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This comment asks us to imagine that we have discovered a principle that completely matches our intuitions about the various actions that might be performed in all the different versions of the trolley problem. Would that constitute a solution to the problem of providing a plausible principle to cover these various cases? Not necessarily, since the principle might turn on distinctions that have no obvious moral significance, and we might be unable to provide the principle with a compelling and plausible rationale. It argues that this might well be the situation we find ourselves in with regard to the book’s proposed solution to the trolley problem: even if the principle does match our intuitions in how it sorts the cases, it is difficult to see why the distinctions on which it turns should matter, and appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this comment believes the book has not provided the principle with a plausible account or rationale.

This comment discusses the book's positive account of the trolley problem, given in the Principle of Permissible Harm. This principle says an act that causes both a greater good and a lesser evil is impermissible if the evil results from a means to the good but can be permissible if the evil results from the good itself or from its noncausal flip side. This comment argues that this principle has counterintuitive implications—for example, that bombing an arms factory that kills nearby civilians is impermissible if the civilians are killed by flying pieces of bomb but permissible if they are killed by flying pieces of factory. It then argues that the principle lacks a persuasive philosophical rationale because it draws an arbitrary line in a sequence of means to an end and trades on an ambiguity in its understanding of “the greater good.”

This chapter presents a response to Chapter 3’s account of human rights, and to similar accounts which ground human rights in how they serve to protect or promote the good life. Starting from the observations that many people live good lives despite suffering human rights violations, and that many others fail to live good lives despite their human rights being respected, the chapter outlines some of the complications in grounding human rights on the good life. In particular, it shows that to deliver a standard list of human rights, good life approaches must endorse a somewhat controversial liberal commitment to the importance of a range of ways of pursuing a good life. And it also shows that human rights’ recognition-independence means that their grounding cannot proceed in a straightforward way from the value of what they protect (ie the value of having available a range of ways of living a good life). An explanation is needed for why this value grounds human rights even in situations when such rights will do nothing to secure this value. The chapter does not undermine approaches, like Chapter 3’s, which ground human rights on a good life; its aim is rather to sketch the key challenges for such approaches to overcome.