In this talk we investigate the implications of rescue cases featuring risk and overlapping outcome groups. We argue that a look at these cases provides a new perspective on the numbers debate in general and on the contentious issue of aggregation in rescue cases in particular. The former concerns the insight that proposals that were previously thought to coincide with saving the greater number or giving it a greater chance do not consistently do so after all. The latter concerns the insight that in some cases, one needs to aggregate people's claims against their will in order to save the greater number or at least give it a greater chance to be saved. We deem this insight to pose challenges for proposals (be it lottery solutions or proposals to save the greater number outright) that justify their numbers-sensitivity by pointing to the autonomous, self-interest-based choices of the very claimants they aim to save.

The Relevance View promises to reconcile aggregationist and anti-aggregationist intuitions: we should aggregate people’s claims, but only those relevant, that are sufficiently strong compared to another claim. However, the Relevance View is confronted with two challenges. (i) In multiple-option choices, it implies cyclical obligations. (ii) In choices between heterogeneous groups, it dismisses irrelevant claims too easily. Some proponents solve (i) by a global interpretation, but they cannot account for (ii). Others address (ii) by a local understanding, but they fail to avoid (i). I tackle both challenges together by considering cases with multiple options and heterogeneous groups. The key is to distinguish the relevance of claims and the reasons provided by relevant claims. I argue that (ii) requires a local relevance: claims are relevant not in general but only relative to particular other claims. To solve (i), we should understand the reasons as global: reasons in favour of an option relative to not only one but all alternatives. However, local relevance doesn’t entail local reasons, and global reasons don’t need global relevance. Locally relevant claims that are satisfied under an option can, thus, provide global reasons to choose that option rather than any other available alternative.

It is often considered an important advantage of deontological theories that they don't share the counterintuitive verdict of consequentialism that we ought to violate duties or rights when this leads to overall less instances of such duty or rights violations. However, deontological theories struggle explaining why we ought to prevent duty violations when this is possible by morally innocuous means. Since deontology recognizes non-consequentialist duties, the importance of preventing their violation cannot always be explained in terms of their bad consequences. But at the same time, it seems that permitting that these non-consequentialist duties are violated does not violate these duties themselves. This paper argues that the only viable option for deontologists that allows them to explain why one ought to prevent immoral actions is to reinterpret deontological duties in terms of defeaters that diminish the strength of consequentialist reasons rather than proving additional reasons themselves.

Maximizing Objective Act-Consequentialism (MOAC) holds that an action is morally right iff no alternative would produce better consequences. One central challenge to MOAC is the Collective Action Problem (CAP), roughly the observation that in some collective decision situations, apparently right individual actions fail to bring about the best possible outcomes. This has been seen as a violation of the Principle of Moral Harmony (PoMH)—the idea that adequate moral theories should guarantee that their adherents collectively produce the best achievable world.

I argue that this critique misdiagnoses the problem: rather than generating incorrect moral assessments, MOAC theories are deontically incomplete, i.e., they fail to generate any (non-conditional) deontic assessments in the relevant class of collective decision situations. CAP, then, is the result of the consequentialist attempt to obscure its own deontic incompleteness.

To address this nexus of problems holistically, I propose a Multi-Agent Criterion of Rightness (MA-CoR), which extends MOAC using game-theoretic principles and mixed strategies to determine morally right actions in collective contexts. By addressing CAP without compromising MOAC’s core commitments, this approach offers a structurally robust conservative extension of the established consequentialist framework for handling collective moral decision-making, transforming an apparent weakness of MOAC into a comparative advantage.

I argue that first-order moral theory often overlooks a crucial mistake: moral hubris. A moral view is guilty of moral hubris when it “goes too far”—that is, when it implies moral claims that fail to respect what I call the function constraint. This constraint sets the boundaries of what moral norms can demand while still qualifying as moral norms. It arises from the fundamental purpose or function of morality, where “morality” refers to our actual socio-cultural moral practice.

In short, moral hubris occurs when a moral theory advocates norms that conflict with the very purpose of moral practice. After introducing the function constraint and arguing that morality has an underlying point or function, I suggest that longtermism (MacAskill 2022) exemplifies a hubristic moral view. If my argument is persuasive, a broader conclusion follows: the content of moral norms is constrained by morality’s function. As a result, normative ethicists must adhere to the function constraint to avoid moral hubris in their theories. Finally, I suggest that utilitarian views are more prone to moral hubris than Kantian or contractualist perspectives.

There is an overlooked dilemma for the overdemandingness objection. The intuition behind this objection is that morality must allow agents to live good lives. Yet, the two most obvious ways to spell out this intuition are unsatisfactory.

(1) Morality must leave room for a person to live their good life, by pursuing their central commitments, projects, and preferences (CPPs). This is too permissive: Morality could not ask agents to sacrifice the pursuit of any CCPs that happen to be central to their lives.

(2) Morality must leave room for a person to live a good life, irrespective of how this life relates to who they are right now. This is too restrictive: Agents could be required to sacrifice the pursuit of any and all of their central CCPs, if it would be possible for them to change into a person who would live a good life by pursuing different CPPs.

To overcome this dilemma, the demandingness debate must shift its focus. Instead of asking how much agents can be asked to sacrifice of the pursuit of their actual CPPs, we must ask under what conditions and in what way agents can be expected to change the content of these CCPs.