Discussion Notes

My informal replies to academic papers

It turns out I’ve blogged rather a lot of philosophy over the years! I like to find ways to categorize and refer back to the more valuable of those old posts, so they aren’t entirely lost to the ages. To that end, here are 60+ critical replies I’ve written to published papers (or book chapters) that could potentially be worth considering—I’ve bolded the most substantial.¹

Busy times…

• Adams (1976), ‘Motive Utilitarianism’
  In ‘Adams' Critique of Global Consequentialism’, I explain how Adams drew precisely the wrong lesson from his apt critique of global consequentialism: there’s a principled connection between right motives and right acts which means they can’t both be independently assessed for rightness (as opposed to for instrumental value). But a utilitarian account of reasons for action is vastly more plausible than a utilitarian account of (right) reasons for motives. (This is evidently an area in which philosophical understanding has progressed immensely over the past 50 years!)

• American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (1995), ‘Ethical considerations in the allocation of organs and other scarce medical resources among patients’
  My reply, ‘Fine-Grained vs. Indiscriminate Allocation’, argues that the Council unjustifiably assumes that misallocation is worse when it results from attempts to allocate well than when it results from not even trying. They thus violate the principle that an allocation method that’s better than chance is thereby better than an allocation method that uses chance alone. (Note that the underlying moral error is very common across applied ethics.)

• Bedke (2020), ‘A dilemma for non-naturalists: irrationality or immorality?’
  My reply, ‘Ambiguously Normative Testimony’, argues that (i) it can be perfectly reasonable and innocuous to revise some moral beliefs on the basis of oracular pronouncements about the distribution of non-natural properties; and (ii) the fundamental structure of the ‘dilemma’ has nothing to do with non-naturalism. It can be generalized to apply regardless of one’s metaethical view.

• Blackburn (2017), ‘All Souls Night’
  My reply, ‘Expressivism and Evidence’, argues that Blackburn’s analogy to expressivism about single-case probabilities is not as obviously congenial to his position as he seems to suppose: there are good grounds for preferring robust realism about epistemic normativity, too.

• Bradley (2008), ‘The Worst Time to Die’
  My ‘Acquired Tastes and Necessary Interests’ defends a necessitarian account of which future interests matter, against Bradley’s objection from acquired tastes. I note that contingently acquired tastes still advance one’s standing interest in pleasure, which undermines the objection: there’s no puzzle for necessitarians about how acquiring new tastes could be good for you. (My postscript explores how necessitarianism functions differently between desire vs objective accounts of interests. There are some interestingly subtle differences!)

• Bramble (2021), ‘The Defective Character Solution to the Non-Identity Problem’
  My reply, ‘The Limits of Defective Character Solutions’, offers a quick refutation by replacing the moral agent with “natural” causes: if the outcome is still undesirable, as is clearly the case in Parfitian depletion scenarios, then the problem isn’t just one of “defective moral character”.

• Brennan (2010), ‘Scepticism about Philosophy’
  My reply, ‘Unreliable Philosophy’, explores three ways of responding to the challenge of widespread disagreement within philosophy. I conclude that (to avoid skepticism) we might reasonably regard ourselves as being more reliably truth-tracking than other philosophers are.

• Bronsteen et al. (2009), ‘Welfare as Happiness’
  My reply flags some significant flaws in their arguments.

• Brown (2010) ‘Deprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism’
  My reply, ‘Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II’, explains the importance of transparent specifications in conceivability arguments, and how this undermines Brown’s “zoombie” (or “reverse zombie”) parody.

• Cookson et al. (2008), ‘Public healthcare resource allocation and the Rule of Rescue’
  My reply, ‘Catering to Mistaken Morals’, argues (against the authors) that widespread acceptance of a moral mistake doesn’t suffice to justify it.

• Cullity (2004), The Moral Demands of Affluence
  In ‘Helping Wrongdoers’, I dispute Cullity’s ‘No Helping Wrongdoers’ principle, arguing that it only plausibly applies to absolutely negative and not to merely comparative wrongdoing. So it’s still worth helping people, even if they in turn wrongly fail to help others as much as they ought.

• Cutter & Crummett (forthcoming), ‘Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism’
  In ‘Psychophysical Harmony’, I suggest that psychophysically harmonious worlds are (intuitively) intrinsically more credible than disharmonious worlds, whereas appeals to theism are too extrinsic to get this result for the right reason.

• Draper (forthcoming), ‘Benatar and Beyond: Rethinking the Consequences of the Asymmetry’.
  My reply, ‘Benatar’s Fallacy’, builds upon Draper’s starting point to suggest that a stronger critique of Benatar’s argument is possible.

• Driver (2001) Uneasy Virtue
  In ‘What is Virtue?’, I explore grounds for worrying that Driver’s consequentialist account of virtue may be merely terminological (a ‘concealed tautology’, as Parfit would say). Substantive claims about virtue need to relate two distinct properties; I suggest five candidates, none of which seem promising for Driver’s account.

• Feldman (2012), ‘True and Useful: On the Structure of a Two Level Normative Theory’
  My two-part reply, ‘Assessing Decision Procedures: Background’ + ‘Action Guidance and Rational Decision Procedures’, together argues that Feldman’s picture is excessively subjective; greater idealization is required to yield verdicts that are meaningfully normative.

• Frick (2020), ‘Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry’.
  My reply, ‘Against Conditional Beneficence’, argues that (i) Frick’s central objection to teleology equivocates between two very different senses of ‘state-regarding’ reasons; (ii) his argument for the procreative asymmetry is blatantly question-begging (considering reasons “against” but not reasons “for” a world in which a new person exists), and (iii) there are challenges with making his ‘Selection Requirement’ work as intended.

• Girgis et al (2010), ‘What is Marriage’
  My reply, ‘What's Wrong With 'What Is Marriage?'’, explains several ways that their anti-gay-marriage argument goes wrong.

• Goldman (1999), ‘Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility Approach’
  My reply, ‘Valuing Unnecessary Causal Contributions’, presents a simple counterexample to the claim that one should value being part of a group that does good things (when one’s individual contribution knowably makes no difference to how much good the group does).

• Graham (2019), ‘An Argument for Objective Possibilism’
  My response, ‘Actualism, Evaluation and Prerogatives’, explores two candidate responses (concessive vs bullet-biting) on behalf of the actualist.

• Graham (2021), Subjective versus Objective Moral Wrongness
  My reply, ‘What's at Stake in the Objective/Subjective Wrongness Debate?’, argues that there’s no single question to which ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ accounts of wrongness (or other deontic concepts) could plausibly be offered as competing answers.

• Hare (2013), The Limits of Kindness (chp 9: Morphing)
  My three-part series (‘Personal Concern and Chains of Counterparts’, ‘Anti-Haecceitism and Personal Concerns’, and ‘Option-Dependent Preferences’) explain and critically assess Hare’s ingenious argument. I conclude that defenders of partiality may resist Hare’s argument, but only if they reject The Practical Insignificance of Irrelevant Alternatives.

• Harman (2004), ‘Can we harm and benefit in creating?’
  While agreeing that the answer to her titular question is ‘yes’, my response, ‘Harman, Harm, and the Non-Identity Problem’, argues that Harman has subtly misdiagnosed the role that harm plays in explaining commonsense non-identity verdicts. The relevant “harms” are (in typical cases) better understood as “reduced benefits”; accordingly, it is still the case that nobody is wronged when we act wrongly in typical non-identity cases. The wrongness is, ultimately, impersonal.

• Harrison (2013), ‘The moral supervenience thesis is not a conceptual truth’
  My reply, ‘Moral Supervenience’, offers counterargument. (The comments sport a further exchange with the author.)

• Hayward (2020), ‘Utility Cascades’
  My reply, ‘No Utility Cascades’, explains how the central argument misrepresents how act utilitarianism works and what it recommends (in a way that ends up being incoherent: it’s literally impossible to complete a utility table that matches the given stipulations).

• Kamm (1993), Morality, Mortality vol.1, ch. 8: ‘Are There Irrelevant Utilities?’
  In section 3 of ‘The Mere Means Objection’, I argue that Kamm’s discounting of indirect beneficiaries is not well justified, and her characterization of instrumental favoritism as treating people “merely as means” is outright unreasonable.

• Kingston & Sinnott-Armstrong (2018), ‘What’s Wrong with Joyguzzling?’
  My replies, ‘Emergence and Incremental Impact’ and ‘Emergence and Incremental Probability’, together make the case that there’s no good reason to grant K&SA’s crucial assumption that “emergent” phenomena involve no thresholds: (i) there are known scientific counterexamples of individual increments affecting emergence, and (ii) their probabilistic claims appear outright logically incoherent.

• Lazar (2019), ‘Moral Status and Agent-Centred Options’ includes two objections to my account of the separateness of persons. I respond to each objection separately:
  (i) ‘Constitutive Instrumentality: a response to Lazar’ explains the concepts of fungibility and constitutive instrumentality, which Lazar’s paper misunderstands.
  (ii) ‘Acts, Attitudes, and the Separateness of Persons’ defends my view that moral separateness should be understood primarily as having implications for fitting attitudes (on pain of lacking any independent force or interest over and above purely extensional disagreements with utilitarian verdicts).

• Lenman (2000), ‘Consequentialism and Cluelessness’
  My response (expanded further here) defends the “expected value” response against several bad arguments presented in Lenman’s paper.

• MacFarlane (2007), ‘Relativism and Disagreement’
  My reply contrasts MacFarlane’s “apt assertoric challenge” account of genuine disagreement with a more “substantive” alternative, flagging that there seems something importantly defective about cases of the former without the latter. Relativistic disagreement seems especially problematic in the moral domain, as I expand upon further in ‘Reflecting on Relativism’ and ‘The Deliberative Question’.

• Macklin and Cowan (2012), ‘Given financial constraints, it would be unethical to divert antiretroviral drugs from treatment to prevention’
  My response, ‘Treatment, Prevention, and Bad Bioethics’ explains why their paper is a moral and intellectual embarrassment to the field. Simply shameful.

• Maguire & Woods (2020), ‘The Game of Belief’
  My reply, ‘Why Belief is No Game’, argues that their pragmatist account is wrong about what people are rationally criticizable for, and hence wrong about what reasons there are.

• Muñoz & Spencer (2021), ‘Knowledge of Objective ‘Oughts’: Monotonicity and the New Miners Puzzle’
  My reply, ‘Monotonicity and Inadvisable Oughts’, argues that their paper relies on a tendentiously possibilist analysis of ‘ought’, which unwisely ignores the potential downsides of a non-maximal action. (See also some interesting back-and-forth with the authors in the comments section!)

• Nefsky (2019), ‘Collective Harm and the Inefficacy Problem’
  My reply, ‘Nefsky on Tiny Chances and Tiny Differences’, argues that Nefsky doesn’t really establish any serious difficulty for the defenders of expected value. Her objections from (a) tiny chances, and (b) tiny differences, are both easily addressed. (See also: ‘When is inefficacy objectionable?’)

• Nefsky (2011), ‘Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm: A Reply to Kagan’
  My reply, ‘Apparent Vagueness and Graded Harms’, argues that her central cases don’t really support her conclusion.

• Nye, Plunkett, & Ku (2015), ‘Non-Consequentialism Demystified’
  I’m a big fan of this paper. But my reply puts some pressure on their distinction between (fittingness conditions for) state-directed and act-directed motivations, as divergences between the two seem to essentially involve weakness of will or other irrationality.

• Oreste Fiocco (2012), ‘Consequentialism and the World in Time’
  My reply, ‘Consequences in Time’, suggests that this paper’s arguments are deeply confused.

• Otsuka (2012), ‘Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons’
  My reply, ‘Competing Claims and Separate Persons’, questions Otsuka’s assumption that separateness must affect our moral reasons for action. It may instead influence our reasons for attitudes such as (pro tanto) regret.

• Parfit (2011), On What Matters vol. 1
  re: chapter 9: In ‘Parfit’s Mere Means Principles’ I propose a “Full Appreciation Principle” as a possible improvement on Parfit’s principles analyzing when it is wrong to treat someone as a mere means.
  re: chapter 5: In ‘Parfit on Epistemic and Practical Rationality’, I argue (contra Parfit) that an important form of practical irrationality can result from a purely epistemic mis-step.

• Parfit (2011), On What Matters vol. 2 (Appendix: ‘On What There Is’)
  In ‘Parfit’s Possibilism’, I argue that Parfit has badly misunderstood what ontological actualists believe.

• Parfit (2017), On What Matters vol. 3.
  In ‘On Parfit on Knowing What Matters’, I follow up on Parfit’s (brief) comments on my paper, ‘Knowing What Matters’.

• Perl (2021), ‘Solving the Ideal Worlds Problem’
  I offer a quick refutation in passing in my ‘Objections to Rule Consequentialism’ (under #3): Perl proposes that “the moral value of a rule R is everything actual that’s agent-neutrally good or bad to the extent it’s caused by actions that R classifies as morally right.” But suppose that R permits both good and extremely bad acts, but we’re in a world where people have only performed the good acts. We shouldn’t conclude from this that R is a good rule, or that its non-actual (extremely bad!) instances are permissible. Counterfactuals matter.

• Persad et al. (2009), ‘Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions’
  My reply, ‘QALYs, DALYs, and Complete Lives’, argues that productive-aged life-years are clearly more instrumentally valuable than other (very young or old) life-years on average, and may even be more valuable for the subject.

• Pettigrew (2024), ‘Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it?’.
  My reply, Risk Aversion as a Humility Heuristic, cautions against Pettigrew’s formal treatment of risk aversion and suggests an alternative which yields more commonsensical results.

• Portmore (early draft version of his eventual 2011) Commonsense Consequentialism.
  Doug’s initial draft of the book defended possibilism. My replies, ‘Portmore on Possibilism’ + ‘Actualism and Complex Actions’ (and further discussion in the comments) convinced him to switch to my view! (He calls it ‘securitism’ instead, but the view I propounded in these posts was precisely one on which the deontic status of long-term intentions is “determined by the agent’s present scope of control”; “the actualist can certainly endorse forming effective long-term intentions… [advising] such options when they would lead to the best outcomes.”)

• Pummer (2017), ‘Lopsided Lives’—presents a brilliant, difficult challenge for welfare pluralists.
  In ‘A Multiplicative Model of Value Pluralism’ I offer a sketch of a step towards an answer, but it’s still far from entirely satisfactory.

• Rivera-López (2012), ‘The Moral Murderer. A (More) Effective Counterexample to Consequentialism’
  My reply, ‘Counterexamples to Consequentialism’, suggests that we can take the sting out of the case once we appreciate that the “moral murderer” may be blameworthy, or even unusually vicious, despite doing more good than many people who aren’t either blameworthy or vicious. There’s more to ethics than just act-evaluations! (A common theme in my replies, you may be noticing…)

• Rosen (2004), ‘Skepticism About Moral Responsibility’
  My reply offers a sustained argument against (what I call) Rosen’s RAID principle (responsibility for actions done from ignorance is merely derivative). Instead, I argue, an act done from unreasonable ignorance, manifesting a lack of good will (in case of motivated ignorance), may yet serve as a locus of blameworthiness.

• Rowland (2018), ‘The Intelligibility of Moral Intransigence’
  My reply, ‘Cognitivism and Moral / Philosophical Peer Intransigence’, (i) notes that a parallel argument would imply non-cognitivism about philosophy, and (ii) argues against the premise that “Perceived peer disagreement is perceived evidence.” Further conditions must be met for peer disagreement to be epistemically relevant.

• Sartorio (2008), ‘Moral Inertia’
  My reply, ‘Natural Agents and Status-Quo Bias’, explores some reasons for skepticism about moral inertia, together with an alternative (defective character) explanation of the relevant intuitions.

• Scanlon (1982), ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’.
  My reply, ‘Revisiting "Philosophical" Utilitarianism’ argues that (i) Scanlon has misconstrued the philosophical impulses that most naturally motivate utilitarianism, and (ii) Scanlon’s downgrading of the significance of well-being is substantively objectionable.

• Schroeder (2017) ‘What Matters about Metaethics’
  My reply, ‘Cancelling Schroeder's "Implicature" Response to Parfit's Trivality Objection’, argues that reductive subjectivists cannot rely on pragmatic implicatures in order to explain positive substantive normative claims.

• Schwitzgebel (ms) ‘The Washout Argument Against Longtermism’
  My responses: (i) It’s not wise to be clueless and (ii) Commonsense Clues: a Defense of Longtermism both defend the importance of good judgment (and substantively reasonable “priors” or expectations about the future) in applying decision-theoretic tools and resisting cluelessness.

• Sharadin (2019), ‘Consequentialism and Moral Worth’
  My reply, ‘Consequentialism, Moral Worth, and the Fitting/Fortunate Distinction’, argues that Sharadin’s neglect of the latter distinction leads to conceptual confusion.

• Slater (2020), ‘Satisficing Consequentialism Still Doesn't Satisfy’ and

• Slater (2023), ‘Satisficers Still Get Away with Murder!’
  I respond to both in ‘Slater’s Objections to Satisficing’.

• Slote (2007), The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Slote’s view in this book appeals to natural empathy, which could (for all we know a priori) turn out to be patterned in deeply immoral ways.
  In ‘Possibly Wrong Moral Theories’, I respond that a possibly superior theory may thereby be actually superior.

• Smith (1983), ‘Culpable Ignorance’
  My two-part reply, ‘Culpable Ignorance and Double Blame’ + ‘Negligence and Culpable Ignorance’, argues that Holly Smith’s seminal paper leads us astray by failing to mark two crucial distinctions: (i) between focal acts and acts-as-events, and (ii) between diachronic negligence and synchronic epistemic irrationality. Getting clear on these yields a very different—and much more illuminating—framework for thinking about “culpable ignorance” and blame.

• Staples & Cafaro (2009), ‘The Environmental Argument for Reducing Immigration Into the United States’
  My reply, ‘Migration and Sustainability’, argues that if we want to get the most welfare “bang” for our ecological “buck”, barring the global poor access to economic opportunities is surely not the way to go. It’s less extreme than outright killing them, but misguided for fundamentally similar reasons.

• Sterri & Moen (2021), ‘The Ethics of Emergencies’
  My reply, ‘Emergency Ethics’, argues that (i) their “informal insurance model” yields the right result for the wrong reason in drowning child cases, and (ii) emergency ethics doesn’t call for fundamentally different norms—it’s easy to construct cases in which we should pass by one drowning child in order to save more. (There are also obvious psychological reasons why a well-adjusted person would find this very difficult!)

• Street (2009), ‘In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference’
  My reply, ‘Against a Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference’, argues that Street misconstrues Parfit’s famous example. When conceptualized appropriately, it remains an intuitively compelling example of an intrinsically irrational desire.

• Tenenbaum & Raffman (2012), ‘Vague Projects and the Puzzle of the Self-Torturer’
  My responses, (i) ‘Do we have vague projects?’ and (ii) ‘Irrational Increments for the Self-Torturer’, explain why I think their central claims are mistaken.

• Thomson (1976), ‘Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem’
  Against Thomson’s famous Transplant thought experiment, I suggest we do better to consider more explicitly alien thought experiments, such as Martian Harvest.

• Tucker (2016), ‘The pen, the dress, and the coat: a confusion in goodness’
  My reply, ‘Final Value and Fitting Attitudes’, dispels the confusion by refocusing the fitting attitudes analysis on the kind of care that’s warranted, rather than the explanation why care is warranted.

• Yablo (1993), ‘Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?’
  My reply, ‘A Worldly Metaphysics’ (also: chapter 2 of my undergraduate thesis), argues that just as we should (by Yablo’s lights) take whole scenarios (epistemically possible worlds, rather than individual sentences or propositions) to be what’s fundamentally assessable in terms of conceivability and possibility, we should also take individual scenarios to be prior to our grasp of “modal space” as a whole. This insight provides modal rationalists with a principled response to Yablo’s challenge from meta-modal conceivability: we should not regard a necessity claim (□G) as conceivable (◆) unless G holds true in every conceivable scenario. (My thesis advances a “cross-modal variation on the S5 axiom” to this effect: ◆□G → ■G.)

1. I think many of these make important points of the sort that (like “discussion notes” in peer-reviewed journals) could easily warrant professional credit. But it wouldn’t be worth the time cost to try to officially publish them—I’d rather focus on my more original ideas. Maybe I’ll instead just add a link to this post to my CV: self-publication obviously doesn’t “certify” quality, but anyone interested can always just follow a few links and judge my arguments for themselves! Note that some of these responses go back to my grad school (2007-12) and even undergrad (2006) days. And it’s all informal writing. But I think I still endorse basically all the content. And it really is a lot of substantive philosophical engagement. For anyone with reason to assess my productivity or “value” as a philosopher, it at least seems worth being aware of!