John Broome argues that fairness requires that claims are satisfied in proportion to their strength. Broome holds that, when distributing indivisible goods, fairness requires the use of weighted lotteries as a surrogate to satisfy proportionally each candidate's claims. In this article, we present two arguments against Broome's account of fairness. First, we argue that it is almost impossible to calculate the weights of the lotteries in accordance with the requirements of fairness. Second, we argue that Broome rules out those methods whose use might provide some resolution to this problem. From these arguments, we conclude that, contra Broome, fairness does not require the proportional satisfaction of claims.

Tom Dougherty has recently argued that non-consequentialists cannot accommodate our judgements about acceptable levels of risk-imposition. More specifically, he argues that the following two intuitively plausible claims are inconsistent: (i) that it is impermissible to provide small benefits to many people rather than saving the life of someone else, and (ii) that it is permissible to expose someone to a negligible risk of death in order to otherwise provide this person with a small benefit. Abandoning either principle has significant consequences: rejecting (i) requires rejecting an important argument against consequentialism and consequentialist approaches to beneficence; rejecting (ii) requires radically rethinking the way we live our lives, as we routinely expose individuals to negligible risks of death. This article shows that Dougherty's argument relies on a scope ambiguity involving permissibility. Once this ambiguity is resolved, Dougherty's argument fails.

This paper aims to reconcile the context-sensitivity of natural language with the essential epistemological role that language plays in the preservation and transmission of content.

Generic sentences involving phrasal conjunctions present a prima facie problem for the standard theory of generics according to which they express quasi-universal generalisations about what is characteristic for members of a particular kind. For example, the sentence ‘Elephants live in Africa and Asia’ is true, even though it is uncharacteristic for an elephant to live in both Africa and Asia. In response to this problem, theorists have recently proposed radical departures from the standard view. This paper argues that such departures are unwarranted: not only do they fail to fully accommodate the data involving generic conjunctions, their scope is overly narrow, since the phenomena in question also arise in non-generic contexts. I propose a new theory of generics that aims to account for generic conjunctions in a principled manner and which sheds new light on the mereological commitments of natural language.

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