The last time my wife and I were in London together, we had dinner at the Garrick Club with an eminent political philosopher and his wife. We’d walked out on some horrible West End play after the ...

Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest ...

I noted in my last post that many science-minded moral philosophers suggest that morality should aspire towards utilitarian goals (maximizing welfare for the greatest number of people/beings). I also ...

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 18, No. 4, Special Issue: BSET-2014 (August 2015), pp. 717-729 (13 pages) I argue that utilitarianism cannot accommodate a basic sort of moral judgment that ...

When we recite the Creed each Sunday and say, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” most of us don’t imagine that it has much to do with our everyday lives. Stop! Every aspect of ...

Think of all the billions of people there are in the world. Scads of innocent people die all the time. Why not spread happiness and reduce the death toll at the same time? Hard cheese on the appointed ...

The consequences of our actions are important. They matter. But if the utilitarian is right, then consequences are all that matters. Is this correct? The main principle of utilitarian moral theory, ...