Tim Campbell

In Climate Matters John Broome defends two claims. First, if you live a "normal life" in a rich country, you will probably cause significant harm by your emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG), violating a moral duty of harm-avoidance. Second, you can satisfy this duty by offsetting your emissions. Some would deny Broome's first claim on the grounds that an individual's emissions of GHG do no harm. Broome calls this position "Individual Denialism" (ID) and in a recent paper he attempts to refute it. I explain how, if Broome's refutation of ID were successful, it would undermine his claim that you can satisfy your duty of harm avoidance by offsetting. I suggest an alternative defence of the claim that you can satisfy your individual duty to reduce your carbon footprint by offsetting. This alternative defence assumes that your duty to reduce your carbon footprint derives from a duty of risk-avoidance.

Some moral philosophers believe that people getting what they deserve has intrinsic positive value. Some of these philosophers are axiological retributivists. They believe that some evil people deserve what is bad for them, and that some such person getting what he deserves, even though this is bad for him, has intrinsic positive value. In this paper, I raise a problem for axiological retributivism. The problem arises when we ask what this view implies about pairs of outcomes that differ with respect to the number and identities of deserving agents. Attempting to answer this question leads to a paradox that mirrors a familiar paradox in population axiology. The latter, which I call the neutrality paradox, arises when one tries to formulate a plausible population axiology that accommodates what John Broome calls the intuition of neutrality: there is a range of positive wellbeing levels such that if a new person comes into existence at any one of these levels, the resulting outcome is neither better nor worse, other things being equal. As Broome demonstrates, it seems impossible to accommodate the intuition of neutrality without rejecting some seemingly obvious axiological claim. I argue that axiological retributivists will be pressed to acknowledge a range of wellbeing levels such that if a new deserving person comes into existence at any of these levels, the resulting outcome is neither better nor worse with respect to desert, other things being equal. This claim, like the intuition of neutrality, seems impossible to accept without rejecting some seemingly obvious axiological claim. But the desert-neutrality paradox poses a bigger problem for axiological retributivism than the neutrality paradox poses for population axiology. While it would be unreasonable to respond to the neutrality paradox by rejecting population axiology altogether, it would not be unreasonable to respond to the desert-neutrality paradox by rejecting axiological retributivism.

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.

I argue that Psychological Reductionism, a view of the nature of persons and their identity over time, supports an axiological claim that I call The Impersonal Value of Experience (IVE): If two outcomes differ in their experiential properties, then this difference by itself can make one of these outcomes worse (or better) than the other. I argue that IVE rules out axiological person-affecting views according to which an outcome is better than another only if it is better in some respect for persons. Furthermore, I argue that given plausible assumptions about how axiology feeds into ethics, IVE undermines a claim in population ethics known as the Procreation Asymmetry: There is moral reason to refrain from creating badly-off people but no corresponding moral reason to create well-off people.

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.

In this paper we consider problems in population ethics for Scanlonian Contractualism. As we demonstrate, this view seems unable to satisfy rather obvious intuitive desiderata in population ethics. Rahul Kumar has suggested that his idea of "standpoints" offers help with this difficulty. We discuss different interpretations of this idea and argue that it unfortunately fails. Scanlonian Contractualism cannot, it seems, avoid the aggregation problems that standard "impersonal" theories face without running into other problems that are at least as troublesome.