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Briefly restates the central argument of the book and then summarizes the main proposals for reforming the international legal system that the preceding chapters have developed on its basis. It sets the stage for Ch. 11, which explores morally accessible ways of undertaking the proposed reforms. The four sections of the chapter are: I. A Justice‐Based Approach; II. An International Legal Order Grounded in Obligation, not Mere Permissibility; III. Linking Justice, Legitimacy, and Self‐Determination; and IV. Needed Reforms.

Describes the methodological approach of the book and provides a summary overview of the other chapters. The methodological section explains what contextual political theory means and why it is useful; it advocates a comparative approach that helps us to see the range of the morally permissible by paying attention to a wide variety of cases in different states; and it introduces, explains, and defends the concept of justice as evenhandedness. The chapter also provides a brief account of the presuppositions about culture and identity that underlie the analysis.

This chapter continues the exploration of transitivity by assessing the nature of two other normative relations, the permissibility relation “is permissible to do rather than,” and the obligatoriness relation “ought to be done rather than.” It then identifies the factors that ultimately determine whether or not “all-things-considered better than” (in this book's wide reason-implying sense) is, in fact, a transitive relation.

This chapter continues the exploration of transitivity. Chapter 6 showed that one important normative relation, “the not worse than” relation, may be nontransitive. It also developed and explored a model for understanding why that relation, and others, would be nontransitive. The chapter begins by discussing two other important normative relations that may be nontransitive, the “permissibility” relation and the “obligatoriness” relation. It then suggests that there is good reason to believe that if the “obligatoriness” relation is nontransitive, the “all-things-considered better than” relation will also be nontransitive. It next considers an important response to the claim that the “obligatoriness” relation is nontransitive. It directly takes up the question of whether the “all-things-considered better than” relation (in this book's wide reason-implying sense) could be nontransitive. It spells out the conditions under which the relation would or would not be transitive and reexamines some of the arguments of earlier chapters in this light. Finally, it notes some of the important theoretical commitments that accompany both the view that the “all-things-considered better than” relation (in the aforementioned wide reason-implying sense) is transitive and the contrary view that it may not be, pointing out that the former view will hold if a position called the Internal Aspects View is correct, while the latter view will hold if a position called the Essentially Comparative View is correct.

This chapter begins by offering two mutually compatible diagnoses of why the orthodox view has been perennially appealing. One is that the orthodox view makes sense as a matter of law and people tend to conflate the morality of war with the law of war. The other is that many of the considerations that people invoke to defend the permissibility of participation in an unjust war are actually excuses or excusing conditions rather than ground of permissibility. The chapter goes on to survey a variety of excusing conditions that are generally thought to apply to the action of combatants who fight in unjust wars, but argues that the mitigating force of these considerations is weaker than people generally assume and that they very seldom provide full excuses — that is, that they are seldom fully exculpating.

Peter Unger has tried to show that relying on intuitive judgments is a worthless methodology for finding principles, and he has also offered a novel approach to the Trolley Problem. Unger, however, deals not only with the questions of when may we harm some to help others and how we can best reason about this issue. He also considers how much we must sacrifice in order to stop strangers from suffering serious losses and whether our distance from them alters our obligations. Unger's ground for claiming that intuitive judgments in cases are worthless is that we can construct cases that generate the opposite intuitive judgments. He thinks that we must decide which intuitive judgments are correct and what to do by consulting general moral values, such as the importance of reducing suffering and death. This chapter examines Peter Unger's views on the permissibility of harming innocent bystanders and the duty to harm ourselves in order to aid others.

In order for God to allow a bad state E to occur, (1) he must have the right to allow it (or an equally bad state) to occur, (2) to allow it must be the only morally permissible way in which he can bring about a good G, (3) God does everything else logically possible to bring about G, and (4) the expected value thereby of allowing E is positive. Unless he has strong prior reasons for believing that there is a God, a theist needs to have (or have to begin to construct) such a theodicy with respect to all known evils, explaining why a good God would allow them to occur, if his belief that there is a God is to be rational.

Part I considered how to determine whether there is a moral difference between killing and letting die per se, but in the two chapters of Part II, the consideration is when it is and when it is not permissible to kill some to save others. Ch. 6 first examines in some detail the arguments John Harris has made for a survival lottery (where we may select from among healthy people the one who will die to save another or who will share a fair risk of death with another), and considers a very limited context in which a curtailed survival lottery might be installed. The rest of the chapter is devoted to consideration of the many attempts to solve the problem of why we may not ordinarily kill one to save more (as in the Transplant Case, where a non‐consequentialist would believe that we may not chop up one innocent non‐threatening person, who would not otherwise die, to transplant his organs into a greater number of people in order to save their lives) but may kill via redirection of threats (as in the Trolley Case, where there is a choice between killing one or killing a greater number by turning/redirecting, or failing to turn/redirect, a runaway trolley). These attempts include the views of Philippa Foot, proponents of the Doctrine of Double Effect (e.g. Michael Costa), Warren Quinn, James Montmarquet, Judith Thomson, and Bruce Russell. A detailed examination is also made of whether the notion of ‘being already involved’ is a moral notion or can be given a non‐moral description.

Continues the consideration of when it is and is not permissible to kill some to save others, by presenting a new proposal (related to an earlier one made by the author) for a Principle of Permissible Harm (PPH) for dealing with the Trolley Case and related cases. One upshot of this proposal is to show that many redirection‐of‐threat cases are not sui generis but one of a class of cases in which greater good (or its structurally equivalent component or a means that has greater good as its non‐causal flip side) may permissibly cause lesser harm. This PPH is compared with the Doctrine of Double Effect, and a morally crucial distinction concealed within the concept of ‘intending’ is pointed out. The problem then is to explain what important moral notions the PPH expresses; an investigation is made of this (focusing on the maintenance of appropriate relations between victim and beneficiaries) and of why the PPH does not govern omissions (even when there are positive rights). Concludes by examining the bearing of the PPH on the killing/letting‐die distinction, and the problem of euthanasia, also noting how its application is limited by, among other considerations, the Principle of Secondary Permissibility and the distinction between intra‐ and inter‐personal benefits.

A second inferential system that preserves permissibility rather than truth is developed. All classical theorems are shown to be necessarily permissible to assert. The two inferential systems are compared.

The notion of a sentence that is permissible to assert spawns a new ‘paradox’: a sentence that says of itself that it is not permissible to assert. This appears to be a form of the revenge problem for solutions of the Liar paradox. The problematic sentences are shown to force a violation of a normative ideal, but to be otherwise unproblematic.

This chapter examines some unmistakably Kantian features of Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics and argues that Hertz initially took over a widespread Kantian distinction between an a-priori kinematics and an empirical dynamics. The properties of permissibility, correctness, and appropriateness were somehow interconnected in Hertz's discussion of the three images of mechanics. Still, he insisted that in a scientific representation of an image one, should distinguish clearly between them. Immanuel Kant had argued that in addition to a-priori intuitions of time and space, a rational mathematical science of nature requires a basic purely philosophical analysis of the concept of matter. This ‘metaphysics of corporeal nature’ should not be based on any particular experience but only on the empirical notion of matter as a concept of nature pertaining to the pure intuitions of time and space. When combined with the empirical laws of nature it would lead to the science of physics.

According to typical formulations of the doctrine of double effect (DDE), it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else being equal. T. M. Scanlon has recently followed James Rachels and Judith Jarvis Thomson in rejecting the DDE on the grounds that it is implausible to hold that an otherwise permissible action can be rendered impermissible simply because of a particular agent's bad intentions. The chapter argues that when properly understood the DDE does not have this general implication and does not lead to implausible results: the role of intention in the DDE is more complex and abstract than these critics and even some defenders recognize, not generally making permissibility turn on the actual intentions of particular agents. When this is taken into account the objection is avoided entirely. Still, there are special circumstances under which the actual intentions of particular agents can affect permissibility, and the alternative understanding of the DDE properly explains this as well. The chapter concludes with a critique of Scanlon's attempt to show that the DDE is in any case dispensable.

According to Heinrich Hertz, the aim of theoretical physics is to construct and evaluate images that can be used to predict future events. Yet Hertz seems to take it for granted that these images are intersubjective in the sense that all (educated) humans can form the same images and can describe them accurately to one another. In order for an image to serve its predicting purpose, Hertz made the following basic requirement: that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in the nature of the things pictured. This chapter discusses Hertz's concept of images of nature and compares his notions of images and signs with those of Hermann von Helmholtz. Hertz's three criteria for the evaluation of image — logical permissibility, correctness, and appropriateness — as well as his views about simplicity and distinctness are also considered.

Having considered Heinrich Hertz's general ideas about images, this chapter discusses his evaluation of the three images of mechanics. First, the principles of mechanics according to Hertz are considered. In the Newtonian-Laplacian image, the fundamental concepts are space, time, mass, and force which are connected by Isaac Newton's three laws and d'Alembert's principle. The energetic image also rests on space, time, mass, and energy and the basic mechanical principle is William Rowan Hamilton's principle. Hertz's description of his own image of mechanics only deals with space, time, and mass. He spotted problems with permissibility of the first Newtonian-Laplacian image, but redefined them as problems of appropriateness. He had no serious doubts about its correctness. He spotted problems with both permissibility and correctness of the second energetic image but ended up redefining those also as problems of appropriateness. He considered his own image as permissible, distinguishing this as its most important merit, and the problems that he realised could be raised against its correctness, he deferred for future falsification or verification.

The traditional, but now unfashionable, interpretation of the means principle is that it is worse to harm a person intentionally than it is to harm them as a side-effect of one's actions. This account of the means principle regards the motivations of wrongdoers as important in determining whether or not an action is permissible. Many people now think that motivations cannot play a role in determining what is right or wrong. What is right or wrong is to be determined by the effects of the actions on others, and not by the motivations of the person doing the action. It is outwardly that we ought to look when deciding what to do, they claim, rather than inwardly. Chapter 7 defends a version of the traditional interpretation against this objection. It is argued that motivations with which an action is done are central to its permissibility.