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• James Rachels, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia’, The New England Journal of Medicine vol. 292 (1975)
  In the context of an argument against the view that ‘passive euthanasia’ is morally superior to ‘active euthanasia’, Rachels argues that the distinction between killing and letting die is not morally significant in itself, and that our inclination to judge otherwise is the result of distorting factors.
• Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1991), chapter 3
  Kagan argues that every formulation of the distinction between doing and allowing will face decisively counterintuitive implications, and furthermore that the distinction cannot be given a compelling rationale.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid’, Ethics vol. 103, no. 2 (1993)
  Through examination of intuitive reactions to a series of hypothetical cases, McMahan defends the view that a carefully formulated version of the distinction between killing and letting die is morally significant. He goes on to suggest that the commonsense morality of harm has a structure that is too complex to be captured in one or two simple principles, ending with a note of scepticism about whether a satisfying rationale can be found for it.
• Kai Draper, ‘Rights and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 3 (2005)
  Draper argues that an appeal to rights does a better job of explaining the intuitive verdicts that are adduced in favour of the DDA than the DDA itself does.
• Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015), chapter 6
  The first five chapters in Woollard’s book are devoted to arriving at the formulation of the DDA that best accounts for our intuitions about various examples. Chapter 6 offers a rationale for the DDA so formulated, appealing to the idea of imposition.

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• Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: our illusion of innocence (Oxford, 1996), chapter 4
  Unger defends “Liberationist” moral thinking, which, guided by “Basic Moral Values”, rejects the sorts of non-consequentialist distinctions (including that between doing and allowing) accepted by what he calls “Preservationist” moral thinking. He argues that acceptance of these constraints reflects distorting factors, as is made evident, he thinks, by the way our intuitions are affected by the presentation of some examples that he details.
• Warren Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, The Philosophical Review vol. 98, no. 3 (1989)
• Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford, 1998)
• Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm (Oxford, 2011), pp. 149–155

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• Warren Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 18, no. 4 (1989)
  In this influential defence of the DDE, Quinn analyses pairs of examples that are adduced in its favour and argues for a particular formulation of the DDE’s requirements on that basis. He goes on to defend the DDE as one expression of “a Kantian ideal of human community and interaction.”
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 20, no. 4 (1991), section V (pp. 292–6)
  Thomson expresses scepticism about the DDE, offering a famous objection based on the seeming absurdity of distinguishing between pilots to carry out a strategic bombing mission by reference to the intentions they would have in doing so.
• Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford, 1998), chapter 11
  Bennett argues against the DDE, introducing what has come to be known as the ‘closeness’ problem for it and offering careful analysis and rebuttal of various ways of formulating and defending it.
• William J. Fitzpatrick, ‘Acts, intentions, and moral permissibility: in defence of the doctrine of double effect’, Analysis vol. 63, no. 4 (2003)
  Fitzpatrick defends the DDE against an interpretation that takes it to suggest that permissibility may depend simply on the token intention of the agent, so that another agent with different intention but performing exactly the same physical actions could permissibly do what the first could not. Fitzpatrick’s suggestion is that the DDE focuses on the possibility of licit intention, not the fact of it.
• Dana K. Nelkin and Samuel C. Rickless, ‘Three Cheers for Double Effect’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 89, no. 1 (2014)
  Nelkin and Rickless defend the DDE against Thomson, Scanlon, and other sceptics, proposing a revision and justification of the doctrine that refine Quinn’s defence.
• Ketan H. Ramakrishnan, ‘Treating People as Tools’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 2 (2016)
  Ramakrishnan argues against intention-focused explanations of the distinction in permissibility that is intuitively supposed by many to obtain in examples typically used to illustrate the DDE. He appeals instead to a principle he calls “Utility”, according to which a person’s rights are particularly resistant to infringement on the basis of her usefulness to others.

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• Philippa Foot, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, in her Virtues and Vices (Blackwell, 1978)
  In this seminal article, Foot introduces the ‘Doctrine of Double Effect’ (DDE) and explains why it has seemed suspicious to many, before offering a series of examples that might be thought to justify it—most famously, the ‘trolley case’. She argues, however, that intuitions about these examples are better explained by appeal to a distinction between negative and positive duties instead.
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘The Trolley Problem’, The Yale Law Journal vol. 94, no. 6 (1985)
  Thomson examines a variety of different ways in which we might hope to account for the apparent moral difference between two ‘trolley cases’ that she discusses: ‘Bystander’ and ‘Transplant’. Making a number of interesting distinctions along the way, she ends up defending a view that distinguishes between deflecting and creating threats and between infringing rights as a means and infringing them as mere side-effects.
• Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (Oxford, 2007), chapters 4–5
• T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Harvard, 2008), chapters 1–3
  Scanlon argues that the appeal of the DDE is illusory, derived from a failure to distinguish between two significantly different ways of employing moral principles and a failure to take into account the necessity of exceptions to them. He goes on to offer an account of the moral significance of intention and to argue against the Means Principle, a principle—closely related to the DDE—according to which it is harder to justify treating people as causal means than otherwise.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 23, no. 1 (2009)
• Howard Nye, ‘Objective Double Effect and the Avoidance of Narcissism’, in Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics vol. 3 (2013)
• Victor Tadros, ‘Wrongful Intentions without Closeness’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 1 (2015)
  Tadros attempts to defend the view that intentions can make a difference to permissibility from the closeness problem, building on Quinn’s account and defence of the DDE.

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• Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 1, no. 3 (1972)
  In this enormously influential article, Singer suggests that what we do wrong in failing to make extensive sacrifices in order to provide aid to the world’s poorest and most needy individuals in just the way that we would do wrong in walking on by a child whom we could easily rescue from drowning in a shallow pond.
• Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: our illusion of innocence (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–13, 24–61
  Unger develops Singer's argument, patiently setting out various proposed disanalogies between Shallow Pond-type cases and our situation vis-à-vis the world's poorest and arguing that none of them makes for a moral difference.
• Garrett Cullity, ‘Asking Too Much’, The Monist vol. 86, no. 3 (2003)
  Cullity considers just how demanding the conclusion that the remoteness of the needy makes no difference to the strength of our duties of assistance is. He argues that it is less demanding than it might seem, because the duty itself must be grounded in morally legitimate interests, and the best specification of these will make it permissible not to respond to the interests of the needy by impoverishing oneself.
• Frances Kamm, ‘Does Distance Matter Morally to the Duty to Rescue?’, Law and Philosophy vol. 19, no. 6 (2000)
  In this ingenious discussion, Kamm attempts to isolate what it is about the distance of the distant needy that makes it seem plausible to distinguish morally between global poverty and the situation of the child in Shallow Pond, before proposing a rationale for treating the two cases differently that appeals to ideas related to Samuel Scheffler’s ‘agent-relative prerogative’.
• Neera K. Badhwar, ‘International Aid: When Giving Becomes a Vice’, Social Philosophy and Policy vol. 23, no. 1 (2006)
  Badhwar argues that the Singer-Unger view neglects and devalues a variety of goods, denies the permissibility of most forms of meaningful life, forces a kind of doublethink, and ignores certain economic principles that predict disastrous consequences if the view’s recommendations are followed. In the course of making these arguments, she claims among other things that our intuitions about Shallow Pond shift if it is modified so as to make it more precisely analogous to the case of global poverty, and that Singer and Unger’s argument would anyway prove too much if it were successful.
• Barbara Herman, ‘The Scope of Moral Requirement’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 30, no. 3 (2002)
  Herman sets out a Kantian framework for thinking about duties of beneficence that she thinks does a better job than rival theoretical frameworks at negotiating concerns about demandingness and legitimate partiality that seem attendant on adequate recognition of the need of others. Starting from the Kantian contention that we must make others’ ends our own, she advances an interpretation of that obligatory end as a matter of commitment to certain kinds of considerations connected to the rational agency of others as always deliberatively salient. This is integrated with an agent’s own happiness in part because development and pursuit of one’s own ends and happiness are necessary conditions of adequate judgment about the considerations made salient by the obligatory end of others’ happiness. As she stresses, Herman’s account avoids the metaphors of weights and balancing that tend to plague discussions of the duties of beneficence. She then relates this to our central question concerning the moral duties of the affluent to the poor.
• Sarah Buss, ‘Needs (Someone Else’s), Projects (My Own), and Reasons’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 103, no. 8 (2006)
  Buss argues that broadly internal-reasons based and incommensurability based theoretical defences of her minimally helpful career choice as against the demands of beneficence all fail, and that the only case that can be made is from “the heterogeneous collection of rather mundane considerations whose strength it is nearly impossible to assess”, as a result of which “the best case in support of my choice is bound to be far more fragile than I would like it to be”. This, she argues, follows from a broader fact about reasons for action: I am committed as a rational agent to the legitimacy of the projects I take to be reason-giving.

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• Elizabeth Ashford, ‘The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to Basic Necessities’, in Pogge (ed.), Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right (UNESCO/Oxford University Press, 2007)
  Ashford argues that there is a human right to basic necessities which imposes both positive and negative duties relating to access to such necessities and, following Pogge (see below), that the complex causal chains and institutional structures that lead to large-scale severe poverty constitute a violation of those duties for which the affluent are responsible—despite its not being true that any particular individual is responsible for any other particular individual’s plight. She relates this argument to utilitarian and Kantian accounts of human rights, arguing that it must be recognised by both.
• Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Second Edition (Polity, 2008), chapter 4
  Pogge argues that the thesis of ‘moral universalism’ creates a demand for the justification of the discrepancy between the minimal criteria of justice that we apply to the global order and the more substantial criteria of justice that we apply to the domestic order. He goes on to argue against three different proposed justifications in response to the demand.
• Liam B. Murphy, ‘The Demands of Beneficence’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 22, no. 4 (1993)
  Murphy discusses the objection that a ‘Simple Principle’ of beneficence (requiring roughly what act consequentialism would require) is too demanding, arguing that the idea that morality’s demands are limited is more plausible than any rationale that anyone has provided for it. He goes on to argue, however, that the ‘Limited Principle’, which accommodates a Schefflerian agent-relative prerogative, is also implausible. Instead, he proposes a broadly rule-consequentialist principle, the ‘Cooperative Principle’, which demands of any agent only the sacrifice that would be optimal under full compliance. Underlying this principle is primarily the attractive idea that beneficence is a cooperative aim.
• Bernard W. Miller, ‘Beneficence, Duty, and Distance’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 32, no. 4(2004)
• Richard Arneson, ‘What Do We Owe to Distant Needy Strangers?’, in Schaler (ed.), Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics (Carus Publishing, 2009)
• Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford University Press, 2004)

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• Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (Yale University Press, 2015), chapter 1
  Singer gives a brief overview of effective altruism, clarifying its core claims and answering a few frequently asked questions about it.
• William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, 2015), chapters 2–7
  In chapters 2–6, MacAskill explains and defends, via the specification of five key questions, the effective altruist’s emphasis on determining the cost-effectiveness of charitable activities and disregarding emotional connections to particular causes. In chapter 7, he details some of the practical implications of adopting the effective altruist approach to assessing charities, and lists seven charities that do particularly well by the metrics he advocates.
• Amia Srinivasan, ‘Stop the Robot Apocalypse’, London Review of Books 24th September 2015
  Srinivasan reviews MacAskill's book, criticising effective altruism for what she diagnoses as its conservatism and the impoverished conception of the ethical point of view that it inherits from utilitarianism.
• Iason Gabriel, ‘Effective Altruism and its Critics’, Journal of Applied Philosophy (2016)
  Gabriel describes the key ideas of effective altruism and then discusses some of the most common objections to it, arguing for various relatively minor amendments to effective altruism as a way to respond to these objections.
• Theron Pummer, ‘Whether and Where to Give’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 1 (2016)
  Pummer defends effective altruism as a moral requirement conditional upon agents’ making the non-obligatory choice to do good at all, so that only agents who choose to act altruistically beyond the call of duty incur the further obligation to maximise the effectiveness of their altruism. In this way, he tries to show that effective altruism can have moral force even for those who reject a more comprehensive consequentialist view.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Doing Good and Doing the Best’, in Paul Woodruff (ed.), Philanthropy and Philosophy: Putting Theory into Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017)
  McMahan considers a Pummer-style argument for the effective altruist claim that one is morally required to maximise the effectiveness of charitable donations that it is permissible not to make. He points out some potentially morally significant disanalogies between the case of charitable donation and the examples that are used to argue for the effective altruist view, and reflects on some of the implications of these for effective altruists.
• Elizabeth Ashford, ‘Severe Poverty as an Unjust Emergency’, in Paul Woodruff (ed.), Philanthropy and Philosophy: Putting Theory into Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017)
  Ashford argues that duties of effective altruism should be framed as ‘back-up duties’ to help those who have been unjustly deprived of their economic entitlements, alongside ‘primary duties’ of justice to reform the structures that engender severe poverty. Back-up duties are urgent and stringent, but nevertheless their fulfilment is inadequate as compared with that of the primary duties. Thus Ashford hopes to show that the views of effective altruists and of some of their most trenchant critics can be reconciled.
• Leif Wenar, ‘Poverty is no Pond’, in Patricia Illingworth et al (eds.), Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy (Oxford, 2011); and ‘The Deaths of Effective Altruism’, Wired, 27th March 2024
  In the first of these pieces, Wenar argues that morally appropriate individual action in the face of the “human disaster of severe poverty” is much less straightforward than effective altruism suggests, because of the harm that aid may do and the difficulty of knowing how much it does. In the second, Wenar suggests that Effective Altruists ignore these points.

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• Theron Pummer, The Rules of Rescue (Oxford, 2023)
  This is a book-length defence of effective altruism. Pummer builds his argument within a framework that resists simple dismissal of effective altruism as an application of consequentialist thinking, pursuing arguments from analogy of the sort made famous by Peter Singer and extended by Peter Unger. A special issue of Public Affairs Quarterly on Pummer›s book here includes some critical responses.
• Joe Horton, ‘The All or Nothing Problem’, The Journal of Philosophy (2017)
  Horton considers the puzzle that although it is permissible to save neither of two people if the cost to oneself is great enough, it is impermissible to save one of them rather than both if saving both costs no more than saving one. He argues that the right solution to the puzzle, which appeals to ideas about justifiability conditional on willingness to bear a cost, also implies effective altruism.
• Thomas Sinclair, ‘Are We Conditionally Obligated to be Effective Altruists?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 46 (2018): 36–59
  Sinclair argues that a conditional obligation of effective altruism cannot be inferred from intuitive judgments about examples of lifesaving rescue in the way that Theron Pummer and Joe Horton suppose.
• William MacAskill, ‘Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 17, no. 2 (2014)
• Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 4
• Frances M. Kamm, ‘Deciding Whom to Help, Health-Adjusted Life Years and Disabilities’, in Anand, Peter, and Sen (eds.), Public Health, Ethics, and Equity (Oxford University Press, 2004)

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• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 3
  Parfit argues that we can defend acting (or not acting) in cases of collective impact by appeal to the consequences of our acts, but only if we avoid some “mistakes in moral mathematics” that he details in this chapter.
• Frank Jackson, ‘Group morality’, in Pettit, Sylvan, and Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality: essays in honour of J.J.C. Smart, (Blackwell, 1987)
  
• Shelly Kagan, ‘Do I Make a Difference?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 39, no. 2 (2011)
  Kagan dismisses some competing solutions to what he calls the ‘collective action problem’ before distinguishing two kinds of case in which it appears that an agent’ act makes no difference. With respect to one kind of case, he argues that the chance of the agent’s act working as a ‘trigger’ for morally significant consequences can generate moral reasons for the agent. Kagan argues that although in the other kind of case consequences cannot generate moral reasons for the agent, that is less problematic than it seems, because such cases are as a matter of fact impossible.
• Philip Pettit, ‘Responsibility Incorporated’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 2 (2007)
  Pettit argues that corporate agents and even more loosely defined groups can meet conditions that he sets out as necessary for being held responsible. In particular, he defends the claim that a group agent can be held responsible for its actions even as individual members of the group are also held responsible for the actions out of which the group action is constructed. He also argues that corporate agents should be held responsible.
• Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World, chapters 1 and 3
  Gilbert defends a ‘joint commitment’-based account of collective agency and responsibility, and surveys the ways in which members of a ‘plural subject’ constituted by such joint commitment may be to blame for the actions of the plural subject.
• Julia Nefsky, ‘How you can help, without making a difference’, Philosophical Studies vol. 174, no. 11 (2017)
  Partly appealing to arguments she makes in papers in the further reading list, Nefsky dismisses arguments such as Kagan’s to the effect that in the puzzling cases, contrary to appearance, our acts really do make a difference. She also dismisses arguments to the effect that reasons besides difference-making justify making or refraining from performing the relevant acts. Instead, she argues, we must reject the assumption that the only way we can help to bring about some valuable outcome is by making a difference.

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• Julia Nefsky, ‘Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm: a reply to Kagan’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 39, no. 4 (2011)
  Nefsky argues that Kagan’s way of categorising collective harm cases is misleading, and that consequentialism has more difficulty accounting for our reasons to act in such cases than Kagan recognises.
• Julia Nefsky, ‘Fairness, Participation, and the Real Problem of Collective Harm’, in Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 5 (Oxford University Press, 2015)
  Nefsky argues that appealing to considerations related to participation and fairness cannot explain why we have reason to act (or not to act) in collective harm cases, because they rely on its being true that our acts make a difference—which, in the relevant kinds of case, they don’t.
• Christine Tiefensee, ‘Indeterminacy and collective harms’, Philosophical Studies vol. 179 (2022)
  Tiefensee argues that ‘triggering cases’ and ‘non-triggering cases’ do not present the same moral problems and cannot therefore be solved in the same way, contrary to the assumptions of many philosophers working on the problem of collective harm.
• Andrea S. Asker, ‘The problem of collective impact: why helping doesn’t do the trick’, Philosophical Studies vol. 180 (2023)
  Asker gives an internal critique of Nefsky’s ‘helping’ solution to the problem of collective harm. The argument is that Nefsky’s critiques of rival views implies a set of conditions that the helping account itself doesn’t meet.
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• Chrisoula Andreou, ‘The good, the bad, and the trivial’, Philosophical Studies vol. 169, no. 2 (2014)
• Felix Pinkert, ‘What If I Cannot Make a Difference (and Know It)’, Ethics vol. 125, no. 4 (2015)
• Alexander Dietz, ‘What We Together Ought to Do’, Ethics vol. 126, no. 4 (2016)
• Donald H. Regan, Utilitarianism and Co-operation (Oxford University Press, 1980)
• Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, ‘It's not my fault: global warming and individual moral obligations’, in Sinnott-Armstrong and Howarth (eds.), Perspectives on Climate Change (Elsevier, 2005)
• Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
• Anna Stilz, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 19, no. 2 (2011)
• David Miller, ‘Holding Nations Responsible’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 2 (2004)

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• Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Pimlico, 1975), chapter 1
  Singer argues that it is a fundamental moral principle that individuals are owed equal consideration of their interests, and that from this principle it follows that ‘speciesism’—“a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species”—is a moral wrong analogous to racism and sexism. He then draws out various practical and theoretical implications of this conclusion.
• Tom Regan, ‘Animal Rights, Human Wrongs’, Environmental Ethics vol. 2, no. 2 (1980)
  Regan argues against a number of proposed justifications, including Singer’s, for the claim that widespread treatment of non-human animals is wrong. Drawing on his objections to these justifications, Regan argues for the view that non-human animals have rights grounded in their (the animals’) value as distinct subjects of lives that can go better or worse for them.
• Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3, sections 1.2–2.3
  McMahan raises a problem for what he calls the ‘Time-Relative Interest’ account of the badness of killing, namely, that it seems to imply that it is no worse to kill certain humans than to kill certain animals. Investigating this problem, he considers and rejects various arguments for a speciesist approach.
• Shelly Kagan, ‘What’s Wrong with Speciesism?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 33, no. 1 (2016)
  Kagan identifies some important gaps in Singer’s argument against speciesism. He then argues that we are not speciesists but ‘personists’, and provides some provisional arguments in favour of a refined version of the personist view that he calls ‘modal personism’.
• Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy vol. 53, no. 206 (1978)
  Diamond argues that Singer-style arguments for vegetarianism and animal rights more generally fail to take into account the way in which our moral outlooks are fundamentally structured around responses to humanity, and not merely to things such as pain that humans share with non-humans.
• Stephen Mulhall, ‘Fearful Thoughts’, London Review of Books 24 (2002)
  Mulhall brings the kinds of concerns raised by Cora Diamond into contact with the approach and arguments of McMahan’s The Ethics of Killing, of which this is a review.

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• Richard Arneson, ‘What, if Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?’, in Jamieson (ed.), Singer and his Critics (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999)
• Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights (OUP, 2011), chapters 2–3
• S. Matthew Liao, ‘The Basis of Human Moral Status’, Journal of Moral Philosophy vol. 7, no. 2 (2010)
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life’, in Sunstein and Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Eating Animals the Nice Way’, Dædalus vol. 137, no. 1 (2008)
  McMahan investigates some possible grounds for ‘benign carnivorism’, the view that killing humanely reared animals for food is unobjectionable. He argues against a justification based on the view that animals have reduced capacity for welfare and illfare and reduced connectedness to their future selves, and then against the idea that since being caused to exist is a benefit to the animals themselves, benign carnivorism is good for everyone and bad for no one. He ends by suggesting that there is nevertheless room for the possibility of one technologically still remote but permissible form of benign carnivorism.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘The Moral Problem of Predation’, in Chignell, Cuneo, and Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (Routledge, 2016)
• Philip Kitcher, ‘Experimental Animals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 4 (2015)

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• Don Marquis, ‘Why Abortion is Immoral’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 86, no. 4 (1989)
  Marquis begins by analysing the standoff between standard anti-abortionist and pro-choice views, arguing that each side begs important questions against the other. He argues that the way out of the standoff is to arrive at an account of the wrongness of killing, and defends such an account according to which killing is wrong because it deprives the victim of a valuable future. He takes this to imply a general moral presumption against abortion. As well as setting out some of the virtues of his account of the wrongness of killing, Marquis criticises competing accounts, such as Tooley’s, that have been appealed to in support of pro-choice views.
• Dan Moller, ‘Abortion and Moral Risk’, Philosophy vol. 86, no. 3 (2011)
  Moller argues that there is a strong pro tanto moral reason to avoid abortion, on the grounds that we cannot be confident about the various moral and metaphysical principles and intuitions that underpin arguments about abortion’s permissibility and therefore are at significant risk of being morally mistaken. There are, he argues, moral norms that require us to avoid taking a non-negligible risk of serious wrongdoing.
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 1, no. 1 (1971)
  Thomson’s famous defence of abortion makes the dialectically powerful move of assuming that a foetus is a person with full rights to life from the moment from conception. She argues that these rights don’t include a right against others that they provide one whatever one needs to survive—perhaps even if others have begun providing what one needs, and even if they have done so via voluntary acts. Granting that the foetus has them therefore doesn’t show that abortion is impermissible, or even that it is permissible only in cases of conception by rape or danger to the mother’s life
• Michael Tooley, ‘Abortion and Infanticide’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 2, no. 1 (1972)
  Tooley argues that a necessary condition of the right to life is possession of the concept of self as a continuing subject of experience. The underpinning idea is a relative of the Will Theory of rights that makes the capacity to desire that people do not kill one a necessary condition of a right that they do not kill one. Tooley draws the conclusion that abortion and indeed “infanticide during a time interval shortly after birth” are morally permissible. He also argues against some other positions on abortion, including views attributing moral significance to potential and to various cut-off points in foetal development.
• Nancy Davis, ‘Abortion and Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 3 (1984)
  Davis raises problems both for restrictive views about the permissibility of abortion—which she thinks must in consistency deny it even when the mother’s life is at stake—and for Thomson-style moderate views, which she thinks rely on analogies with self-defence that fail in light of the special nature of the mother-foetus relationship. More generally, she argues against regarding the permissibility of abortion as determined by the correct resolution of a conflict between the mother’s and the foetus’s rights. The discussion addresses issues in the morality of self-defence in a way that may help to illuminate that topic for you too.
• Margaret Olivia Little, ‘Abortion’, in R.G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics (Blackwell, 2005)
  Little argues against prevailing tendencies to regard the question of abortion as a simple question of moral permissibility, to be analysed using the tools of moral theory for relations between independent adults or by focus solely on the topic of foetal personhood. She suggests that gestation of a foetus involves distinctive aspects that distinguish abortion from wrongful interference, as with a stranger; what is interesting about abortion has rather to do with questions internal to the ethics of parenthood, which are complex. She argues that we cannot simply conclude that abortion is monstrous if foetuses are persons, and then goes on to argue that even if they are not, it is not morally insignificant, because it brings into play important and neglected questions of maternal practical identity and integrity.
• Warren Quinn, ‘Abortion: Identity and Loss’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 1 (1984)
  Quinn sets out two different theories of foetal ontology with the aim of vindicating a position that views abortion as a morally freighted choice and yet doesn’t simply prohibit it. The theories allow us to say that the foetus, though not yet fully attaining the status of human being, faces a significant loss if it is aborted. This makes it appropriately an object of the ‘morality of humanity’, even if not the ‘morality of respect’. Quinn thinks this does more justice to pretheoretical intuitions than competing positions. A significant portion of the essay is taken up with reflections on the badness of death for a subject, so refer to your work for the week on the badness of death as you think about Quinn’s essay.

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• Ann E. Cudd, ‘Sensationalized Philosophy: A Reply to Marquis's “Why Abortion is Immoral”’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 87, no. 5 (1990)
• Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Abortion Rights and Gender Justice Worldwide: An Essay in Political Philosophy’, in Tooley, Wolf-Devine, Devine, and Jaggar, Abortion: Three Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• John Finnis, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Reply to Judith Thomson’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 2, no. 2 (1973)
• David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 4
• Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 4

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• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 16
  Parfit begins by arguing that a particular person’s existence depends on her having been conceived when she was conceived, so that no one conceived at any other time could have been her. As he points out, this means that our present choices can affect the identity of future people. This gives rise to the following problem: acts that, intuitively, harm future people may also be necessary for their existence, so that it cannot be said that the acts make them worse off than they would otherwise have been. That makes it hard to explain what is wrong with the acts. Parfit argues that an appeal to rights cannot solve the problem, and defends a number of claims, including what he calls the ‘No-Difference View’, according to which the moral significance of a harm or benefit does not depend upon whether it makes its recipient worse or better off than she would have been in its absence.
• Elizabeth Harman, ‘Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 18, no. 1 (2004)
  Harman attempts to solve the non-identity problem by appeal to the idea that bringing a person into existence is a benefit, but one that is present whichever way we act, in many of the relevant examples, and which is less morally significant than harm, together with an account of harm that does not depend upon temporal or counterfactual comparisons. Harman writes with exemplary clarity—her style is a good model for your essays.
• Rahul Kumar, ‘Who Can Be Wronged?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 2 (2003)
  Kumar argues for a contractualist approach to the non-identity problem, which he thinks avoids the counter-intuitive implications that the non-identity problem is standardly supposed to have.
• Melinda A. Roberts, ‘The Non-Identity Fallacy: Harm, Probability and Another Look at Parfit's Depletion Example’, Utilitas vol. 19, no. 3 (2007)
  Roberts argues that key presentations of the non-identity problem must rely upon an ‘expectational’ account of harm, and that this account of harm does not support the claim that there is a problem. As she puts it, “these apparently ‘different people’ cases can, and should, be understood as ‘same people’ cases”.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives’, The Journal of Ethics vol. 17, no. 1 (2013)
  McMahan contrasts ‘ordinary’ benefits with ‘existential’ benefits, which are conferred on someone by causing her to exist and most of which cannot be plausibly conceived as beneficial in virtue of a comparison with the alternative. He goes on to explore questions about the relative significance of the two types of benefit. He argues that ordinary and existential benefits have the same moral weight in a range of ‘Same Number Choices’, and shows that this generates a puzzle. Surveying possible responses, McMahan suggests that the distinction between comparative benefits and non-comparative benefits is the main locus of moral significance, rather than the distinction between ordinary and existential benefits, and places weight on a distinction between the ‘reason-giving’ weight and ‘cancelling’ weight of benefits and harms.

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• Seana Valentine Shiffrin, ‘Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm’, Legal Theory vol. 5, no. 2 (1999)
• Caspar Hare, ‘Voices from Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 3 (2007)
• J. David Velleman, ‘Persons in Prospect’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 36, no. 3 (2008)
• James Woodward, ‘The Non-Identity Problem’, Ethics vol. 96, no. 4 (1986)
• Hilary Greaves, ‘Population Axiology’, Philosophy Compass (forthcoming)
• John Broome, ‘Should We Value Population?’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 13, no. 4 (2005)

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• Thomas Nagel, ‘Death’, in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
  Nagel argues that fear of death does not involve the confused idea that one will be around to experience it or that there is something bad about the state of nonexistence, but rather stems from an appreciation of the misfortune of losing out on the good of the life that one would have led had one not died. It is the fact of this loss that constitutes the misfortune of death, rather than a state in which the dead person is confusedly somehow thought to persist.
• John Broome, ‘The badness of death and the goodness of life’, in Bradley, Feldman, and Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  Broome begins this clearly written chapter by arguing against the Epicurean argument that death cannot harm its victim. Broome argues that it can, even granting that the only goods and bads are sensations, and so occur at particular times. Then he argues against the view that death deprives its victim of everything, on the grounds that what the victim loses is only what she would have had if she had not died, which is not everything. He defends a ‘life comparison’ account, which compares the life of a dead person with the life she would have lived if she hadn’t died. Section 5 of the chapter is devoted to setting out different ways of measuring the goodness of lives; you can skim this.
• Shelly Kagan, Death (Yale University Press, 2012), chapter 10
  Kagan endorses a ‘deprivation account’ of the badness of death, according to which the badness of death is a matter of the goodness it leads its victim to miss out on. In an easy-to-read informal style, he explores Epicurean and Lucretian objections to it, highlighting a range of possible responses and interesting distinctions and puzzles.
• Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 2
  After some caustic comments on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the topic of death, McMahan argues that immortality would not be as bad as others have argued, and that in any case immortality is not really the important comparison for explaining the badness of death. He goes on to explore the idea that the relevant comparison is with the life a dead person would have lived had she not died, identifying various problems with this and in general with purely possible-future oriented accounts. He also rejects the view that the badness of death is determined purely by the extent to which the life lived up to it was well-lived or successful, ultimately favouring a view according to which the badness of death is determined by a plurality of factors, including the closeness of ‘prudential unity relations’ between the subject at the time of death and the subject as she would have been had she survived and lived well, the extent of her ‘previous gains’ from life, the completeness of the narrative structure of her life, any investments in her future that she made, desert, and her desires at the time of death. (There is a summary of the view—but not the arguments—at pages 183–184.)
• Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 2
  Bradley defends a ‘life comparison’ account of the badness of death from objections, including McMahan’s. Then he gives a general argument in favour of this account, the essence of which is that we care about difference-makers, not what competing accounts of the badness of death would have us care about.

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• There are further chapters in the Kagan and Bradley monographs from the priority reading list that would be good further reading.
• Frances Kamm, ‘The Purpose of My Death: Death, Dying, and Meaning’, Ethics vol. 127, no. 3 (2017)
  As always with Kamm’s work, you have to keep track of the names of many ‘cases’ and claims and principles, but she helpfully clarifies elements of the debates about death’s value and, in particular, the rationality of ending one’'s life.
• Frances Kamm, Morality, Mortality: Death and Whom to Save from It (Oxford University Press, 1993), chapters 1–4
• Bernard Williams, ‘The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality’, in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
  Williams defends the claims that death is often reasonably feared as an evil and yet that immortality would be undesirable, so that we are lucky in having the opportunity to die. He appeals to the notion of a ‘categorical desire’, a desire that is not conditional on the assumption that one lives, in arguing for the former; and to ideas about boredom and the incoherence of boredom-avoiding alternatives in arguing for the latter.
• Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the reaper: a philosophical study of the nature and value of death (Oxford University Press, 1992)
• Matthew Hanser, ‘The Wrongness of Killing and the Badness of Death’, in Bradley, Feldman, and Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Don Marquis, ‘Abortion and Death’, in Bradley, Feldman, and Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Alastair Norcross, ‘The Significance of Death for Animals’, in Bradley, Feldman, and Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford University Press, 2013)

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• Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: an Introduction (Routledge, 2011), chapter 1
  Frowe provides a clear introduction to contemporary debates about self-defence, helpfully setting out in particular the leading accounts of the basis of what is known as liability (= having a Hohfeldian no-claim) to defensive harm.
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 20, no. 4 (1991)
  Thomson presents a number of examples in which an agent’s life is threatened and tries to identify plausible principles underlying intuitive responses in each case to the question whether lethal self-defensive action is permissible for the threatened agent. Her headline conclusions are that the permissibility of lethal self-defence does not depend upon the threatening party’s being in the wrong—or even upon the threat’s being the product of the threatening party’s agency.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘The basis of moral liability to defensive killing’, Philosophical Issues vol. 15, no. 1 (2005)
  After setting out two competing accounts of the basis of the liability to defensive harm, the ‘rights account’ (e.g. Thomson’s) and the ‘culpability account’, McMahan defends his favoured ‘responsibility account’, according to which responsibility for an unjust lethal threat (even if it’s not culpable) renders an agent liable. McMahan refines the account so as to make clear various accompanying conditions, including the condition that responsibility for a treat implies its foreseeability and the condition that “justification defeats liability”.
• Michael Otsuka, ‘Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 23, no. 1 (1994)
  Otsuka argues from the claim that it is impermissible to kill ‘innocent bystanders’ in self-defence to the conclusion that it is also impermissible to kill ‘innocent threats’ and ‘innocent aggressors’. The underlying explanation that he suggests is that none of them are morally responsible for the threat that is posed to the agent.
• Jonathan Quong, ‘Liability to Defensive Harm’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 40, no. 1 (2012)
  Quong argues that what makes a person liable to defensive harm is not that she is culpable for an unjust threat of harm, nor that she is morally responsible for an unjust threat of harm, nor that she has acted in an evidence-relative impermissible way that creates a threat of unjust harm. Instead, he argues, what makes a person liable is that she treats others as if they lack the claims against the harms she threatens. As a result, it is only fair that she should bear special liability for her actions.
• Massimo Renzo, *lsquo;Rights Forfeiture and Liability to Harm’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 25, no. 3 (2017)
  Renzo argues that the notion of rights forfeiture with which most theories of liability to defensive harm work is incapable of doing the job assigned to it: it is insufficient by itself to justify defensive harming, but any supplement designed to complete the justification will turn out to supersede forfeiture, rendering it redundant.

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• Helen Frowe, ‘Equating innocent threats and bystanders’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 25, no. 4 (2008)
  Frowe argues against Otsuka's arguments from the wrongness of self-defensive killings of bystanders to the wrongness of killing innocent threats, arguing that one of them disregards a morally significant difference between lethally using a person as a means and killing her as a means, and that the other depends upon disputable intuitions about a particular example. She goes on to argue for revisions in standard views about innocent threats and ‘Innocent Shields’.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker’, Ethics vol. 104, no. 2 (1994)
• Shlomit Wallerstein, ‘Justifying Self-Defense: A Theory of Forced Consequences’, Virginia Law Review vol. 91, no. 4 (2005)
• David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford University Press, 2002), Part I
• Seth Lazar, ‘Responsibility, Risk, and Killing in Self-Defense’, Ethics vol. 119, no. 4 (2009)
• Jonathan Quong, ‘Killing in Self-Defense’, Ethics vol. 119, no. 3 (2009)
  Quong defends the view that it is permissible to kill innocent threats and aggressors, but not (most) bystanders, in self-defence. Arguing against Thomson, Otsuka, and McMahan, he founds the permissibility of lethal self-defence against the innocent in the agent-relative value one's life has for one, at the same time holding that this value does not give rise to an unrestricted permission, being constrained by a version of what is known as the ‘Means Principle’.
• Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Justifying Defense Against Non-Responsible Threats and Justified Aggressors’, Philosophia vol. 44, no. 1 (2016)
  Steinhoff defends a liability account of defensive harm (such as Thomson’s), according to which defensive harm is made permissible by the absence of claims against it, and argues in particular against Quong’s justified-infringement view, according to which defensive harm is in some cases a matter of permissible infringement of others’ claims rather than a matter of their having no such claims.

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• Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations (Basic Books, 1977), chapter 3
  Walzer argues eloquently that “when soldiers fight freely ... their war is not a crime; when they fight without freedom, their war is not their crime”&8212;even though their cause may be unjust. He argues this on the basis of the idea that war is a social creation, structured by a set of conventions.
• Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: an Introduction (Routledge, 2011), chapter 6
  Frowe offers a concise overview of the debate about the moral equality of combatants, setting out standard defences of the so-called ‘orthodox view’ (including Walzer’s) and McMahan’s revisionist arguments, and reviewing some of the major lines of response to McMahan.
• Jeff McMahan, ‘On the Moral Equality of Combatants’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 14, no. 4 (2006)
  After setting out a case against MEC based on the fact that nothing analogous holds in everyday cases of unjust aggression, McMahan reviews and rejects various reasons for thinking that war and everyday life are disanalogous: that the combatants have consented or would consent, that war is like gladiatorial combat, that combatants in war must be obedient, and that it is asking too much of combatants to say that they should fight only for just causes.
• Thomas Hurka, ‘Liability and just cause’, Ethics & International Affairs vol. 21, no. 2 (2007)
  Hurka explains the distinction between independent and conditional just causes for war, and explores the implications for such causes of McMahan’s account of just causes for war (see further reading below). He then offers a sophisticated consent-based defence of MEC against the objections that McMahan raises.
• Jonathan Parry, ‘Authority and Harm’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press, 2017)
  Parry argues that agents can be morally required to obey commands to harm others even when harming would be impermissible in the absence of the command, and, second, that someone's having an authority-based justification for harming does not, in itself, raise the justificatory burden on harming her in self-defence, which explains why soldiers obeying a mistaken command may be resisted even though they act permissibly.
• Arthur Ripstein, Rules for Wrongdoers: Law, Morality, War (Oxford, 2021)
  In these characteristically stylish and crisp lectures, Ripstein develops an illuminating Kantian perspective on the morality of war. One of Ripstein's moves is to interpret the question that MEC is supposed to answer as a question about the legitimacy of punishing unjust combatants for their part in prosecuting an unjust war.

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• Jeff McMahan, ‘Just Cause for War’, Ethics & International Affairs vol. 19, no. 3 (2005)
• F. M. Kamm, ‘Failures of Just War Theory: Terror, Harm, and Justice’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 4 (2004)
• Lionel K. McPherson, ‘Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 3 (2007)
• Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Jeff McMahan on the Moral Inequality of Combatants’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 16, no. 2 (2008)
• Seth Lazar, ‘The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38, no. 2 (2010)
• David Estlund, ‘On Following Orders in an Unjust War’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 15, no. 2 (2007)
  Estlund offers a more detailed discussion of the analogy between following orders to fight in an unjust war and jailing an innocent person in accordance with the verdict of a court, defending the claim that under certain conditions, combatants can permissibly fight for an unjust cause, contrary to McMahan’s view.
• Cécile Fabre, ‘Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War’, Ethics vol. 120, no. 1 (2009)
  Fabre explains and then rejects a widely accepted distinction in liability to attack in war between civilians who provide military resources to combatants and civilians who provide non-military resources to them. She argues that what matters is whether a given civilian is sufficiently causally and morally responsible for wrongful enemy deaths, but then suggests that epistemic difficulties and individual causal insignificance give immunity to even those civilians whose activities directly contribute to wrongful deaths.

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• H.L.A. Hart, ‘The Presidential Address: Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment’, in his Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  Hart’s masterful essay distinguishes important questions about punishment (e.g. the question what the general aim of the institution of punishment is and the question what principles should guide its distribution) and argues that neither a thoroughgoing retributivism nor a thoroughgoing utilitarianism will offer satisfactory answers to all the questions, preferring instead a pluralistic view that takes the institution’s general aims to be restricted in questions of distribution by principles of justice.
• Warren Quinn, ‘The Right to Threaten and the Right to Punish’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 14, no. 4 (1985)
  Quinn ingeniously argues that the permissibility of punishment is grounded in the permissibility of threatening punishment, rather than the other way around. He proceeds by arguing that the practice of punishment is morally equivalent to the practice of ‘m-punishment’, which involves activating machines that threaten punishment for certain violations and then unavoidably carry it out automatically.
• Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm (Oxford University Press, 2011), chapters 12–13
• M.S. Moore, ‘Justifying Retributivism’, Israel Law Review vol. 27, no. 1–2 (1993)
  Moore clarifies the possible forms of retributivism, highlighting some ways in which a lack of clarity about possible forms may make some objections seem more troublesome for retributivists than they really are. Then he defends the retributive principle “that offenders should be punished because and only because they have culpably done wrong” by defending retributivist judgments about hypothetical cases from common objections and by defending the appeal to those judgments to vindicate retributivism. You can probably skip sections 3–4, which focus on more general metaethical questions, unless you have a particular interest in these.
• Daniel Farrell, ‘The Justification of Deterrent Violence’, Ethics vol. 100, no. 2 (1990)
  Farrell highlights a problem with the Quinn-style theory of punishment that argues from the permissibility of auto-punishing deterrents to the permissibility of ordinary punishment, viz., that it does not give adequate justification for enforcing a threat when the act of enforcement is distinct from the act of threatening. He then defends enforcing permissible threats as a part of a strategy of maintaining credibility that is essential to permissibly lowering the threat of harm to one.

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• R.A. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Jeffrie G. Murphy, Punishment and the Moral Emotions: Essays in Law, Morality, and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012))
• Andrew von Hirsch, Censure and Sanctions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996))

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• Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Preferential Hiring’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 2, no. 4 (1973)
  Focusing on the case of academic institutions in particular, Thomson argues that public institutions are subject to a kind of equal-opportunities principle on the grounds that every member of the public has a claim to the benefits they provide. However, Thomson argues, just as a private club member’s analogous claim can be overridden if the club wants to express gratitude to some long-serving member, so equal-opportunities claims can be overridden by the need for the public to make amends for wrongs done to members of underrepresented groups. As with Thomson’s work on other topics, a key move is to concede that those who suffer from a policy had rights against it, and yet argue that it was permissible anyway.
• Alan H. Goldman, ‘Limits to the Justification of Reverse Discrimination’, Social Theory and Practice vol. 3, no. 3 (1975)
  Rejecting arguments against a general rule of hiring according to competence, Goldman raises doubts about the idea that compensation could be owed to a group to which members belong solely by virtue of sharing some characteristic such as gender, or to individuals solely in virtue of their belonging to such a group, and concludes that compensatory justice can require discrimination only in favour of specific individuals on grounds of past discrimination against those individuals in particular. He goes on to argue against appeals to the need for role models and to past denial of educational opportunities as grounds for preferential hiring in general before suggesting a defence that appeals to the background conditions needed for future competence-based hiring to be just.
• Louis P. Pojman, ‘The Case against Affirmative Action’, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice, 4th edition (Blackwell, 1994)
  In a rather scattergun set of arguments, Pojman rejects defences of what he calls ‘strong affirmative action’ that appeal to ideas about role models, compensation, the wrong of benefiting from injustice, and the value of diversity. Then he goes on to argue that strong affirmative action simply “shifts injustice”, judges people by morally irrelevant criteria, encourages mediocrity, and is contrary to justified meritocracy.
• Randall Kennedy, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (Vintage, 2013), pp. 66–109
  In this extract, Kennedy gives his qualified endorsement to affirmative action in the US after surveying key arguments for and against it, with a focus on arguments that have been made in response to particular policies and institutional endorsements of affirmative action. He gives most attention to the argument from compensatory justice, which he regards as the most compelling, and to the argument from diversity. At the end of the chapter he spends some time investigating objections from the ‘disappointed white candidate’ and from harm (stigmatisation and overpromotion) to the intended beneficiaries.
• Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, (Princeton, 2010), chapters 7–8
  In the first of these chapters, Anderson argues for ‘discrimination-blocking’ and ‘integrative’ rationales for affirmative action on race over diversity- and compensation-based rationales, though she offers responses to some common objections to the latter too. In the second chapter, Anderson rejects objections from the idea that institutions should be ‘colour-blind&rsquo, arguing that these either do not apply to the integrative rationale or else rest on various confusions and bad arguments. This chapter includes helpful distinctions between different ideas of race and their different connections to arguments about affirmative action and a catalogue of mechanisms generating systematic race-based disadvantage that anti-discrimination laws do not address.

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• Richard Arneson, ‘What is wrongful discrimination?’, San Diego Law Review vol. 43 (2006)
• Deborah Hellman, When is discrimination wrong? (Harvard University Press, 2008), chapters 1–3
• Lawrence Blum, ‘Racial and Other Asymmetries’, in Hellman and Moreau (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• David Boonin, Should Race Matter? Unusual answers to the Usual Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapters 4–5
• George Sher, ‘Diversity’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 2 (1999)
• Tarunabh Khaitan, A Theory of Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 8

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• Randall Kennedy, ‘Suspect Policy’, The New Republic 221, pp. 30–35
  Kennedy argues that racial profiling isn‘t necessarily bigoted or based on empirical errors, but that it is wrong because it feeds resentment and division, places excessive burdens on innocent people, and is contrary to the principle that people should be judged by public authorities on their conduct alone.
• Matthias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser, ‘Racial Profiling’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 32, no. 2 (2004)
  After some helpful clarificatory work distinguishing profiling from nearby concepts, Risse and Zeckhauser argue that most of the harm of racial profiling is due to underlying societal racism rather than by the profiling itself, and that remainder can be offset by the utilitarian value of the profiling, so that profiling is in some cases justified on utilitarian grounds, even in a racist society. They go on to dismiss objections from the idea that profiling contributes to oppression and that it imposes burdens in an unfair way.
• Anabelle Lever, ‘Why Racial Profiling Is Hard to Justify: A Response to Risse and Zeckhauser’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 1 (2005)
  Lever replies to Risse and Zeckhauser, objecting that their argument—in particular the idea that the harm of racial profiling is what they call ‘expressive’—depends upon an implausible understanding of the relations between racism and racial profiling, and that the harms of racial profiling are not small.
• David Boonin, Should Race Matter? Unusual answers to the Usual Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 11
  Boonin defends what he calls ‘rational racial profiling’ against the objections that it violates a right against unreasonable searches (and other intrusions), that it violates a right to equal treatment, that it has unacceptable costs, and that its costs are distributed unfairly.
• Andreas Mogensen, ‘Racial Profiling and Cumulative Injustice’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 98, no. 2 (2019)
  Mogensen tries to vindicate the sense that even racial profiling practised without public knowledge would be wrong, appealing to a principle of fair treatment that requires us to judge people on the basis of traits for which they can be held responsible in conjunction with an appeal to the moral significance of participating in the patterns of conduct that constitute racial oppression.

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• Adam Omar Hosein, ‘Racial Profiling and a Reasonable Sense of Inferior Political Status’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 26, no. 3 (2018)
• Benjamin Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect (Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 6
• Deborah Hellman, ‘Racial Profiling and the Meaning of Racial Categories’, in Cohen and Wellman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, 2nd edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Racial Profiling Versus Community’, Journal of Applied Philosophy vol. 23, no. 2 (2006)
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘“We Are All Different”: Statistical Discrimination and the Right to be Treated as an Individual’, Journal of Ethics vol. 15, no. 1–2 (2011)
• Naomi Zack, White Privilege and Black Rights: the Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)
• David Boonin, Should Race Matter? Unusual answers to the Usual Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 10

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