Alexander Pruss's Blog

It’s tempting to say that what justifies lethal self-defense is a wrongful lethal threat, perhaps with voluntariness and/or culpability adde...

I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationship between dignity and value. Here are four plausible principles: If x has dignity, then x ...

If it can be reasonable for a typical innocent human being to save lions from extinction at the expense of the human’s own life, then the l...

Here is a plausible thesis: You should never intend to produce a bad effect qua bad. Now, even the most hardnosed deontologist (like me...

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

Here’s a valid argument with plausible premises: A finite being has finite value. Any being with finite value may be permissibly sacrific...

Suppose the only way to save five innocent people is by killing one innocent person. The deontologist says: you must refrain. But what you ...

One strategy for accounting for deontology while allowing the tools of decision theory to be used is to set such a high disvalue on violatio...

Classic utilitarianism holds that the right thing to do is what actually maximizes utility. But: If the best science says that drug A is b...

If a person acts in a way that would be right if their relevant non-moral beliefs were correct, they are not subject to moral criticism for...

On the divine desire version of divine command theory, the right thing to do is what God wants us to do. But what if God’s desires conflict...

Consider this argument: An action is intrinsically evil if and only if it is wrong to do no matter what. In doing anything wrong, one doe...

Suppose that Alice is a morally upright officer fighting against an unjust aggressor in a bloody war. The aggressor’s murderous acts include...

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

Consider a variant of my teenage Hitler case . You’re a hospital anesthetist and teenage Hitler is about to have an emergency appendectomy. ...

I’m imagining a conversation between Alice, who thinks it is permissible to lie to Nazis to protect innocents, and a Nazi. Alice has just li...

An standard way to handle deontological constraints is to simply specify an infinite disvalue for breaking the constraints. Thus, you should...

Absolutists who think that lying is wrong even to save a life are sometimes accused of thinking truth to be more valuable than life. Whether...

Molinism makes possible a curious kind of moral dilemma. God could reveal to Alice that if Alice doesn’t kill Bob today, she will kill Carl ...

You are a dentist and a teenage Hitler comes to you to have a bad tooth removed. You only have available an anaesthetic with this feature: W...