Alexander Pruss's Blog

Here is an initially plausible idea: A promise can take an action that absent the promise is merely permissible and turn it into an action...

The fact that a large animal is attacking me would give me both permission and reason to kill the animal. On the basis of cases like that, o...

Normally, our overt behavior has the presumption of moral permissibility: an action is morally permissible unless there is some specific rea...

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

It is hard to know that something is permissible, because an action is permissible provided that no moral consideration is decisive against ...

The usual way to argue that an action is permissible is to argue that the arguments against the action’s permissibility fail. But it would b...

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's b...

Supererogation is a difficult concept for me. But there has to be such a thing. If Jones has suffered two hundred weeks of torture to ...

Consider a fairly normal formulation of the Principle of Double Effect (PDE). An action that is foreseen to result in an evil is ...

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is often stated in something like this form: An action that is foreseen to have an evil effe...

Some moral permissibility facts are logically trivial: it permissible to eat a morally appropriate breakfast. And maybe some mor...