It is very good of you to pay attention to these costs borne by others -- most people don't. Given the amount involved ($120,000 per annum), I think you should make an effort to find out more. Your oncologist says that no generic drug "can be administered this way" -- well, is there a compelling reason why it should be so administered, or would you be equally well off with the generic product administered in some other way? It is quite possible that your oncologist makes a lot more money from giving you the expensive medication rather than the cheaper one, so explore the question on the internet and perhaps also ring Medicare to get their opinion. If we all pay attention in this way, then it will be much harder for pharmaceutical companies and medical providers to overcharge the system we all pay for. If the expensive drug you are taking really is the only way to manage the symptom in question, then I would expect this symptom to be serious enough to justify this lavish reimbursement. But perhaps...

It sounds like you are drawing a distinction here, but I am not sure that you are. Suppose you have the ability to intervene in a certain situation in a way that makes the outcome better. If you do not intervene, then the outcome will be X; if you do intervene, then the outcome will be X+. Suppose you decide not to intervene. Now we can say of you that you have allowed a bad thing (X) to come to pass; and we can also say of you that you have failed to make a good thing (X+) happen. Now you might save your distinction by defining some threshold such that, if X is below this threshold, then your non-intervention is allowing a bad thing to pass, and if X is at or above this threshold, then you are merely failing to make a good thing happen. But I don't see a good way of defining such a threshold and also no good reason to give it moral significance: Wherever the threshold is, why should it be unethical to allow a very small bad thing just below the threshold and not unethical to fail to make an...

Sure. There can be an empirical theory of how moral judgments and reasoning develop in children for example, as presented by Lawrence Kohlberg and his successors (including Carol Gilligan). And there can be an empirical theory of how -- in reponse to features of human psychology and of the human natural environment -- prevalent conceptions of morality evolve in societies or in the human species. Philosopher David Hume presents a fascinating empirical theory of the latter sort in Books II and III of his Treatise of Human Nature , somewhat recast in his later Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals . A different broadly empirical theory of this kind is offered by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals . Kohlberg's empirical theory was written with the intent to vindicate a certain universalistic style of moral reasoning, and Hume took his theory to vindicate the moral commonsense of his time. By contrast, Nietzsche wrote with deflationary intent: once we fully...

Your well-articulated question brings out something interesting about how we moderns think about morality. When we consider whether a certain piece of conduct is morally acceptable or not, we tend to examine what complaints other people might plausibly raise against this conduct and how the agent might possibly answer these complaints. This is pretty clearly the approach of your female friend in the case of the man on the bench. Your friend thinks along the following lines, I believe: if the man's behavior is to be wrong, then this must be in virtue of some complaint one might raise on behalf of the girl (who else?). Her complaint must be that he is looking at a part of her body that he should not be looking at. But this is not a convincing complaint, because it is as a consequence of her own conduct that this part of her body has appeared in his visual field. His sitting where he is sitting is entirely innocent, and the viewing opportunity arose (unexpectably for him) through her choosing to wear...

I read your queston as envisaging that the attorneys in question not merely contribute to a miscarriage of justice but do so knowingly -- or at least have strong reason to believe that the outcome they are achieving is the wrong outcome. I also read you as stipulating that the cases you have in mind happen within a largely just legal system. Within a seriously unjust legal system, an attorney who gets a guilty client (who really did make a joke about the dictator) acquitted has done a morally good deed, and similarly the attorney who gets one of the regime's torturers convicted for a crime he didn't commit. To be reasonably just, a criminal justice system must not merely punish the kinds of conduct that ought to be punished and permit the kinds of conduct that ought to be permitted. It must also have rules and procedures that are reasonably reliable in ensuring that guilty people get punished and especially that innocent people are acquitted. It is not consistent with such a system that...

There is a more general moral duty to do all one can reasonably do to ensure that one will not harm children. This duty might trigger the moral obligation you contemplate in special circumstances. But I would think that most persons disposed toward pedophilia will have other options that would reliably achieve the same objective.

You capitalize the word "act", so maybe what you are wondering about is whether hiding something can be classified as an act or whether it should always be classified as an omission. This question of classification could be important if you give weight (as most do) to the distinction between (actively) harming someone and (passively) failing to benefit them. I can see two ways of reaching the conclusion that, in some cases, hiding a secret is active. Sometimes a failure to act comes on the heels of an explicit or implicit undertaking to act. Here it can be natural to look at the combination of the undertaking and the failure to live up to it as one act. For example, a rich guy invites the guests on his yacht to take a swim, assuring them that he'll throw them a rope when they'll have enough so they can climb back on board. He then fails to throw that rope and they drown. In this case, failure to throw the rope (or the combination of reassurance followed by this failure) should be classified as an...

Charles Taliaferro did not write that internet stalking is wrong only due to the victim's knowledge of it. According to you, he wrote that it's wrong due to the fact that the victim would mind if she knew. So, according to him, it can be wrong even if the victim never finds out. This is worth correcting because what interests you is, I think, different from what you're asking. You are asking what the moral status is of acts that become wrong only due to the victim's knowledge of them when the victim has no such knowledge. The answer is easy, such acts are not wrong. If the only thing that makes the act wrong is the victim's knowledge of the act, then the act cannot be wrong when the victim has no such knowledge. I think what you are really interested in is: when does the sole fact that some "victim" finds out about an act render this act wrong? To tackle this question, let's draw a distinction. One way one can harm a person is by frustrating an important, worthwhile interest or goal or desire of...

There are surely cases like the one you describe. But far more frequently, I would think, marketing gets people to switch to a product that costs about the same and is about equally good. In those cases, marketing still imposes a net loss on consumers because its cost gets factored into the price: the consumers of washing powers, cereals, and cars pay for the ads. But the individual firm can often not avoid advertising because it'll then lose market share and will eventually go out of business. In such a context firms can probably not be expected to desist unilaterally, but they can be asked perhaps to reduce their advertising when their competitors are willing to do likewise (insofar as this is consistent with anti-trust/competition laws). There are also clear counter-examples to your hypothesis: marketing for really new or much improved products. Here the consumer is already dissatisfied (for example, with his sexual functioning) and the consumption of the new product, though it sets him back...

Yes, the options you outline are coherent, and it's therefore not a necessary truth that the good coincides with pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is essentially G. E. Moore's "further question" argument presented in his Principia Ethica : "whatever definition [of "good"] be offered, it may always, with significance, of the complex so defined, be asked whether it is itself good." Much of what utilitarians say in support of their view is indeed commonsensical: when we look for the good for human beings, we should look for what they naturally strive to attain and strive to avoid. Most people do strive for pleasure or at least are glad when it comes their way; and most people strive to avert pain. In the famous (but flawed and clumsy) statement of John Stuart Mill: " thesole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is thatpeople do actually desire it. ... No reason can be given why the generalhappiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he...