Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Through the ages, many thinkers have worried that our death fears mar our lives. Sharing this worry, the Epicureans have argued that we can live well only if we see death for what it is: a mere "nothing" that it is ill-fitting to fear. I show how this argument depends on the assumption that a mental state theory of well-being is correct. If we give up this assumption, it can be fitting to fear death. Using my philosophical discussion of when and how it is fitting to fear death, I formulate three strategies for keeping our death-related fears in check. In this way, my paper follows the therapeutic tradition in philosophy, whose potential I urge effective altruists to explore.

AbstractWe frequently engage in activities that impose a risk of serious harm on innocent others in order to realise trivial benefits for ourselves or third parties. Many moral theories tie the evidence-relative permissibility of engaging in such activities to the size of the risk that an individual agent imposes. I argue that we should move away from such a reliance on quantified individual risks when conceptualising morally permissible risk imposition. Under most circumstances of interest, a conscientious reasoner will identify a gap between the factors they deem potentially relevant to the riskiness of an agent's behaviour, and the factors they are reasonably able to quantify. This then leads a conscientious reasoner to conclude that they cannot, in good faith, come up with a quantitative risk estimate that is genuinely tailored to the agent's particular situation. Based on this, I argue that principles of morally permissible risk imposition fail to provide us with practical guidance if they ask us to take into account our agent-specific risks in a quantified manner. I also argue that principles of permissible risk imposition which appeal to quantified individual risks implausibly imply that it is frequently indeterminate whether engaging in some risky activity is morally permissible. For both of these reasons, I contend that principles of morally permissible risk imposition should make no reference to quantified individual risks. They should instead acknowledge that any quantitative estimates that an agent might usefully be able to consider will likely not be tailored to the agent's idiosyncratic situation.

Imagine that, through no fault of your own, you find yourself at the bottom of a deep well. Thugs have picked up an innocent person-call him Bob-and have thrown him down the well. Bob is now falling towards you. If you do nothing, your body will cushion Bob's otherwise lethal fall. This will guarantee his survival, but it will kill you. If you shoot your ray gun, you vaporize and kill Bob, thereby saving your life. Are you morally permitted to shoot your ray gun? If you are, then it is permissible to kill a profiting, non-responsible threat. Bob is a threat because he endangers your life through no immediate action of his own. He is innocent or non-responsible because neither did he intend to become a threat. nor was becoming a threat a consequence of an intentional action of Bob's that he could reasonably have been expected to foresee. Bob profits from you because he depends on your presence for his survival. There is disagreement among moral philosophers whether self-defence against a profiting, non-responsible threat is permissible. In this article, I argue that the right thing to do when faced with such a threat is to flip a coin. By flipping a coin to determine who should live, you ensure that the indivisible good of continuing one's life is distributed as fairly as is possible without wasting it. Adapted from the source document.

Published online: 6 March 2019 ; We argue that even if an agent's initial responsibilities are not very demanding, it can become permissible to burden her with significant costs if she culpably fails to discharge those responsibilities. In particular, we defend the claim that even if our responsibilities to assist others are not initially very demanding, our failure to live up to them can make us liable to possibly burdensome enforcement costs. Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland (2016) disagree. They claim that other things equal, fewer costs may be imposed on an agent if she culpably fails to live up to her assistance-based responsibilities as opposed to her responsibilities not to contribute towards harm. Their thought is that our responsibilities to assist others are less demanding than our responsibilities not to contribute towards harm, and they assume that this asymmetry is matched by an asymmetry in the enforceability of the two types of responsibility. We agree with Barry and Øverland (2016) that our assistance-based responsibilities are less demanding than our contribution- based responsibilities. We argue that autonomy-based reasons support this asymmetry. Pace Barry and Øverland (2016), we claim that there is no reason to think that the two types of responsibility differ in their enforceability. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement No 340956 - IOW - The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict.

We argue that even if an agent's initial responsibilities are not very demanding, it can become permissible to burden her with significant costs if she culpably fails to discharge those responsibilities. In particular, we defend the claim that even if our responsibilities to assist others are not initially very demanding, our failure to live up to them can make us liable to possibly burdensome enforcement costs. Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland (2016) disagree. They claim that other things equal, fewer costs may be imposed on an agent if she culpably fails to live up to her assistance-based responsibilities as opposed to her responsibilities not to contribute towards harm. Their thought is that our responsibilities to assist others are less demanding than our responsibilities not to contribute towards harm, and they assume that this asymmetry is matched by an asymmetry in the enforceability of the two types of responsibility. We agree with Barry and Øverland (2016) that our assistance-based responsibilities are less demanding than our contribution-based responsibilities. We argue that autonomy-based reasons support this asymmetry. Pace Barry and Øverland (2016), we claim that there is no reason to think that the two types of responsibility differ in their enforceability.

While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1000 senior executives from across the world, which was constructed using a survey instrument designed by the authors based on a thought experiment resembling John Rawls's original position. We report four main findings. First, executives conceptualise distributive justice in a pluralistic manner, endorsing different and sometimes apparently conflicting philosophical principles: to explain how this plurality can be accounted for we propose a novel field-theory framework for conceptualising beliefs about distributive justice. Second, executives support similar philosophical approaches at both society and company levels of analysis, thus countering the idea that companies should leave matters of distributive justice exclusively for governments to deal with via the tax system. Third, executives believe that they live in societies and work for companies that fall short of desirable distributive justice outcomes. Fourth, the distributive justice views of the executives in our sample fall into four distinct clusters that are correlated with certain socio-demographic markers. Finally, we note the distinction between distributive justice beliefs and behaviours, from which we derive a number of managerial and public policy implications.