Suggested Readings

Hidden gems for philosophy classes

This one’s for any philosophy professors in the audience. As the new semester approaches, I’d like to take a moment to share some candidate reading suggestions that colleagues might not otherwise think of. So, I won’t bother to highlight already-canonical texts like Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’; but I might suggest my study guide as a useful supplement.

My background thought here is that professors tend to rely too much on an outdated canon, in part because discovery of new gems in a bloated literature is difficult and time-consuming. So it’s helpful for academics to draw attention to new work (of theirs or by others) that others might find valuable. Accordingly, here’s my offering.¹

On Consequentialism and Axiology

The most obvious upgrade for anyone teaching on utilitarianism or consequentialism (perhaps as part of a general intro ethics class) is to make use of utilitarianism.net. It’s straightforwardly the best introductory resource on the topic, in my view, and plenty of big names seem to agree.

For more advanced (e.g. graduate) seminars, wanting greater depth on the core view and its many varieties — beyond what’s offered in utilitarianism.net’s second chapter — check out my ‘Consequentialism: Core and Expansion’ (forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics) for a detailed overview. If you want students to get as deep an understanding of consequentialism as possible from just one assigned paper, I’d say this is the one to use.

If you want to go into more depth on maximizing, satisficing, and scalar consequentialisms, you can’t beat my Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism entry on ‘Deontic Pluralism and the Right Amount of Good’. (This could also be a useful background/supplement for a grad seminar on Norcross’ recent book, Morality by Degrees.) For satisficing in particular, I think my ‘Willpower Satisficing’ is generally agreed to be the best extant version of the view. I worry that people too often default to assigning (and discussing) the refuted 40-year-old original view, rather than the live contemporary version. Please don’t make this mistake!

For global consequentialism, Hilary Greaves’ handbook chapter offers a sympathetic overview, but (IMO) doesn’t sufficiently grapple with the biggest objections that emerge from thinking about fitting attitudes. So I would strongly recommend pairing it with McElwee’s brilliant paper, ‘The Ambitions of Consequentialism’ (JESP, 2020).²

For population ethics, you can’t beat the utilitarianism.net chapter for a comprehensive introduction. Jeff McMahan’s work on non-comparative benefits (e.g. his 2013 ‘Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives’) is incredibly important. But if you need a simplified explanation for undergraduates, my blog post ‘The Profoundest Error in Population Ethics’ offers an accessible introduction to the core idea. Finally, if specifically discussing the procreative asymmetry and associated worries about implausible “procreative duties”, my 2017 ‘Rethinking the Asymmetry’ explores how to separate these issues. (If you’re after more theoretical arguments in population axiology, I recommend Elliott Thornley’s ‘A Non-Identity Dilemma for Person-Affecting Views’.)

If you want the best representative of a “person-affecting”, asymmetry-embracing view, I’d probably recommend Johann Frick’s ‘Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry’. But I’d especially recommend it pairing it with my critical response: ‘Against Conditional Beneficence’!

Finally, if you plan to discuss the Thomson/Geach “there’s no such thing as predicative goodness” view, you might consider pairing it with my response, ‘Words Don’t Matter’, which I imagine could prompt some interesting discussion of broader philosophical methodology.

Objections to Consequentialism

Generally speaking, the objections pages of utilitarianism.net are a great place to start. For example, I think our responses to the rights, mere means, separateness of persons, alienation, abusability, and cluelessness objections are the best you’ll find anywhere, and straightforwardly ought to be included on any syllabus that discusses these topics.

For more depth on alienation worries, check out ‘The Right Wrong-Makers’ (PPR, 2021), which I think offers a decisive response to the classic objections from Stocker’s (1976) ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’ and Stratton-Lake’s (2011) ‘Recalcitrant Pluralism’—both wonderful papers, which make for great classroom discussion. (I advance a very different strategy from that found in Railton’s canonical 1984 paper; in a grad seminar, it could well be interesting to compare the two. Note that Railton’s famous strategy remains vulnerable to Stocker’s charge of “moral schizophrenia” or disharmony between one’s normative and motivating reasons.)

On replaceability, the perfect pairing is G.A. Cohen’s (2012) ‘Rescuing Conservatism’ with my (2015) ‘Value Receptacles’.³ The latter paper could also be paired as a response to anyone making strongly anti-utilitarian claims about what the “separateness of persons” calls for (e.g. Voorhoeve’s ‘How Should We Aggregate Competing Claims’).

On demandingness, Sobel’s 2007 paper is now canonical, for good reason. I’d recommend also assigning Mogensen’s (2020) ‘Moral Demands and the Far Future’ for a fresh perspective. It’s especially helpful in correcting the (previously-common) impression that morality would cease to be demanding if only everybody did their “share”. If you’re open to assigning non-traditional texts (e.g. blog posts), consider adding either my ‘Imperfection is OK!’ or Scott Alexander’s ‘Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable’ to get at the issue of how to actually respond in practice. (Otherwise, I worry, a purely academic discussion of morality’s demands risks being very demotivating to students.)

On collective harm / inefficacy objections, Nefsky’s 2019 Philosophy Compass article, ‘Collective Harm and the Inefficacy Problem’ provides a helpful survey of the putative problem, though I find it a bit one-sided. I think my unpublished paper, ‘There is No Problem of Collective Harm’, offers the most comprehensive available response, so would make an ideal pairing if you’re teaching this topic.

Applied Ethics

• On effective altruism, my 2024 ‘Why Not Effective Altruism?’ defends the core ideas and critically surveys the major objections. (Suggestions welcome for a good critical piece to pair it with. I usually use Srinivasan’s ‘Stop the Robot Apocalypse’, but would welcome something that engages more substantively with EA ideas.)

• On vegetarianism, there are many excellent and compelling works to choose from on the “pro-veg” side. The difficulty, in teaching the topic, is finding a non-stupid foil to pair these with. One option would be to use my ‘Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist’. It acknowledges that there isn’t really any adequate justification for meat-eating (which helps on the “not stupid” front). But it explores how a generally decent person might still do it even so, and even have an intriguingly moral reason for prioritizing other moral improvements over this one. I could imagine this sparking some interesting class discussion.

• My (2020) ‘Pandemic Ethics: The Case for Risky Research’ (co-authored with Peter Singer) is sufficiently short, simple, and provocative to be an ideal reading on research ethics for undergraduates. For broader issues in public health ethics and the pandemic policy response, I’d instead recommend my (2022) ‘Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk’.

• On voting, I strongly recommend Zach Barnett’s instant classic from 2020, ‘Why You Should Vote to Change the Outcome’. An especially important corrective for anyone still teaching the Brennan-Lomasky binomial model (on which the chance of making a difference is astronomically low when the voting population is large), which is practically misinformation at this point.⁴

Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics

For an advanced seminar on metaphysics of mind, touching on type-A vs type-B physicalism, check out Helen’s (2017) ‘Dissolving Type-B Physicalism’, which argues that physicalists ought to be Type-A physicalists, by providing a blueprint of a possible psychology that would have a priori knowledge of physical-phenomenal identities—if those identity claims are really true.

Many philosophy of mind classes only touch briefly on dualist theories, and are especially dismissive of epiphenomenalism. To give the view a fair hearing, consider assigning (2022) ‘Dualism all the way down: why there is no paradox of phenomenal judgment’, which defangs the main objection to the view.

If teaching on perception, esp. representationalism vs “naive realism”, Helen’s (2024) ‘Get Acquainted with Naive Idealism’ provides a striking challenge to the ambitions of (materialist) “naive realism”, by showing what a really direct view of perceptual acquaintance would look like (and why it depends upon taking reality itself to be mental).

Finally, if you’d like a representative reading on Idealism for a metaphysics class surveying different conceptions of fundamental reality (materialism, panpsychism, dualism, etc.), you can’t beat Helen’s (2024) ‘Idealism and the Best of All (Subjectively Indistinguishable) Possible Worlds’.⁵

Your turn!

Ok, those are the best new readings that I’m in a position to recommend. There are obviously going to be a lot more that I don’t know about! But maybe you know some of the missing gems? (Maybe you wrote some of them?) If so, please suggest them in the comments below! :-)

1. I know Helen’s and my own work more closely than anyone else’s, and most of my suggestions will reflect this. Anyone offended by self-promotion might want to skip this post. But I warmly encourage others to chip in with their own suggestions!

2. I first advanced an objection along these lines in my 2012 Fittingness paper, but I would recommend assigning McElwee’s version instead—I think he develops it better.

3. I also find Liz Harman’s (2009) ‘"I'll be glad I did it" reasoning and the significance of future desires’ helpful to this topic, as explained here.

4. The binomial model seems stubbornly popular among libertarians.

Bryan Caplan

recently affirmed it on his blog, linking to teaching materials that misleadingly present it as the way to estimate the probability of difference-making. I commented to flag Barnett’s refutation of the model’s applicability to close elections; I’ll be delighted if he eventually updates. (So far, sadly, there’s no indication that Caplan cares about the accuracy of his teaching materials.)

5. Well, unless the “reading” can be an entire book. Then you might rather use The View from Everywhere, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, if you can get your hands on an advance copy.