Title: Eliminative Harming without Intentions Location: Edgecliffe G03 Abstract: Consider the following pair of cases Roughshod. You are driving to the hospital for an emergency life-saving operation. If you do not make it in time, you will die. However, Victim is lying in the only road that will get you there in time. Although Victim ... Read more
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Positive interest rates block green transitions, and there is no compelling reason not to fix the interest rate at zero Commentator: Carl Mildenberger (Zurich)
Title: Chance Prioritarianism Location: Teams (online only), and streamed from Edgecliffe G03 Abstract: I will defend what we could call survival chance prioritarianism, according to which the moral value of improving someone’s chance of surviving (some period) is greater the more likely the person was to die before the improvement. I motivate this view by ... Read more
Title: Risk, Ambiguity, and Ethical Decision-Making Abstract: I argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority about what to believe or what to do even when doing so goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities: for example, experts in ... Read more
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Green Bioethics: Environmental Sustainability and Health Care Commentator: Joseph Millum (St Andrews) Abstract: Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. By 2017, the National Health Service’s Health, and Social Care sectors had a carbon output (CO2) of 27.1 million tons. Carbon ... Read more
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Is the future a utility monster? Abstract: I will revisit Nozick’s utility monster thought experiment and draw an analogy between imagined utility monsters and the long-term future. I argue that the far future can be seen as a real-life utility monster. This is the case if the three premises that form the ... Read more
Title: Threshold Deontology: Some Lessons from Vagueness Abtract: Threshold Deontology is the view that the positive consequences of an act do not normally override moral constraints, but when the positive balance of the consequences of an act is sufficiently great, it may be morally permitted, and possibly required to engage in an act that is ... Read more
Title: Is There Anti-Fittingness?" Abstract: The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad are, by contrast, polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the apt and the inapt, the warranted and ... Read more
Title: Justice and the Problem of Alienation Abstract: I will focus on why alienation is a problem for many of our major theories of justice (discussing political liberalism, capabilities approach and republicanism) and what might be done about it. Location: Edgecliffe G03
Title: Debating proportionality at the edge of sentience Abstract: Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings ... Read more