Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose Bob paid professional killer Alice to kill him on a day of her choice in the next month. Next day, Bob changes his mind, but has no ...

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

Suppose that Alice wishes to steal an item she can only take if Bob is dead. She plans to go to Bob’s house and ensure he is dead, by first ...

Suppose you are visiting a hospital and you see Bob, a nurse, sneaking into Alice’s hospital room. Unnoticed, you look at what is going on, ...

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...

Alice is about to inherit a large some of money and then she hears that she has a long-lost sibling with whom she’d have to share. So she hi...

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...

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...

On January 26, 2021 at 18:30 GMT / 12:30 PM Central / 1:30 PM Eastern, I will be giving a work in progress Zoom talk on Defining Murder at t...

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is traditionally a defense against a charge of bringing about an effect that is absolutely wrong to int...

Thomson and other opponents of the idea that intention deeply affects moral permissibility like to point to the idea that it is silly to thi...

In my previous post , I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a...

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 ...

Roughly: To murder is to intentionally kill a juridically innocent person. And: To steal is to intentionally appropriate something tha...

As part of a just war, Alice drops a bomb on the enemy military headquarters. Next door to the enemy headquarters are the world headquarters...

In a paper on Double Effect , I offer this kind of an example. Jim has sneaked into a zoo on a mission to kill the first mammal he sees at t...

A fellow philosopher just sent me this very interesting quote from an article in a reputable medical journal: [I]f it was conclusively sho...

Alice has just fed a poison to Bob. Bob hasn’t died yet. He is standing, by coincidence, on the edge of a cliff, and soon will die of the po...

Alice has tools in a shed and sees a clearly unarmed thief approaching the shed. She knows she is in no danger of her life or limb—she can e...