According to Wollstonecraft ‘every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason’. This suggests that for her ethical judgement is based on reason, and so she is an ethical cognitivist. This impression is upheld by the fact that she clearly believes in the existence of ethical truth and has little sympathy with subjectivism. At the same time, she places a great deal of importance on the role of the emotions in ethical judgement. This raises the question how the emotions can be relevant if ethics consists in a realm of truths, discoverable by reason. The paper answers this question and clarifies Wollstonecraft's model of the interaction of emotion and reason by comparing it with those of Rousseau, Godwin, Price and Adam Smith. It argues that the originality of Wollstonecraft's position resides in the way she understands the role of the imagination in ethical reasoning.

A common objection to consequentialism is that it makes unreasonable demands upon moral agents, by failing to allow agents to give special weight to their own personal projects and interests. A prominent recent response to this objection is that of Samuel Scheffler, who seeks to make room for moral agents by building agent-centred prerogatives into a consequentialist moral theory. In this paper, I present a new objection to Scheffler's account. I then sketch an improved prerogative, which avoids this objection by incorporating a non-proportional account of the relationship between values, costs and reasons.

This paper criticizes the ‘justice-adjusted’ consequentialist theory recently put forward by Fred Feldman. I argue that this theory violates two crucial requirements. Another theory, proposed by Peter Vallentyne, is similarly flawed. Feldman's basic ideas could, however, be developed into a more plausible theory. I suggest one possible way of doing this.

Fred Feldman has argued that consequentialists can answer the well-known ‘objection from justice’ by replacing the utilitarian axiology with one that makes the value of receiving pleasures and pains depend on how deserved it is. It is shown that this proposal is open to three interpretations: (1) the Fit-idea, which operates with the degree of fit between what recipients get and what they deserve; (2) the Merit-idea, which operates with the magnitude of the recipients' desert or merit; and (3) the Fit-Merit idea which is a combination of (1) and (2). It is argued that none of these ideas will do, among other things because they fail to take into account the fact that justice involves inter-personal comparisons.

Moral theorists and game theorists are both interested in situations where rational agents are ‘called upon’ to constrain their future actions and co-operate with others instead of being free riders. These theorists have constructed a variety of hypothetical games which illuminate this problem of constraint. In this paper, I draw a distinction between ‘behaviour games’ like the Newcomb paradox and ‘disposition games’ like Kavka's toxin puzzle, a prisoner's dilemma and Parfit's hitchhiker example. I then employ this distinction to argue that agents who subscribe to the orthodox theory of rationality do significantly better in disposition games than those who subscribe to revisionist theories like David Gauthier's, while revisionist agents do marginally better in behaviour games. I argue that because of agents' ability to manipulate their own weakness of will, orthodox agents do better at all of these games than has previously been thought. And, by elucidating the distinction between behaviour games and disposition games, I uncover the virtues that underlie the success of each theory of rationality.