In the first article of this issue, Yujia Song discusses the role of empathy in morality. Song argues that empathy plays two important roles in morality, one epistemic and the other relational. However, one must be careful not to exaggerate the contribution that empathy can make to our moral life. In their article, Hallvard Lillehammer & Niklas Möller respond to Bart Streumer (JofPhil 2013) who argues that it is not possible for us to believe the error theory. They argue that it is indeed possible to believe the error theory. First, they suggest a critical improvement to Streumer’s argument. As it stands, one crucial premise of that argument—that we cannot have a belief while believing that there is no reason to have it—is implausibly strong. They argue that Streumer’s argument is either invalid or the crucial premise should be rejected. Karin Edvardsson Björnberg examines in her article the common view that cultural objects ought to be returned to their place of origin in order to remedy injustices committed in the past. She states that it is not clear that historic injustices can meaningfully be corrected, or compensated for. In order to bring analytical clarity to the issue, Edvardsson Björnberg discusses the various steps of the argument that must be addressed in order to ground a valid repatriation claim based on historic injustices.

Henrik Andersson’s subject is incomparability of values. According to a standard account of incomparability, two value bearers are incomparable if it is false that there holds a positive value relation between them. John Broome has argued that indeterminacy cannot coexist with incomparability, and since there seems to exist indeterminacy there cannot exist incomparability. At the core of his argument lies the so-called “collapsing principle”. After reviewing several objections to the principle, Andersson concludes that without a better argument in favour of the principle the debate seems to run into a stalemate. Tom Roberts discusses one’s responsibility for one’s emotions. He argues that this responsibility has a two-fold structure: one bears direct responsibility for emotions insofar as they are the upshot of first-order evaluative judgements concerning reasons of fit; and one bears derivative responsibility for them insofar as they are consequences of activities of emotional self-regulation, which can reflect one’s take on second-order reasons concerning the strategic, prudential, or moral desirability of undergoing a particular emotion in a particular context.

In his article Gideon Elford argues, against David Estlund, that principles of justice are sensitive to facts about individuals’ motivational deficiencies. This argument is made with reference to so-called Agent-Centred Prerogatives: If Agent-Centred Prerogatives to depart from a putative normative principle depend on the burdensomeness of complying with that requirement, human motivational capacities can affect which normative principles apply. According to Megs S. Gendreau it is the fact that athletes who use dope have lied about who they are that explains the strong negative moral response to their behaviour. In violating the constraints of their own public narratives, they make both themselves and their choices unintelligible. She develops this view through an examination of narrative identity, primarily focusing on J. David Velleman’s work on agency and self-constitution.

Drawing on Thomas Hurka’s work on proportionality in war, Kevin Macnish examines what it means that surveillance should be proportionate. Macnish argues that only certain benefits and harms should be counted in any determination of proportionality. His conclusion is that proportionality is not only a morally relevant criterion by which to assess surveillance, but that it is a necessary criterion. George Crowder’s subject is the link between value pluralism and liberalism. In contradistinction to Isaiah Berlin, value pluralists such as John Gray and John Kekes have tried to sever pluralism from liberalism, instead proposing connections between pluralism and forms of conservatism or modus vivendi. Liberal pluralists have proposed various ways of re-establishing the link between pluralism and liberalism. In his article, Crowder focuses on what he calls ‘the diversity argument’, the claim that value pluralism implies a commitment to a diversity of values that is best made possible, within a given society, by liberalism. He defends the diversity argument against leading objections that have emerged in the literature.

Stephen M. Campbell opens his article with the observation that it seems better to have a life that begins poorly and ends well than a life that begins well and ends poorly. One possible explanation, he says, is that the very shape of a life can be good or bad for us. If so, this raises a tough question: when can the shape of our lives be good or bad for us? Campbell presents and criticises an argument that the shape of a life is a nonsynchronic prudential value—that is, something that can be good or bad for us in a way that is not good or bad for us at any particular time. In his contribution, Michael Moehler criticises Edward McClennen’s recent alternative to the standard Nash bargaining theory of distributive: a full cooperation bargaining theory that demands that agents select the most egalitarian strictly Pareto-optimal distributional outcome that is strictly Pareto-superior to the state of nature. In Möller’s view, McClennen’s bargaining theory is moralized. He argues that what he calls the stabilized Nash bargaining solution can accommodate McClennen’s criticisms of the standard Nash bargaining solution. Contrary to Kant, Michael Yudanin argues that positive duties commanding action cannor be derived from the Categorical Imperative and thus from reason. After answering a number of attempts to derive positive duties from the Categorical Imperative, most notably those of Barbara Herman, Yudanin sketches an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the universal moral law and specific moral contents.

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on charges of sexual assault, a sizeable portion of French public opinion was furious about the way in which he had been treated by the American authorities. Bill Wringe argues in his contribution that, from the point of view of an expressive theory of punishment, the parading of Strauss-Kahn before the press, in handcuffs—the so-called perp walk—constituted a form of punishment; and thus that it contravened the principle that criminal punishments should only be administered after a fair trial. Anthony Wrigley discusses the moral authority of proxy decision-making which is now widely seen as a useful means through which people can exercise control over decisions when they have lost capacity to make these decisions for themselves. According to Wrigley, there is little theoretical work that has tried to explain why we should respect the decisions made by a proxy and that would also serve to underpin the legal or pragmatic institutions of proxy decision-making. The last contribution, by Andrew James McAninch, goes into an influential view of practical reason and rational agency that says that a person acts for a reason only if he recognizes some consideration to be a reason, where this recognition motivates her to act. McAninch argues that, despite its intuitive appeal, this “guidance condition” appears to generate a vicious regress. Christine M. Korsgaard appeals in recent work to the constitutive principles of action can be seen, in part, as a response to the regress worry. McAninch argues that, if we are to appeal to the constitutive principles of action to resolve the regress, then we must determine whether acting on such principles is also subject to the guidance condition. This raises a dilemma. If following these principles is subject to the guidance condition, then the regress remains unresolved. But if not, then the rationale for applying it to acting for a reason vanishes as well. McAninch concludes that we should embrace an account of acting for a reason that rejects the guidance condition.