Robert Gruber

The mismatch problem for consequentialism arises whenever the theory delivers mismatched verdicts between a group act and the individual acts that compose it. A natural thought is that moving to expected utility versions of consequentialism will solve this problem. I explain why the move to expected utility is not successful.

There’s a familiar problem for consequentialism that arises in connection with anthropogenic climate change: it seems as though someone has misbehaved, but if no individual makes a difference, then it’s not clear how to assign wrongdoing. Several philosophers have suggested an intuitive solution. The idea is to assign disutility to a group act and then distribute a share of this disutility to each of the participants. Unfortunately, the idea hasn’t been developed in a satisfactory way. I identify several difficulties for the approach, and I explain why I don’t think the approach can be made to work.

The mismatch problem for consequentialism arises whenever the theory delivers mismatched verdicts between a group act and the individual acts that compose it. Several philosophers have suggested that the problem can be resolved by modifying consequentialism in order to condemn uncooperativeness. As I explain in this paper, this strategy does not succeed as a general solution to the problem. There are versions of the problem case that do not involve uncooperative individuals.

There is great injustice in the distribution of wellbeing among humans. But the situation may appear even worse once we expand our outlook to include other animals. Even a human who has a decent but not very good life plausibly has a much better life than the life of a mouse or an ant. And yet, if nonhuman animals are typically worse off than humans, does that mean that we should favor distributions that prioritize their wellbeing over the wellbeing of humans? Many of the popular principles of distributive justice imply that we should, and some philosophers view this as a problem. I carefully specify this alleged problem, reject two popular approaches that have been taken to resolve it, and I then explore how a desertist approach to distributive justice handles the problem. I suggest that desertism about distributive justice sometimes favors human over nonhuman wellbeing in distributions. However, I then show that the desertist principle that I advance offers only a very limited justification for favoring human wellbeing over the wellbeing of other animals.