All ethical systems seem to call for more ethical sensitivity. The dangers to personal life of too much ethical sensitivity have received much attention lately, in attempts to limit the demands of morality. But the ethical dangers of ethical sensitivity have hardly been noticed. I argue that, in a number of different ways, too much ethical sensitivity can be ethically harmful. The normative, the psychological and the pragmatic pictures are far more complex than is commonly realised.

People do not always really believe what they take themselves to believe. Sometimes a person may report having an attitude which conflicts with his better judgment -- his opinion. In these cases the person?s (evidential) beliefs are not apparent to the person in the normal way, and are not judgment-sensitive in a way that they are supposed to be. Beliefs of this kind can be called alien attitudes, or more narrowly, alien beliefs. They are attitudes or beliefs that fail to be sensitive to the person?s regular processes of introspection and evaluation and are known by him merely through behavioral and psychological evidence that he has noticed about himself, or learned about himself from others. When a person is aware of his beliefs in this way, he is not committed to their truth or overall acceptability; he has not endorsed them. We explore some issues that pertain to the ethics of such attitudes.

TBA

I argue that there exist duties that can be called "Moral duties due to history" or, shorter, "Duties to History" (DTH). My claim is not the familiar claim that we need to learn from history how to live better in the present and towards the future, but that history itself creates moral duties. There exist special obligations in response to the past; in addition to those obligations we currently recognise to the present and the future. If convincing, this means that our lives ought to be guided, in part, not only by our obligations to the living but by the DTH. This is a surprising result, with significant and sometimes perplexing implications. My focus will be on the obligations of individuals in the light of history rather than on collective duties.

The past is full of terrible tragedies, including slavery, World War I, and the Holocaust. Morality would clearly appear to support the preference that the victims of those calamities would have lived free and peaceful lives. And yet, a puzzle or even a paradox appears to be lurking here. Moral evaluation can be either personal or impersonal, yet neither one of these two perspectives, nor any other prevalent moral evaluation of events, appears to yield the morally expected conclusion. To the best of my knowledge this puzzle has not been discussed before. If there is no way to escape this surprising conclusion, then morality appears to be much more grim and unsympathetic than we normally think.

The nonidentity problem (henceforth NIP) is one of the great moral discoveries of the 20th century; and a philosophical classic. It is a single, simple, powerful, philosophical conundrum. It has in many cases a solution, but cannot be dismissed, and retains its paradoxical force. I will aim to present my own take on it, and defend the NIP from the original and challenging attack by Melinda Roberts and David Wasserman in "Dividing and Conquering the Nonidentity Problem" (this volume). In the process, I will reject the positions they offer on each of the two alleged problems into which they divide the NIP, offering some less familiar arguments, particularly about individual contribution and the special role of parenting. I will also explicate why I think that it is in any case a mistake to see the NIP as composed of two distinct problems, showing both its unity and the broadness of its manifestations; illustrate how my recent "historical" exploration of this problem is helpful; and will conclude by defending the idea that the nonidentity problem typically has a solution but is nevertheless a large and significant problem, an "existential paradox".

Morally, when should one retire from one's job? The surprising answer may be ''now''. It is commonly assumed that for a person who has acquired professional training at some personal effort, is employed in a task that society considers useful, and is working hard at it, no moral problem arises about whether that person should continue working. I argue that this may be a mistake: within many professions and pursuits, each one among the majority of those positive, productive, hard working people ought to consider leaving his or her job.

In "The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement" I proposed a personal and moral paradox about integrity and retirement. This paradox raises the disturbing prospect that many people (perhaps even the majority, in many professions) ought to seriously consider retiring, because they are likely to be replaced by someone who will do their work better than they do it. In "Why I Have No Plans to Retire: In Defence of Moderate Professional Complacency", James Lenman argues that my argument does not succeed. I examine his arguments, and conclude that they do not significantly affect the salience of the paradox.

In "The Paradox of Moral Complaint" I took up the question whether a person who has wronged others in certain ways may morally complain if other people then harm him illegitimately in similar ways. I argued that there are strong grounds for saying both 'yes' and 'no' here and, therefore, that our considered moral views are paradoxical. In her reply, Talia Shaham disagrees with the no part of my position. She presents two appealing philosophical arguments, and concludes that there is no 'paradox of moral complaint', seeking in particular to defend the unconditional moral 'right' of wronged wrongdoers to complain, as against my claims. I attempt to defend my position against her arguments.

In "The Paradox of Moral Complaint" I took up the question whether a person who has wronged others in certain ways may morally complain if other people then harm him illegitimately in similar ways. I argued that there are strong grounds for saying both 'yes' and 'no' here and, therefore, that our considered moral views are paradoxical. In her reply, Talia Shaham disagrees with the no part of my position. She presents two appealing philosophical arguments, and concludes that there is no 'paradox of moral complaint', seeking in particular to defend the unconditional moral 'right' of wronged wrongdoers to complain, as against my claims. I attempt to defend my position against her arguments.

If the social environment were arranged so that most people in the West could, with relatively little effort, be morally good to a reasonable degree, would this be a good thing? I claim that it is not entirely obvious that we should say yes. This is no idle question: mainstream Western social morality today seems to be approaching the prospect for a morality that is not taxing. This question has substantial theoretical interest because exploring it will help us understand the paradoxical relationship between morality and moral worth.

On the assumption that we are able to justify the institution of punishment, when people may be punished? Christopher New has recently argued that, despite our intuitions to the contrary, there is in principle nothing which forbids punishment' before the offense has been committed, i.e., prepunishment'. The issue, he argues, is only epistemological. I explore the challenge presented by New, and argue that prepunishment is deeply ethically unacceptable. The problem with prepunishment derives, in the end, from the widely recognized need to respect persons and from the unacceptability of the punishment' of the innocent.