the second part of the title – the idea that there are moral reasons without demands. I do not think that it is at all obvious what this means, and whether it is distinct from Norcross's central (and compelling) idea, that moral reasons come in degrees. I explore several possible ways of cashing out a distinctive claim that morality does not make (...)
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  14.  23
    Harm, Context, Blame, and Significance: A Response to Eggleston, Sinnott-Armstrong, Mason, and Kagan.Alastair Norcross - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (1):57-73.
    Eggleston claims that my account of harm suffers from more problems than his preferred account. I clarify my account, and explain how his account suffers from some of the supposed problems he charges my account with. Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that his contrastivist approach is preferable to my contextualism. I clarify the role of linguistic context, and suggest that our positions are quite close to each other. Mason worries that my scalar approach does not properly accommodate the notions of blame and moral (...)
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  15.  15
    From Contextualism to Contrastivism in Moral Theory.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2025 - Utilitas 37 (1):16-33.
    In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross presents contextualist accounts of good and right acts as well as harm and free will. All of his analyses compare what is assessed with “the appropriate alternative,” which is supposed to vary with context. This paper clarifies Norcross's approach, distinguishes it from previous versions of moral contextualism and contrastivism, and reveals difficulties in adequately specifying the context and the appropriate alternative. It also shows how these difficulties can be avoided by moving from contextualism to (...)
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