Totalism without Repugnance

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives

Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows

The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not

Priority, Not Equality, for Possible People

How should we choose between uncertain prospects in which different possible people might exist at different levels of wellbeing? Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey offer an egalitarian answer to this question. I give some reasons to reject their answer and then sketch an alternative, which I call person-affecting prioritarianism

The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of _Better Than_

The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments

Normative Reasons as Reasons Why We Ought

I defend the view that a reason for someone to do something is just a reason why she ought to do it. This simple view has been thought incompatible with the existence of reasons to do things that we may refrain from doing or even ought not to do. For it is widely assumed that there are reasons why we ought to do something only if we ought to do it. I present several counterexamples to this principle and reject some ways of understanding "ought" so that the principle is compatible with my examples. I conclude with a hypothesis for when and why the principle should be expected to fail

Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism

An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox

I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it suggests various difficulties for leading views about the value of a person’s life compared to her nonexistence

A fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population contexts

Wild food plants in Graecanic communities in Calabria, southern Italy - ethnobotany, current role in Mediterranean diets and antioxidant activity

Dietary patterns are changing rapidly all over the world. The body of available local food knowledge, which forms the basis of many local traditions, is decreasing dramatically. In rural areas throughout the Mediterranean, vegetables and salads made from wild plants have been particularly important as local foods since ancient times. However, very little is known about the use of these wild food plants (WFPs) and about their contribution to health, while numerous clinical and pharmacological-biochemical studies have shown beneficial effects for major components of Mediterranean diets. This research project studied WFPs used in the Graecanic area in Calabria, Southern Italy as components of the local diet with potential antioxidant activity. It was embedded in an EU-funded project entitled "Local Food - Nutraceuticals". The research approach adopted for this interdisciplinary research combined ethnobotanical methods with pharmacology and nutritional sciences. The gathering, processing and consumption of these plants were studied using participant observation techniques and semi-structured interviews. Local perceptions about WFPs (beneficial health effects, health risks) and nutritional data were obtained through a socio-nutritional study conducted in Italy, Spain and Greece. More than 40 WFPs are used as condiments, or vegetables, including edible greens, called ta chòrta in the local language. Many are considered to be healthy because of their bitterness (e.g. Reseda alba). Furthermore, the antioxidant activity of WFPs from Italy, Spain and Greece, was evaluated using in vitro assays. Crude extracts were tested for free radical scavenging activity (FRSA), and for the inhibition of xanthine oxidase (XO). Only a small number of plant extracts showed significant antioxidant activity. However, some extracts had promising activity in the XO-system. This interdisciplinary research contributed not only to the understanding of locally used WFPs as a promising source of natural antioxidants, but also to the safeguarding of this rapidly vanishing local knowledge