TBA

How can hard determinism deal with the need to punish, when coupled with the obligation to be just? I argue that even though hard determinists might find it morally permissible to incarcerate wrongdoers apart from lawful society, they are committed to the punishment's taking a very different form from common practice in contemporary Western societies. Hard determinists are in fact committed to what I will call funishment, instead of punishment. But, by its nature funishment is a practical reductio of hard determinism: it makes implementing hard determinism impossible to contemplate. Indeed, the social practices that hard determinism requires turn out to be morally bad even according to hard determinism itself. I conclude by briefly reflecting upon the implications.

Knowledge is a significant good. With time, human beings broadly acquire more and better knowledge. Hence, it seems, it is prima facie better to be born later. We conduct a thought experiment as to when one should wish oneself born. This yields a paradox, and some other interesting results about our feelings towards people who lived in the past, about our own lives, and about the value of knowledge.

TBA

This article asks whether justice is binary, whether matters are either-or with respect to it. This question has been inexplicably neglected, and the elementary conceptual work has not been done. We consider this question through exploring the implications of free-will-related justice. We see that there are actually two questions of very different scope here, and that two distinct notions of binarity need to be distinguished. In the process, the plausibility of considering justice as a binary notion is evaluated.

The question whether libertarian free will is 'worth wanting' was emphasized (and given a negative answer) by Dennett in his recent Elbow Room. I argue that this question is seriously ambiguous, and includes two different sorts of questions, which I attempt to elucidate. I then go on to argue that once the two questions are clearly perceived, the compatibilist case is hardly as strong. Even if libertarian free will is impossible (and is thus in one sense 'not worth wanting'), in another sense libertarian free will is 'worth wanting'.

I argue, counter-intuitively, that under certain conditions many people are under some moral requirement to attempt to bring children into being (in order to raise them). There is only rarely a strict obligation to have children, but more moderate, inclining moral considerations in favour of having children, have a place in our moral world. I begin by considering a large number of arguments of favour and against the possibility of an obligation to have children. Then I examine when the weight of one set of arguments is greater. And I conclude by pointing out some general lessons from the discussion.

David Benatar has made a number of distinct claims leading to the conclusion that giving birth to people harms them, that it is overall impermissible to do so from a moral point of view and that, hence, giving birth needs to be strongly discouraged. In the response to his work, his exciting direct antinatalist arguments have taken center stage. The issue whether life is all that bad or is in fact good has been relatively neglected. I take up this matter, and argue that there is a strong case to be made for the goodness of life, in a way that significantly affects the plausibility of Benatar?s views.

The serious moral condemnation and legal penalization of blackmail has often been considered paradoxical. This practice, after all, often simply combines two fairly innocuous elements; asking for money or other favors, and threatening to do something which one is "allowed" to do. Michael Clark has recently argued that previous discussions of this issue were fundamentally mistaken, and that there is no paradox about blackmail. The relation between the two elements, Clark argues, brings forth something new, and thus there is nothing paradoxical about the fact that "in themselves" the elements which make up the practice of blackmail are permissible. I argue for the paradoxality of blackmail in a different way, which considers the practice as a whole, and is not based only on the permissibility of the elements of ordinary blackmail when taken separately.

Cynicism has a bad reputation. The cynic is not only after teaching us something new about morality, but seeks to unmask it, claiming that it derives from illicit and undeclared motivations. I explore whether there is anything we can learn from cynicism about morality, particularly about the content of morality. I distinguish between three basic forms of skepticism and the parallel forms of cynicism. I then examine four examples of suggestive ethical cynicism. Finally, I try to see in which areas ethical cynicism is likely to be more enlightening.

People do good or bad things and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.

I point out an odd consequence of the role that broadly pragmatic considerations regularly (and reasonably) play in determining moral demands. As a result of the way in which moral demands are formed, it turns out that people will frequently become morally good in a strange and rather dubious way. Because human beings are not very good, we will lower our moral demands and, as a result, most people will turn out, in an important sense, to be morally good. Our relative badness, by giving us good reasons to limit moral demands, makes us morally good.