Abstract:

Suppose that you have considered all of the arguments you know purporting to show that abortion is wrong and have concluded that they all fail. Are your deliberations about the morality of abortion at an end? The first essay of my dissertation, "Abortion and Moral Risk," argues that the answer is No: you must proceed to consider the possibility that you are mistaken in your assessment. Ignoring the possibility that you are mistaken about the morality of abortion involves taking a risk--the risk of unwittingly committing serious wrongdoing--that I show may itself be impermissible. However, not all such moral risks are wrong, and I attempt to flesh out various countervailing factors, including costs to the agent.

The second essay, "The Morality of Overdetermination," takes up the problem that in many situations like voting or polluting the environment individual acts cannot make a difference to the outcome, since that outcome is overdetermined. Accordingly, we might wonder why individual agents should avoid performing the relevant acts when they benefit the individual and avoiding them does no one any good at all. I first argue that we cannot infer from an act's making no difference that it cannot be wrong, since we may cause or partly cause the result in an objectionable way all the same. Acting even in overdetermined circumstances may thus be wrong. I next argue that appealing to (partial) causation allows us to solve at least some of the practical problems the issue of overdetermination raises, though I also explore some lingering challenges to this approach.

Finally, "Killing and Dying" advocates a harm-based approach to what makes killing wrong, and defends such an approach against respect-based views. I begin by emphasizing that a defensible conception of the harm we suffer in dying will imply that at least one important part of the harm we inflict in killing will not vary from person to person. I marshal this point to ward off the so-called equal-wrongness objection to harm-based accounts. I go on to discuss various mistakes which have led philosophers to misunderstand both the harm- and the respect-based views, including difficulties in explaining what the relevant notion of respect is in this context. The importance of the dispute over theories of killing for determining moral status in marginal cases emerges at the beginning and end of the essay.