Members of ethics committees are assumed to have a specific expertise, but what is the expertise of the ethicist among them? Does moral expertise, do moral experts exist? Traditional accounts, says Michael Cholbi in the first article of this issue, require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification. Cholbi finds this account too lean in allowing the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to his own judgements and advice. Even if this criterion is incorporated into the definition of moral expertise, the credentials problem remains. That is, moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice produced by a putative expert is correct and whether an individual is a bona fide expert.

Even if all rich people together could solve global poverty, not all of them would do their part. Reto Givel present a device that makes it more likely for everybody to do his part: the super-button. The idea behind it is very simple. Pressing that button is not a commitment to donate a definite amount of money, but a commitment to donate certain amounts of money depending on similar commitments of other people. If someone presses his super-button, and N others also press their super-buttons, his bank account will transfer N times a certain amount of money, say € 100.

Is genuine satisficing rational, that is, is it rational to choose an option one judges good enough even a better option is known to be available? The answer, says Edmund Henden, depends on how genuine satisficing is understood. One interpretation is: ‘It can be rational to choose a satisfactory, suboptimal option even when one knows of another option included in one’s set of options that it is better’. Another interpretation is: ‘It can be rational to choose a satisfactory, suboptimal option even when one knows that a better option is included in one’s set of options but does not know which of these options is better’. Henden argues that while genuine satisficing in the first interpretation is always irrational, in the second interpretation it can be rationally permissible.

Is it the fact that terrorism tends to be directed toward innocent victims that makes it so abhorrent? In his contribution, Troy Tollimore attacks ‘revisionist’ contemporary philosophers who deny that the innocent/non-innocent distinction corresponds to the noncombatant/combatant distinction. In their view, prohibitions against targeting noncombatants cannot be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. Trollimore argues that the arguments supporting the revisionist account are ultimately unsuccessful. Even if one admits that not all noncombatants are innocent, they are less responsible and less directly involved than those who give the orders to kill, and those who carry out the killing.

Fabienne Peter draws our attention to the political egalitarians’ dilemma. This dilemma reveals a clash between the requirement of ensuring equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation. As such, the dilemma is a variant of the procedure vs. substance dilemma that is well-known in democratic theory. While it has sometimes been argued that deliberative democracy solves the tension between procedure and substance, the political egalitarian’s dilemma shows, according to Peter, that this tension continues within deliberative democracy.

The next contribution deals with another version of egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism. According to luck egalitarianism, inequalities are justified if and only if they arise from choices for which it is reasonable to hold agents responsible. The objection frequently raised against luck egalitarianism is its response to cases where individuals through risks they voluntarily accepted, end in desolate circumstances. Kristin Voigt argues that this Harshness Objection is less of a challenge for luck egalitarians than its advocates claim. The luck egalitarian will evaluate carefully how unequal brute luck may have affected the decision in question and provide compensation accordingly. However, these considerations do not amount to a full rebuttal of the Harshness Objection, and important problems remain. Voigt considers three strategies in her paper as possible responses to these problems and finds them problematic in that they either required a violation of luck egalitarian principles or a limitation of people’s freedom to take risks.

The last contribution is a review article by Stephen Wilkinson of Ann Kerr and Tom Shakespeare’s Genetic Politics: from eugenics to genome, who in their book criticise dominant bioethics. Wilkinson says that several of their criticisms are well-founded and serve as valuable reminders to the bioethics community. These include the claims: that bioethics ought not to consist entirely of applying moral theory to cases; that bioethicists must take account of relevant empirical evidence; and that bioethicists should be on the look out for those subtle social forces which can undermine the voluntariness of people’s choices and consents. Against Kerr and Shakespeare’s other criticisms Wilkinson argues that bioethics should not be wholly (or even predominantly) descriptive and that even ‘mainstream’ bioethics is better able to deal with difficult issues like eugenics than they suggest in their book.