Abstract:It is argued that we have a moral duty to create, and make available, advanced pharmacological agents to boost the happiness of those in the normal, i.e., the non-depressed, range of happiness. Happiness, conceived as a propensity to positive moods, is a quantitative trait with a sizeable genetic component. One means to boost the happiness of those in the normal range is to test the efficacy of antidepressants for enhancement. A second possibility is to model new pharmacologicals based on the genetics of the happiest amongst us, that is, the hyperthymic. The suggestion, in other words, is to ‚reverse engineer‛ the hyperthymic: to investigate what makes the hyperthymic genetically and physiologically different and then put what they have into pill form. To the 'Brave New World' objection, that there is more to wellbeing than happiness and that taking happy-people-pills will require the sacrifice of these other aspects of wellbeing, it is countered that contemporary social science research supports the view that happiness promotes achievement in the 'higher' endeavors of humanity, including work, love and virtue. In other words, happiness promotes acquisition of traits valued by perfectionists. Those born with genes for hyperthymia, on average, tend to be doubly blessed: they are happier and achieve more than the rest of the population. Happy-people-pills are a means to allow everyone else to share in this good fortune. The paper seeks to rebut two further criticisms: that happy-people-pills will lead to emotional inappropriateness and inauthentic happiness. Finally, it is argued that depending on the view about the role of government in individual welfare, either government has a positive duty to develop happy-people-pills, or government has a duty not to interfere with private companies that seek to develop such pharmacological agents.

This paper explores the so‐called buck‐passing accounts of value. These views attempt to use normative notions, such as reasons and ought to explain evaluative notions, such as goodness and value. Thus, according to Scanlon’s well‐known view, the property of being good is the formal, higher‐order property of having some more basic properties that provide reasons to have certain kind of valuing attitudes towards the objects. I begin by tracing some of the long history of such accounts. I then describe the arguments which are typically used to motivate these views. The rest of this article investigates how some of the central details of the buck‐passing accounts should be specified, and what kind of problems these views face.

In this article, I will defend the so-called "buck-passing" theory of value. According to this theory, claims about the value of an object refer to the reason-providing properties of the object. The concept of value can thus be analyzed in terms of reasons and the properties of objects that provide them for us. Reasons in this context are considerations that count in favour of certain attitudes. There are four other possibilities of how the connection between reasons and value might be formulated. For example, we can claim that value is a property that provides us with reasons to choose an option that has this property. I argue that none of these four other options can ultimately be defended, and therefore the buck-passing account is the one we ought to accept as the correct one. The case for the buck-passing account becomes even stronger, when we examine the weak points of the most pressing criticism against this account thus far.KEY WORDS: buck-passing account, normative concepts, practical rationality, reasons, theory of action, value I cannot discover in the things which may be considered to be good in themselves any simple quality of goodness in addition to their non-ethical qualities and the property of being right for an appropriate agent to pursue or to produce. (Frankena, 1942, p. 108.)

CognitivismUtterances of basic indicative moral sentences conventionally express basic moral beliefs.By basic indicative moral sentences, I mean simple, positive indicative moral sentences of the form 'x is F' where 'F' is a moral predicate. Thus, according to the moral error theorists, if I claim that 'torture is wrong', I express my belief that torture is wrong.Cognitivism is therefore a claim about how our moral talk is related to our thought. The role of such talk is to communicate to others how we believe the world to be morally speaking. This means that moral error theories are in conflict with the non-cognitivist views in metaethics.According to the non-cognitivists, moral utterances do not conventionally express beliefs but rather some non-cognitive attitudes such as plans, desires, approvals, acceptances of norms, make-belief, and so on. 3 Roughly, the difference is that beliefs aim at being true whereas non-cognitive attitudes are not considered to do so. Many non-cognitivists believe that attitudes aiming at truth have to be motivationally inert.They then argue that moral utterances must express non-cognitive attitudes because the attitudes expressed by those utterances do play an intrinsically motivating role.The second element of moral error theories describes the content of the expressed moral beliefs. It is: SemanticBasic moral beliefs ascribe moral properties to objects. 4

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