Search

Lockdowns in Australia have been strict and lengthy. Policy-makers appear to have given the preservation of quantity of lives strong priority over the preservation of quality of lives. But thought-experiments in population ethics suggest that this is not always the right priority. In this paper, I'll discuss both negative impacts on quantity of lives caused by the lockdowns themselves, including an increase in domestic violence, and negative impacts on quality of lives caused by lockdowns, in order to raise the question of whether we each had reason to choose quantity over quality in our own lives in a way that would justify the lockdowns we had.

ABSTRACTAccording to Christian Barry & Gerhard Øverland (2016), there are multiple ways “the affluent” might be morally responsible for the situation the global poor are in, including having failed to assist them on a single occasion or on multiple occasions; by enabling harm to them; by ‘giving rise to cost’ for them; by making it costly for the poor to escape their own suffering; by exploiting them; by overdetermining harm to them. But what exactly is this group, “the affluent”, who Barry and Øverland present as being capable of doing all these things? In this paper I present three possible conceptions of ‘the affluent’, and argue that they all create problems for the conclusions the authors want to reach.

The objective of this paper is to explain why certain authors – both popular and academic – are making a mistake when they attribute obligations to uncoordinated groups of persons, and to argue that it is particularly unhelpful to make this mistake given the prevalence of individuals faced with the difficult question of what morality requires of them in a situation in which there is a good they can bring about together with others, but not alone. I will defend two alternatives to attributing obligations to uncoordinated groups. The first solution has us build better people, who will coordinate their actions willingly and spontaneously when the occasion arises. The second solution has us build better groups, so that when the occasion arises, there is a framework in place for coordinating members into action.