Applied Ethics

Advanced

Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open, with the primary literature named rather than gestured at.

Theories of Moral Status and Their ConflictsPlanned
Sentience, cognitive capacity, and relationship as rival criteria, and whether status comes in degrees or not at all
24 min
The Non-Identity ProblemPlanned
Parfit's result that an act can seem wrong while harming nobody, because a different act would have produced different people
22 min
Procreative Ethics and AntinatalismPlanned
Benatar's asymmetry between absent pain and absent pleasure, Savulescu's procreative beneficence, and the repugnant conclusion that squeezes both
24 min
Population Axiology and the Impossibility ResultsPlanned
Every way of ranking populations by size and welfare violates one of a small set of conditions that all look compulsory
28 min
Partial Aggregation and the Relevance ViewPlanned
Taurek's refusal to add the numbers up, and the views that let some claims compete while ruling others irrelevant
26 min
Decision Procedures Under Moral RiskPlanned
Maximising expected choiceworthiness as a decision rule, and the fanaticism that follows when one theory assigns unbounded stakes
26 min
The Ethics of RiskPlanned
Imposing a chance of harm on someone who is never in fact harmed, and whether contractualism should evaluate that before or after the outcome
26 min
Enhancement and Germline EditingPlanned
Whether the therapy and enhancement line can bear weight, what heritable editing does to consent, and the objection that selection expresses a judgment about existing lives
26 min
Allocating Scarce Medical ResourcesPlanned
What a quality-adjusted life year measures, why disability advocates object to it, and whether a lottery treats claimants more fairly than triage
26 min
Revisionist Just War TheoryPlanned
McMahan's argument that liability to attack depends on responsibility for an unjust threat, which denies combatants on the two sides equal standing
28 min
Climate Ethics and Collective HarmPlanned
Discounting future welfare, dividing responsibility for emissions already made, and the problem that no single act makes a detectable difference
26 min
AI Ethics and Moral PatiencyPlanned
Who answers for an automated decision, and what would have to be true of a system before it could be wronged rather than merely misused
24 min