This first part of this issue consists of a special issue containing four commissioned articles, the second part contains submitted articles. The theme of the special issue is ‘Frontiers of Dignity.’ Its guest-editor is Corrado Del Bò of the University of Milan.

The concept of dignity has been employed in ethics, political theory, bioethics, and law. Despite its being frequently appealed to both in the practice and theory of human rights, and in bioethical debates about embryos and genetic engineering, there is a deep controversy over the nature of dignity, its normative function, and the scope of its application. The controversy concerns both foundational issues (On what grounds can we attribute dignity to what kind of beings? Does dignity ground all rights or only a subset of them?), and more specific issues regarding dignity as a social status or as a special property deserved by individuals in virtue of their meritorious behavior. The contributions to the special issue discuss foundational as well as more specific issues. Suzy Killmister discusses the puzzle that dignity appears to enter human rights theory in two distinct roles: On the one hand, dignity is commonly pointed to as the foundation of human rights while on the other hand, dignity is also commonly pointed to as that which is at risk in a subset of human rights. But how can dignity underpin all human rights, and yet only be at stake in very specific human rights violations? Killmister offers a solution to these puzzles, in the form of a new theory of dignity. Jonathan Seglow discusses in what sense, if any, hate speech constitutes a harm to people’s dignity, as is said by Jeremy Waldron. He argues that hate speech is better understood as harming people’s self-respect. Federico Zuolo examines whether attempts in animal ethics to apply the idea of dignity to animals are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, Zuolo puts forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet: non-redundancy and normative determinacy. Somogy Varga analyses a particular strand of ‘expressive’ meritocratic dignity that is not connected to holding a special office or rank, but that is ascribed to individuals who are able to engage in autonomous self-expression.

The second part of the issue opens with two papers on the non-identity problem. Elizabeth Finneron-Burns contends that T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism cannot provide a solution to the non-identity problem. She first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. She then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people could not justify creating people with barely worth living lives on the grounds that it caused those people to exist. Duncan Purves & Benjamin Hale introduce a non-human version of the non-identity problem and suggest that such a variation exposes weaknesses in several proposed person-focused solutions to the classic version of the problem: first that person-affecting solutions fail when applied to non-human animals and, second, that many common moral arguments against climate change should be called into question. Purves & Hale argue that the failure of person-affecting solutions to solve non-human versions of the problem lends support to impersonal solutions to the problem which avoid issues of personhood or species identity.

The next two articles deal with justice. Justice is, according to Klara Stumpf, Christian U. Becker & Stefan Baumgärtner, a contested concept. There are many different and competing conceptions of justice. Different domains of justice deal with different fields of application of justice claims, such as structural justice, distributive justice, participatory justice or recognition. Stumpf et al. show that conceptions of justice can be described, analysed and compared by specifying the following conceptual elements: the judicandum, the community of justice including claim holders and claim addressees, their claims (and obligations), the informational base for the assessment, the principles of justice, and on a more practical level, the instruments of justice. Sufficiency principles of justice are principles that generally state that it is especially important for justice that people have enough of certain goods. In her article, Zi Li examines a recent sufficiency view by George Sher, who argues that the threshold level of resources and opportunities that the state should provide for each citizen is whatever level gives one enough leverage to obtain further resources and opportunities without inordinate difficulty or sacrifice. While Sher’s general account regarding ‘what counts as enough?’ is promising in countering certain challenges typically raised against sufficiency principles, the approach to determine the threshold of resources and opportunities in terms of leverage is, according to Li, problematic.

According to Bernard Williams, if it is true that A has a normative reason to Φ then it must be possible that A should Φ for that reason. This claim is important both because it restricts the range of reasons which agents can have and because it has been used as a premise in an argument for so-called ‘internalist’ theories of reasons. In his article, Neil Sinclair rebuts an apparent counterexample to Williams’ claim: Mark Schroeder’s example of Nate. He argues that this counterexample fails since it underestimates the range of cases where agents can act for their normative reasons. The issue that Sofia Jeppsson takes up in her contribution is whether reasons and obligations are compatible with determinism. She discusses different interpretations of the claim that reasons are action-guiding, and shows that according to one interpretation it is sufficient that the agent believes that she has several alternative options. According to other interpretations, the agent must really have alternative options, but only in a compatibilist sense. She suggests that an interpretation of action-guidance according to which reasons can only guide actions when we have several options open to us in an incompatibilist sense cannot be found. We should therefore assume that reasons and obligations are compatible with determinism.

According to Simon Coghlan, morally unequal treatment of different nonhuman species, like pigs and dogs, can seem troublingly inconsistent. Coghlan develops a narrative-style philosophical critique of Todd May’s moral individualism and relationalism that appears to justify the moral discomfit attending such species-differentiated treatment, especially of its reductionist understanding of moral reasons, consistency, and relevance. Such criticism opens up the possibility that the unequal treatment of nonhuman species like pigs and dogs is perfectly consistent and even justified. However, the paper then presents a narrative-style argument that such species-differentiated treatment may be morally inconsistent and unjustified after all.

Can disabled people be healthy, asks Sean Aas. His answer is affirmative. Aas argues, first, following the well-known ‘social model of disability’, that we should prefer a usage of ‘disabled’ which does not imply any kind of impairment that is essentially inconsistent with health. Second, he argues that it is often wrong to use the term ‘healthy’ in a way that makes health inconsistent with any degree whatsoever of health-relevant bodily dysfunction. Whether someone is ‘healthy’ properly-so-called depends on standards of health presupposed in conversational context. Sometimes, Aas states, these standards are or ought to be lax enough to allow some people with some health deficits still to count as ‘healthy’ per se.

Self-driving cars need to be programmed for how they should respond to scenarios where collisions are highly likely or unavoidable. The accident-scenarios self-driving cars might face have recently been likened to the key examples and dilemmas associated with the trolley problem. In their article, Sven Nyholm & Jillis Smids critically examine this tempting analogy. They identify important ways in which the ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars and the philosophy of the trolley problem differ from each other.

Two articles on the role of reactive attitudes close this issue. Neil Campbell & Jeremy Scharoun defend Derk Pereboom’s ‘containment policy.’ Pereboom disagrees with P.F. Strawson that abandoning the reactive attitudes associated with praise and blame would come at the price of exiting our personal relationships. According to Pereboom, we can contain or modify our attitudes in ways that preserve, and perhaps even enrich interpersonal relationships. In a recent article, Seth Shabo defends ‘the inseparability thesis’ in order to undermine Pereboom’s containment policy. Drawing on David Goldman’s work on non-antagonistic responses to wrongdoing, Campbell and Scharoun defend Pereboom from Shabo’s criticism. Alexandra Couto goes into the relation between reactive attitudes and forgiveness. Couto argues that Stephen Darwall’s second-personal account of morality offers significant theoretical support for the view that for forgiveness to be virtuous, certain pre-conditions must be satisfied. She argues that if, as Darwall claims, reactive attitudes issue a demand, this demand needs to be adequately answered for forgiveness to be warranted. It follows that we should reject the thesis that unconditional forgiveness is appropriate in the absence of repentance.