In recent decades the European Union has moved from a multilateral treaty to a distinctive social, political, and economic order among European states. During the same period political philosophers have increasingly turned their attention to questions of justice beyond the state. But their discussions have largely focused on global justice, and have paid relatively little attention to the distinctive moral and political questions raised by the emergence of a new type of order among European states. This thesis fills this lacuna, by developing a conception of ‘social democratic’ or ‘egalitarian’ social justice for the specific institutional arrangements of the EU. In Chapters one through three, I delineate a general conception of ‘pluralist egalitarianism’, the view that we have a variety of grounds for endorsing equality-inclined economic institutions domestically. Direct egalitarian arguments stress the internal requirements of institutional fairness to which basic economic institutions are subject. Indirect egalitarian arguments favour egalitarian economic outcomes based on concerns of social equality. I further differentiate between a transnationalist and an internationalist position. Direct transnationalist arguments stress the EU’s similarity to domestic institutions and derive egalitarian economic requirements for the EU as a whole. Indirect transnationalists argue that EU citizens stand in a distinctive kind of relationship such that the value of social equality has purchase amongst them, and social equality requires a limitation on economic inequalities at the EU level. By contrast, internationalists insist on the continuing importance of national self-determination. However, they endorse more substantive economic institutions at the EU level to protect existing social democratic welfare state arrangements. In chapter four to seven, I assess the extent to which each of these arguments can support a more egalitarian organisation of basic economic institutions at the EU level. Finally, I offer one practical proposal that would help the EU to realise the social democratic vision I have defended. This is the idea of an EU social minimum. I explain how such a social minimum would be conceived and implemented, and I demonstrate why transnationalists and internationalists should endorse such a policy.

At first glance, the project of moral enhancement (making people more moral) may appear uncontroversial and obviously worth supporting; surely it is a good idea to make people better. However, as the recent literature on moral enhancement demonstrates, the situation is not so simple – there is significant disagreement over the content of moral norms as well as appropriate means by which to manipulate them. This disagreement seriously threatens many proposals to improve society via moral enhancement. In my dissertation, I develop an understanding of how, exactly, disagreement poses problems for moral enhancement. However, I also argue that there is a way forward. It is possible to bring about moral improvement without commitment to particular and controversial moral norms, but instead relying on relatively uncontroversial ideas concerning morally reliable processes. The upshot is that, while attempting to directly manipulate people’s moral ideas is objectionable, it is relatively unproblematic to focus on helping people reason better and avoid akrasia, with the justified expectation that this will generally lead to moral improvement. We should, therefore, focus not on how to bring people in line with what we take to be the right ideas, motives or behaviors. Rather, we should look to helping people determine for themselves what being moral consists in, as well as help ensure that they act on those judgments. Traditional, non-moral education, it turns out, is actually one of the best moral enhancers we have. In fact, the tools of philosophy (which is, in many aspects, concerned with proper reasoning) are central to the project of indirect moral enhancement. Ultimately, one of the best ways to make people morally better may well be to make them better philosophers.

The thesis explores the ethical questions underlying important contemporary debates about how society should respond to autism; whether autism is 'disease', 'disability' or 'difference', and whether it requires 'treatment' or 'acceptance'. Part 1 comprises a historical overview of how knowledge about autism has evolved through the perspective of contrasting stakeholders – clinicians and researchers, parents, professionals, the neuro-diversity movement. It reviews the main areas of academic ethical discussion to date with regard to autism, and proposes a new analytic framework – structured in terms of six 'categories of intervention': from pre-conceptual measures to post-birth interventions targeted towards infants and adults, and from individuals through to wider societal measures. Part 2 then conducts an ethical analysis using this framework. Examples are offered at each stage of intervention, along with a discussion of the ethical questions posed at each one. Part 3 reflects on the questions to which Part 2 has given rise, addressing the way ethical positions on how to respond to autism rely on wider views about quality of life and wellbeing; parental virtues; the impact of local decisions on wider states of affairs (the Big Conundrum); and views on "where autism sits" in comparison with other conditions (the Analogy Challenge). It is argued that to conflate autism and suffering is to fail to do justice to extreme variations among autistic people, and disguises the extent to which external barriers may be the main obstacles to flourishing for autistic people and their families. The real-life conditions in which autistic people and their families struggle for recognition and support are therefore held to be of crucial significance for making both global and localised ethical judgements. It is therefore concluded that cure and/or prevention are not morally defensible as global targets for autism as a whole, but should be clearly distinguished from the ethical importance of supportive and therapeutic interventions to address particular problems that autistic individuals may have. The implications, for research and practice, are spelled out, with particular emphasis on the need for further dialogue among all stakeholders.

This thesis is about justice between people born at different times: the way in which they interact and the extent to which those interactions can be a matter of justice. Its principal aims are: to present certain theories that describe what justice over time might look like; to present certain theoretical problems for this subject; and to understand the impact of these problems upon these theories. The thesis draws mainly upon: the work of David Hume, John Rawls and David Gauthier as sources of certain social contract theories; and the work of Wilfred Beckerman, Gustaf Arrhenius and Derek Parfit for certain problems faced by these theories. The central argument of the thesis is that the theoretical obstacles to the application of justice thrown up by the temporal dimension are not as significant as they might appear. In particular, there are good reasons to believe that social contract theories are more susceptible to intertemporal extension and less encumbered by temporally-related problems than previously thought. The conclusion of the thesis is that, issuing from a clearer view of certain theoretical obstacles to their inclusion, there is significant potential for future people to be considered within the scope of justice over time as described by certain social contract theories and that present people have self-interested reasons to take this project seriously.

This dissertation focuses on the concept of authenticity and its implications for our projects of self-creation, particularly those involving the use of "enhancement technologies" (such as stimulant drugs, "mood brighteners", or brain stimulation). After an introduction to the concept of authenticity and the enhancement debate in the first part of the thesis, part 2 considers the main analyses of authenticity in the contemporary philosophical literature. It begins with those emphasizing self-creation, and shows that, despite their merits, such views cannot adequately deal with certain types of cases, which require a third option, “true self” accounts, emphasizing self-discovery. However, it is argued that in their existing versions, accounts of this third sort are also unsatisfactory. Part 3 of the thesis proposes a new account of the "true self" sort, intended to improve upon existing ones. Common problematic assumptions about the concept of the true self are critiqued, after which a new analysis of that concept is presented, based on seven different conditions. Two specific definitions of authenticity, respectively emphasizing self-expression and the preservation of one's true self, are provided, and its relation to various associated notions, such as integrity or sincerity, are examined. Finally, part 4 looks at the implications of the previous parts for the enhancement debate. In particular, it discusses the prospect of technologically enhancing our personality and mood dispositions. Do such interventions always threaten our authenticity, as some worry? A negative answer is provided to that question. Various potential pitfalls hinted at by the inauthenticity worry are discussed and acknowledged. It is, however, argued that such enhancements could still in principle be used in a fully authentic manner, and that they have the potential to bring about genuine improvements in our mood but also to our moral capacities and our affective rationality more generally.

This dissertation aims to defend an egalitarian conception of global distributive justice. Many hold that the scope of egalitarian justice should be defined by membership of a single political community but my dissertation will challenge this view. I begin by considering three distinctive arguments against the ideal of global equality. They maintain that egalitarian obligations of justice apply only to those people who are subject to the same sovereign authority which coerces them to abide by its rules; or to those who contribute to the preservation of each other’s autonomy through collectively sustaining a state; or to those who belong to the same nation. The first three chapters deal with these arguments respectively. Central to these arguments is the assumption that the domestic and the global contexts are different in some morally relevant way so egalitarian principles of justice apply to the former but not the latter. After rebutting these anti-egalitarian arguments I turn to the more constructive task of developing a form of global egalitarianism that is grounded in the value of equality as a normative ideal of how human relations should be conducted. I argue in Chapter 4 that relational equality—that is, standing in relations of equality to one another (rather than relations characterized by domination or exploitation)—is a demand of justice in the global context. This ideal of relational equality has distributive implications. In Chapter 5 I try to spell out these implications by defending a set of principles of global distributive justice that would follow from our commitment to global relational equality. In the sixth and final chapter, I discuss what responsibilities we have in relation to global injustice, how to distribute the burdens associated with these responsibilities, and whether they are excessively demanding on complying agents.

My DPhil submission consists of a series of papers on related topics on the moral philosophy of scarce benefit distribution. It focuses on two types of scarce benefit distribution case. The first type occurs when which all potential beneficiaries of a good each have an equally strong moral claim on an equal benefit from the resource but scarcity or indivisibility prevents us from benefiting all potential beneficiaries. Call these cases equal conflict cases. In 'Anti-Majoritarianism', I argue against the view defended by both utilitarians and non-utilitarians that in equal conflict cases you always ought to give the benefit to as many people as possible. I argue that doing so is neither morally right nor fair. In 'Weighing Up Weighted Lotteries', I argue that the philosophical debate between unweighted and weighted lottery benefit distribution procedures has been misconceived and that fairness requires us to use a new kind of weighted lottery that I call the exclusive composition-sensitive lottery. In 'Can't Get No Satisfaction', I defend a new view that I call the dual-structure view about how lotteries satisfy potential beneficiaries' claims in equal conflict cases and highlight the implications of that view for the distribution of donor corneas to those who have suffered corneal degeneration. The second type of this distributional problem occurs when we can either benefit a very large number of potential beneficiaries with a very small benefit (call these the many) or a very small number of potential beneficiaries with a very major benefit (call these the few). In "Valuing the Few Over the Many" I argue that there are cases where not only ought we to benefit the few over the many no matter how numerous the many are, but it is also better to do so. However, this conclusion can be shown to conflict with a number of widely held tenets of value theory. I evaluate different ways of accommodating these intuitions and argue that in some contexts, benefits are not of finite value. The view I defend in 'Valuing the Few Over the Many', combined with some intuitively plausible axiological claims, is inconsistent with the transitivity of the 'better than' relation. In 'Making Betterness Behave' I argue that for what I call the conditional non-coextensive thesis: if 'better than' is not transitive, one ought to take the position that 'more reason to bring about rather than' is transitive. I argue that one can generate a transitive 'more reason to bring about rather than' deontic ordering from a non-transitive axiological ordering in a principled way. This deontic ordering avoids the major practical objections (money pumps, moral dilemmas and threats to practical reasoning) to non-transitivity of the 'better than' relation.

This thesis presents a comprehensive theory of evildoing as an attack on morality, grounded in objective morality. It introduces evildoing as a distinct category of immorality, arguing that it is the relationship of evil acts to the core of morality that distinguishes them from ordinary wrongdoing. Two projects are undertaken: to provide an account of morality that can ground a theory of evildoing that is both objective and capable of systematically accommodating the diverse phenomena and definitions of evil acts, and to articulate and defend the attack on morality theory of evildoing. The challenge of the first project is met by a minimalist account of morality, structured by what I call the fundamentals of morality. The thesis defends a particular substantive account of these fundamentals, underpinned by the idea of conatus as the end of morality. Ultimately, it is conatus as the striving to persist in existence and prosper inherent in human beings that justifies the objectivity of the fundamentals of morality and with it the objectivity of the theory of evildoing, for it is these fundamentals that are attacked when we speak of an ‘attack on morality.’ Specifying and defending the conditions necessary for such an attack is the task of the second part of the thesis. An act constitutes evildoing, or an attack on morality, when it is wrong, results in serious harm to others, originates in an intention based on the correct belief that the act will cause or risk such harm, and where the perpetrator’s mental states and/or the act’s consequences are antagonistic to the realization of morality via one or more of its fundamentals.

Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary bioethics. In this thesis, I aim to provide a rationalist account of personal autonomy that avoids the philosophical flaws present in theories of autonomy that are often invoked in bioethics, and that can be usefully applied to contemporary bioethical issues. I claim that we can understand the concept of autonomy to incorporate two dimensions, which I term the 'reflective' and 'practical' dimensions of autonomy. I suggest that the reflective dimension pertains to the critical reflection that agents must carry out on their motivating desires, in order to be autonomous with respect to them. I begin by rejecting prominent desire-based and historical accounts of this dimension of autonomy, before going on to defend an account based upon a Parfitian analysis of rational desires. Following this analysis of the reflective dimension of autonomy, I argue that autonomy can also be understood to incorporate a practical dimension, pertaining to the agent's ability to act effectively in pursuit of their ends. I claim that recognising this dimension of autonomy more comprehensively reflects the way in which we use the concept of autonomy in bioethics, and makes salient the fact that agents carry out their rational deliberations in the light of their beliefs about what they are able to do. I go on to argue that this latter point means that my account of autonomy can offer a deeper explanation of why coercion undermines autonomy than other prominent accounts. Having considered the prudential value of autonomy in the light of this theoretical analysis, in the latter half of the thesis I apply my rationalist account of autonomy to a number of contemporary bioethical issues, including the use of human enhancement technologies, the nature of informed consent, and the doctor-patient relationship.

This thesis looks at the failure of individual people living in affluent societies to do more to help those living in conditions of extreme poverty at the present moment. Affluent people have the capacity to assist, by contributing additional funds to aid and humanitarian organisations. Given an understanding of what is at stake, the fact that they fail to do so is both morally problematic and difficult to explain. Yet, without an understanding of the causes of inaction, it is difficult to know what measures may be taken to alleviate extreme suffering in the world today. The thesis draws upon different philosophical accounts of practical reason to argue that the conduct of the affluent can only be understood in one of three ways: these people may lack decisive reason to assist, they may be misinformed, or they may be rationally deficient in some regard. Considering each possibility in turn, it advances two central arguments. Firstly, the normative reasons claim is sound: affluent people, who do not incur minor costs by assisting, ought to do more. Secondly, these people tend to have false beliefs about the nature of poverty, to make substantive errors of judgement, and to follow flawed patterns of reasoning when they deliberate about what to do. Taken together, these factors explain their failure to act. Building upon this diagnosis, the thesis then considers how to respond to the problem of inaction, advancing a solution that is institutional in character. It argues for the construction of a division of labour between state and citizen, at the national level, which would see political institutions take on responsibility for poverty eradication, thereby leaving individuals freer to pursue their own personal goals and objectives. In order to perform this function effectively, wealthy nations would have to improve the quantity and quality of assistance that they provide to low-income countries. They would also have to cease partaking in practices that harm the global poor. This approach has a number of advantages over reliance on private philanthropy alone: it forms part of a fair and effective solution to the problem of motivating assistance, the arrangement it proposes is both stable and legitimate, and it is also something that could be achieved in practice. Therefore, it represents part of the best possible way in which to proceed.