In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes (e.g. being a parent and being a non-parent) unless one can grasp what these outcomes are like; and (2) one can evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem.

Em meio à crescente cultura do uso abusivo e indiscriminado de exames, procedimentos e tratamentos, surgiu a iniciativa Choosing Wisely ("escolhendo com sabedoria" em tradução literal), a qual tem o intuito de evitar a realização de condutas desnecessárias

Climate change evokes different emotions in people. Recently, climate emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny in the public debate. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the normativization of climate emotions, manifests at two levels. At the individual level, people are faced with affective dilemmas, situations where they are genuinely uncertain about what is the right way to feel in the face of climate change. At the collective level, the public debate reflects disagreement about which climate emotions are appropriate to feel. The aim of this paper is to examine the normative reasons in favour of different climate emotions by combining normative criteria from philosophy and psychology. We conclude that these criteria provide partial reasons for or against different climate. Emotional disagreement in climate contexts may generate

Deprivations normally give rise to undeserved inequality. It is commonly thought that one way of improving a situation with respect to equality is by reducing the incidence of deprivations. In this paper I argue that there is at least one respect in which reducing the incidence of deprivations can make things worse from the point of view of equality. While eliminating deprivations leads to the elimination of inequalities, reducing the incidence of deprivations leads to an uneven distribution of the pairwise relations of inequality of a population, which leads to the concentration of pairwise relations of inequality in the worse off. If my argument is correct, egalitarians have reasons to broaden their dimensions of concern: egalitarians should not only be concerned about the unequal distribution of goods, but also about the unequal distribution of pairwise relations of inequality of a population.Keywords Inequality . Deprivations . Egalitarianism . Population ethics . Larry Temkin The Paradox of Deprivation Reduction and InequalityThe existence of deprivations often gives rise to undeserved inequality. It is an intuitive and common sense belief that reducing deprivations such as poverty leads to more equality. Indeed, many people who advocate poverty reduction describe themselves as egalitarians. This is indisputably true for the elimination of deprivations. Equality favours the total elimination of deprivations. In fact, all else equal, eliminating deprivations is the ideal with respect to equality; if there were no deprived individuals, there would not be inequality stemming from poverty. Since eliminating deprivations is favoured by equality, it is natural to think that, where we cannot eliminate it, reducing it would be a good second best, from the point of view of equality.Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2017) 20:957-968 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9842-x I would like to thank Brad Hooker and Patrick Tomlin for their insightful comments to this paper.