Traditionally, ethical noncognitivists have mainly devoted their attention to simple, categorical moral judgments such as (1) Stealing is wrong.A speaker asserting a sentence like (1) has called something wrong; he h a s made a moral condemnation. Noncognitivist analyses work best for sentences like (l), for it is in uttering such sentences t h a t speakers can most plausibly be held to have expressed a (noncognitive) attitude towards things. However, not all sentences in which words like 'wrong' occur are of this nature. There a r e many contexts where, for various reasons, it is not plausible to give moral terms the standard kind of noncognitivist analysis, where it is not plausible to see them as expressing (noncognitive) attitudes towards things. Clearly such contexts pose a problem for noncognitivists. Among these contexts a r e those in which moral terms are used to perform nonassertive speech acts (questions and commands) and those in which sentences including such terms a r e "embedded" in truth-functional compounds, such as conditionals and disjunctions, and a r e not independently asserted. The question is how a term like 'wrong' should be understood when used in these contexts. In this paper, I will be interested only in moral conditionals, since they have been the focus of much of the debate.' Noncognitivists have proposed a number of different ways of accommodating such conditionals within their theories.2 The most influential such strategy has been developed primarily by S. Blackburn (1988).I will defend three claims. First, Blackburn's account of the meaning of moral conditionals is inadequate. Second, there is a n alternative account, rooted in the noncognitivist tradition, David A l m received his Ph.D. in philosophy f r o m Cornell University in 1998 and is currently an instructor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. His main area of research is ethical theory.

I argue that a defense of deontological restrictions need not resort to what I call the 'Good/Bad asymmetry', according to which it is morally more important to avoid harming others than to prevent just such harm. I replace this paradoxical asymmetry with two non-paradoxical (if also non-obvious) ones. These are the following: (a) We ought to treat an act of preventing harm to persons precisely as such (as a harm prevention), rather than as the causing of a benefit; but we ought to treat an act that causes harm precisely as such (as a harm causing), rather than as the prevention of a benefit. (b) It is morally more important not to cause harm than to cause benefit. I show how we can use those asymmetries, together with certain other assumptions, to defend restrictions. I also offer a partial defense of the first of the two asymmetries.

This paper argues (a) that to any agent-relative value maker there will correspond an agent-neutral value maker, and the latter explains the former; and (b) that to each agent-relative constitutive ground there corresponds a neutral one, and the latter explains the former. It follows from (b), if not from (a), that agent-neutral value exists if agent-relative value does.

In this paper,

In this paper I take another look at the view, defended by C. Nino, that we may punish criminals because, by knowingly breaking a law, they have consented to becoming liable to the prescribed punishment. I will first rebut the criticisms usually aimed at this view in the literature, aiming to show that they are inconclusive. They are all efforts to show that criminal offenders in fact do not consent to becoming liable to punishment simply by committing crimes. I then turn to a different line of criticism, which I find more promising. I argue that the moral power of effecting normative changes by consenting reflects the power holder's value as a person, and show how this idea makes sense of how refusal to recognize that power wrongs a person. I then argue that the Bpower^of consenting to punishability does not fit that model, and is better explained as reflecting the value of other people, whom the offender has wronged. Hence the power of consenting is not involved in typical cases of wrongdoing. Keywords Punishment. Consent. Nino. Rights One view of punishment is that we may punish criminals because, by knowingly breaking a law, they have consented to becoming liable to the prescribed punishment. Punishing them therefore does not infringe any right of theirs. While this consent view of punishment has certainly had its share of criticism, much of that criticism seems to me to miss the point. The goal of this paper is to show why that is, and then present a better reason for rejecting the consent view, a reason based on a certain conception of moral rights.