Utilitarianism makes the sum-total of happiness or average happiness the final end of human activity, what we should maximize. Nearby competitors may disagree about the aggregation part, holding, for example, that we should maximize not the average happiness but rather the lowest level of happiness, or that we should equalize happiness. Or they may disagree with the happiness part (may hold, for instance, that love or knowledge have an importance that is not reducible to their contribution to happiness). All such "consequentialist" views can be applied to human agents (to the question of how they ought to conduct themselves) and also to human societies (to the question of how these should be structured and governed). So utilitarianism is one of many consequentialist views. There are also non-consequentialist views. In regard to human agents, there are views that guide them not toward making the world better but rather toward making oneself the best one can be (virtue ethics) or toward doing...

The three reasons I gave were meant to establish the intermediate conclusion that the criminal law cannot perfectly anticipate all realistically possible cases, cannot be designed so that it always yields the correct result by declaring guilty all and only those who really are guilty. As my third reason for this I adduced the example of rare but morally valid excuses that should nonetheless not be recognized in law. Here is a concrete case. I was caught by a speed camera going 47 mph in a residential area with a 30 mph speed limit. I was going so fast because I was trying to get back home quickly because I had this sudden fear that, lost in thought, I had somehow turned on the gas dial of my kitchen stove without igniting the gas. I feared that gas was filling my apartment, posing a substantial risk to people living above and below. So I drove faster than legal in the reasonable belief that the risk posed by my speeding was very much smaller than the risk posed by my possibly gas-releasing stove....

The legal question varies from country to country, and with regard to the US there is a case to be made that the kinds of instructions you have in mind are speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Morally speaking, the case for considering it permissible to prohibit the publication of such instructions seems overwhelmingly strong. There is no legitimate public interest in having such information widely available, and there is a considerable danger to the public from such wide availability. So the public is better served if such publications are prohibited. Here it is important to formulate the prohibition narrowly and with some precision because a broad or vaguely worded statute can easily be used to criminalize or intimidate legitimate political opposition.

One straightforward way to see that this is not so starts from the realization that the criminal law cannot perfectly anticipate all realistically possible cases. This is so for at least three reasons. First, human powers of anticipation are limited. Second, a criminal law doing justice to all realistically possible cases would be too complex for citizens and officials to comprehend. Third, such a criminal law would also be impossible to administer fairly because it would give criminals too many opportunities to escape punishment. Example: recognizing a rare, morally valid excuse in the law might be a bad idea if the absence of this excuse is very difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We can expect, then, that in some cases punishments warranted under even the best-designed and -administered criminal law are excessive. In those cases, at least, mercy would not be unjust. For example, we may pardon an offender because we are convinced that he has a morally valid excuse that the law, for good...

I don't know what it means for an economic system to benefit. But it seems plausible that some people benefit at the expense of those who are most exploited. I don't see how this benefit is supposed to defeat the proposition that the human race has a responsibility to eradicate poverty -- typically the cost of the exploitation to the exploited is much greater than the benefit of the exploitation to the exploiters and typically, moreover, the assignment of roles is deeply unfair (e.g., tarnished by historical wrongs that led to some being born privileged and others disadvantaged). Currently, the poorest quarter of humanity has about 0.78 percent of global household income. This means that these 1.8 billion people, on average, have about 1/32 of the global average income. More than half of them are chronically undernourished, and most suffer one or another severe deprivation. Had the poorest quarter maintained its 1988 share of global household income, its share would now be greater by about half --...

It would be nice if democracy delivered this outcome. But in some cases the thirty percent may not have enough bargaining power to achieve it. In this case, Spanish-language classes may not actually happen. If so, I would think, the minority's group right would be violated by the majority. Like in many other cases, the right outcome here is not whatever results from a democratic process. Rather, the right outcome is the one that accommodates any large minority's expressed desire in the preservation of their language; and that's what members of the majority ought to support and vote for, even if there's nothing valuable they can extract from the minority in exchange. This is not meant to reject democracy -- which may well be the best feasible procedure for reaching the right outcome. It's meant to reject a certain conception of democracy according to which any decision is right merely because it has resulted from a certain democratic process. What has been successfully negotiated in a democratic...

I would consider Norway and the UK to be examples of this. Here the fundamental equality of citizens is not seriously undermined because the role of the state religion is largely ceremonial. In other countries, of course, citizens who do not share the state religion suffer severe discrimination which can be grave enough to defeat, by itself, the claim that the state in question is democratic. It makes sense here to think of "being a democracy" as a matter of degree. Most of the states we call democracies fail fully to live up to democratic principles in one way or another. Having a state religion is a shortfall, but can be a relatively minor one if any resulting discrimination is not too severe.

Both extreme views seem patently implausible: we should not be indifferent either to the procedure of political decision-making (e.g., to the disenfranchisement of women and African-Americans) nor to the outcome (e.g., collective suffering via environmental decay, financial crisis, war and poverty). So in specifying, institutionally embodying and adjusting democratic procedures we should be guided by both: the concern to enable citizens fully to participate in political deliberation and decision-making and the concern to achieve just and otherwise morally good outcomes. This requires some balancing, a willingness to compromise one or both of these concerns for the sake of better realizing the other. Different political philosophies will differ in how they formulate and balance these two concerns. But I don't think any democratic theorists are dismissing one of these concerns entirely.

Moral judgments are often distorted by self-interest. A morally serious person must try to combat this danger by thinking beyond the particular case. A very simple way of doing this is to contemplate analogous situations in which roles are reversed (the Golden Rule). By extending one's judgments to a larger set of cases and then aiming for a coherent way of judging these cases, one is beginning to do what I was asking. Philosophers may take this sort of exercise quite far and, as you surmise, I don't think that every morally serious person needs to do this. But a morally serious person will question her or his moral judgments in the ways I sketched, especially when they are "convenient", that is, in accordance with her/his own self-interest.

Some rights are granted to us by our government, such as the right to drive a car for example. But there are others which governments themselves agree are not granted by them but exist independently. Various governmental documents (such as the Declaration of Independence) speak of "unalienable" or “inalienable” rights, for example. An inalienable right is a right that its holders cannot lose, not through anything they do themselves (waiver or forfeiture), nor through anything others do, for instance through an alteration of the law. In a similar way, the human rights that have emerged in the last 65 years are conceived as not merely part of the law but also a moral standard that all law ought to meet and a standard that is not yet met by much existing law in many countries. Law has incorporated human rights in a way that points beyond itself: to a normativity that does not depend on the law for its existence and cannot be revised or repealed by legislative or judicial fiat or by other law-making...