Alexander Pruss's Blog

There are many contexts where a necessary condition of the permissibility of a course of action is a kind of proportionality between the goo...

I think some people feel that more immediate effects count for more than more remote ones in moral choices, including in the context of the ...

Let’s assume that lethal self-defense is permissible. Such self-defense requires an aggressor . There is a variety of concepts of an aggress...

At some point in pregnancy it is widely acknowledged that fetuses start to feel pain. Estimates of this point vary from around seven to thi...

I think it’s wrong for us to kill innocent people. Some fellow deontologists, however, think this prohibition should be restricted to say th...

Consider these two cases: You know that your freely killing one innocent person will lead to three innocent drowning people being saved. ...

Rachels famously gives us these two cases to argue that the doing–allowing distinction is morally vacuous: You stand to inherit money fro...

I’ve been wondering whether it is possible for a country to count as pacifist and yet wage a defensive war. I think the answer is positive, ...

Imagine a moderate pacifist who rejects lethal self-defense, but allows non-lethal self-defense when appropriate, say by use of tasers. Now...

In my previous post , I discuss cases where someone is doing an evil for the sake of preventing significantly worse goods—say, murdering a p...

I used to think that every murder is an intentional killing. But this is incorrect: beheading John the Baptist was murder even if the intent...

When an army invades a country, the invaders break a massive number of that country’s laws. They kill, commit assault and battery with deadl...

One of the well-known challenges in accounting for killing in a just war is the thought that even soldiers fighting on a side without justic...

Let’s suppose disease X if medically unchecked will kill 4.00% of the population, and there is one and only one intervention available: a c...

The Principle of Double Effect seems to imply that either there are real dilemmas—cases where an action is both forbidden and required—even ...

Say that an action is deontologically doubtful (DD) provided that the probability of the action being forbidden by the correct deontology i...

My presentation on killing for the Bios Centre is now on YouTube .

It is murder to disconnect a patient who can only survive with a ventilator without consent and in order to inherit from them. Every murde...

Consider this case: You are fighting a just war. There are 1000 people facing you and you have very good, but fallible, reason to think of...

Here is a spectrum of views on killing the innocent to prevent worse evils: Consequentialism: It is permissible to kill the innocent to pr...