At what stage of life is death worst for its victim?  I hold that, typically, death is worse the earlier it occurs.  Others, including Jeff McMahan and Christopher Belshaw, have argued that it is worst to die in early adulthood.  In this paper I show that McMahan and Belshaw are wrong; I show that views that entail that Student's death is worse face fatal objections.  I focus in particular on McMahan's time-relative interest account (TRIA) of the badness of death. Manuscript in progress.

Sometimes people desire that their lives go badly, take pleasure in their lives going badly, or believe that their lives are going badly.  This fact makes some popular theories of welfare paradoxical.  I show that no attempts to defend those theories from the paradox fully succeed.  The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com; please use published version for citations.

A popular view about why death is bad for the one who dies is that death deprives its subject of the good things in life.  This is the "deprivation account" of the evil of death.  There is another view about death that seems incompatible with the deprivation account:  the view that a person's death is less bad if she has lived a good life. I give some arguments against this view and defend the deprivation account.  Penultimate draft posted with kind permission of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy; please use published version for citations.

Harry Silverstein argues that Epicurus' "problem of the subject" can be solved by appeal to four-dimensionalism.  I agree but for different reasons.  In this paper I provide further argument for the view I defended in the Nous paper below.

The move to satisficing has been thought to help consequentialists avoid the problem of demandingness.  But this is a mistake. In this paper I formulate several versions of satisficing consequentialism.  I show that every version is unacceptable, because every version permits agents to bring about a submaximal outcome in order to prevent a better outcome from obtaining.  Some satisficers try to avoid this problem by incorporating a notion of personal sacrifice into the view.  I show that these attempts are unsuccessful.  I conclude that, if satisficing consequentialism is to remain a position worth considering, satisficers must show (i) that the move to satisficing is necessary to solve some problem, whether it be the demandingness problem or some other problem, and (ii) that there is a version of the view that does not permit the gratuitous prevention of goodness.  Penultimate draft posted with kind permission of Cambridge University Press; please use published version for citations.

I distinguish between Kantian and Moorean concepts of intrinsic value.  I show that this distinction helps the Moorean counter recent arguments given by Scanlon, Anderson and Kagan.  The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com; please use published version for citation.

I attempt to improve upon Julia Driver's version of virtue consequentialism.  I maintain that according to the best version of virtue consequentialism, attributions of virtue are really disguised comparisons between two character traits, and the consequences of a trait in non-actual circumstances may affect its actual status as a virtue or vice.  Such a view best enables the consequentialist to account for moral luck, unexemplified virtues, and virtues and vices involving the prevention of goodness and badness.  Copyright 2005 by Cambridge University Press.

Epicurus seems to have thought that death is not bad for the one who dies, since its badness cannot be located in time.  I show that Epicurus' argument presupposes Presentism, and I argue that death is bad for its victim at all and only those times when the person would have been living a life worth living had she not died when she did.  I argue that my account is superior to competing accounts given by Thomas Nagel, Fred Feldman and Neil Feit.   Penultimate draft posted with kind permission of Blackwell Publishing; please use published version for citations.

I argue, in defense of Moore and contrary to Kagan and Hurka, that something's intrinsic value depends solely on its intrinsic properties.  The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com; please use published version for citation.