Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds

A powerful and probing critique of the ethical permissibility of serious harms

In Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds, eminent philosopher John Hawthorne rigorously probes the commonsense morality of killing and other serious harms, exposing troubling issues at the foundations of ethical thought.

The book addresses the ethical significance of causatives, focusing on the contrast between actions that are killings and those that aren't killings, but which hasten death. It offers an extensive critique of popular contractualist treatments of the wrongness of harming people. It also investigates the popular absolutist idea that one should never perform an action that will with certainty kill someone when the only upside is an array of trifling goods. Along the way, readers learn just how difficult it is to embed various standard ethical ideas into a sensible normative theory of decision making.

Drawing many connections with areas of philosophy beyond ethics, and making important contributions at the intersection of ethics and decision theory, Killing and Other Dastardly Deeds is an insightful critique of absolutist prohibitions on killing.