Alexander Pruss's Blog

Desire-satisfaction utilitarianism (DSU) holds that the right thing to do is what maximizes everyone’s total desire satisfaction. This requ...

Suppose for simplicity that everyone is a good Bayesian and has the same priors for a hypothesis H , and also the same epistemic interests w...

It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Th...

Assume actual result utilitarianism on which there are facts of the matter about what would transpire given any possible action of mine, and...

Alice and Bob are both perfect Bayesian epistemic agents and subjectively perfect utilitarians (i.e., they always do what by their lights ma...

Suppose a trolley is heading towards five people, and you can redirect it towards one. But the trolley needs to go up a hill before it can r...

Mill thinks that: An action is unjust if society has a utility-based reason to punish that actions of that type. An action is wrong if th...

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems ...

As a teacher, I have many opportunities to cause minor inconveniences in the lives of my students. And subjectively it often feels like when...

When a state legislates, it often carves out very specific exceptions to the legislation. Sometimes, of course, one is worried that the exce...

A trolley is heading towards a person lying on the tracks. Also lying on the tracks is a delicious cupcake. You could redirect the trolley t...

Here is a picture of ethics. We are designed to operate with a specific algorithm A for generating imperatives from circumstances. Unfortun...

Suppose that: Intense pleasure is very good in itself Consequentialism applies to non-rational animals. Then here is a modest proposal:...

Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion says that, on standard utilitarian assumptions, if n is sufficiently large, then n lives of some minim...

Consider: Case 1: There are two countably infinite sets, A and B, of strangers. The people are all alike in morally relevant ways. I get to...

In physical laws, there are a number of numerical parameters. Some of these parameters are famously part of the fine-tuning problem, but all...

Rule utilitarianism holds that one should act according to those rules, or those usable rules, that if adopted universally would produce...

Consider a version of consequentialism on which the right thing to do is the one that has the best consequences. Now suppose you...

One of our graduate students, Matt Wilson, suggested an analogy between Pascal's Wager and the question about whether to promote or ...

Consider these scenarios: Jim killed ten people to save ten people and a squirrel. Sam killed ten people to save ten people and...