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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.

This chapter sets about testing empirically the claim that philosophical practice involves an implicit reliance on intuitions. It does this by examining ten philosophical thought experiments in argumentative context: Perry’s cases in “The Essential Indexical”, Burge’s arthritis cases in “Individualism and the Mental”, Thomson’s violinist, Thomson’s and Foot’s trolley cases, Cohen’s lottery cases, Lehrer’s Truetemp, Goldman’s fake barn cases, Cappelen and Hawthorne’s cases on judgments of taste, Williams’ cases on personal identity, and Chalmers’ zombies. Relying on the diagnostics developed in the previous chapter, it is shown that none of the judgments involved have the special features that methodologists typically take as characteristic of intuitions.

This chapter compares a system of human rights guarantees of security with libertarian natural rights. Security rights are a solution to a collective action problem that would arise in a state of nature with libertarian natural rights, the internal security problem. To be endorsed by the main principle, a solution to that problem requires guarantees of procedural rights, which have no analog in natural rights. The chapter discusses various problems that have been thought to be fatal to consequentialism: (1) the problem of intentionally punishing the innocent, and the related problem of inadvertently punishing the innocent, which is a challenging one for nonconsequentialists; (2) strict criminal liability; and (3) organ harvesting. The discussion of inadvertently punishing the innocent leads to a consideration of the doctrine of double effect. The chapter concludes the chapter with a comparison of his account with Judith Thomson’s trade-off idea, illustrated by the trolley cases.

Artificial moral agents are necessary and inevitable. Innovative technologies are converging on sophisticated systems that will require some capacity for moral decision making. With the implementation of driverless trains, the “trolley cases” invented by ethicists to study moral dilemmas may represent actual challenges for artificial moral agents. Among the difficult tasks for designers of such systems is to specify what the goals should be, i.e. what is meant by a “good” artificial moral agent? Computer viruses are among the software agents that already cause harm. Credit card approval systems are among the examples of autonomous systems that already affect daily life in ethically significant ways but are “ethically blind” because they lack moral decision‐making capacities. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing, the introduction of service robots in the home to care for the elderly, and the deployment of machine‐gun‐carrying military robots expand the possibilities of software and robots without sensitivity to ethical considerations harming people.

When there is a conflict of personal autonomy interests, constitutional law recommends that the competing autonomy interests are to be ‘balanced’. The chapter first presents four concepts of balancing: balancing as autonomy maximisation, interest balancing, formal balancing, and balancing as reasoning. It argues, negatively, that equating balancing with consequentialist reasoning or mechanical ways of quantification would be misguided. Positively, the chapter proposes a set of moral principles to adequately deal with conflicts of autonomy interests. To this end it relies on approaches from moral and political philosophy, including debates between consequentialism and deontology, trolley cases, discussions of the value of accommodation, and theories of distribution. The chapter thus explores the considerable complexity that hides under the convenient doctrinal label of ‘balancing’ and develops a workable theory of how this balancing ought to be conducted in the resolution of actual cases.

Sometimes it is permissible to infringe an individual’s rights against harm in order to save others from greater harm. It has been a matter of extensive debate if and by whom victims of permissible rights infringements are owed compensation. This chapter defends the view that the beneficiaries of a permissible rights infringement have special compensatory duties to the victim. The chapter identifies two desiderata that an account of the beneficiaries’ compensatory duties should meet, and shows that two existing defenses, the Beneficiary Pays Principle and the Fairness Principle, fail to satisfy them. The chapter argues that the beneficiaries owe compensation on grounds of the Special Duty Principle. Their compensatory duty is best understood as a special duty to alleviate harm. The duty is particularly stringent because victims and beneficiaries stand in a morally tragic relationship.