Knowledge is a significant good. With time, human beings broadly acquire more and better knowledge. Hence, it seems, it is prima facie better to be born later. We conduct a thought experiment as to when one should wish oneself born. This yields a paradox, and some other interesting results about our feelings towards people who lived in the past, about our own lives, and about the value of knowledge.

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The serious moral condemnation and legal penalization of blackmail has often been considered paradoxical. This practice, after all, often simply combines two fairly innocuous elements; asking for money or other favors, and threatening to do something which one is "allowed" to do. Michael Clark has recently argued that previous discussions of this issue were fundamentally mistaken, and that there is no paradox about blackmail. The relation between the two elements, Clark argues, brings forth something new, and thus there is nothing paradoxical about the fact that "in themselves" the elements which make up the practice of blackmail are permissible. I argue for the paradoxality of blackmail in a different way, which considers the practice as a whole, and is not based only on the permissibility of the elements of ordinary blackmail when taken separately.

I point out an odd consequence of the role that broadly pragmatic considerations regularly (and reasonably) play in determining moral demands. As a result of the way in which moral demands are formed, it turns out that people will frequently become morally good in a strange and rather dubious way. Because human beings are not very good, we will lower our moral demands and, as a result, most people will turn out, in an important sense, to be morally good. Our relative badness, by giving us good reasons to limit moral demands, makes us morally good.

We can morally compare possible alternative states of affairs, judging that various actual historical occurrences were bad, overall -- the Holocaust, World War I, and slavery, for example. We should prefer that such events had not occurred, and regret that they had occurred. But the vast majority of people who now exist would not have existed had it not been for those historical events. A 'package deal' is involved here: those events, together with oneself; or, the absence of the historical calamity, and the absence of oneself. So, all considered, ought one to prefer never to have existed, and to regret that one exists? Not in itself, of course, but as part of the conjunction? There seems to be a strong case for saying that morally one must wish and prefer that certain historical events had not occurred, even if that would have meant that one would never have existed. One ought to regret, all considered, that the aggregate state of affairs that includes one's existence is the one that materialized. After setting out this idea, I explore arguments against it, and attempt to reach a conclusion.

I have argued that compatibilism has difficulties resisting prepunishment, and that it is thus a much more radical view than is typically presented and perceived. Helen Beebee presented two counterarguments, which I examine.

Bad things often happen, and morally good people ought to be sorry that they happen. People are sometimes morally permitted not to do anything about such bad things, not to have to struggle to prevent them from occurring. But what could be more obvious to a good person than that one ought to be sorry about the occurrence of bad things? Even more so, it would seem, if the bad things occur in one?s vicinity, or one is involved with them. I shall argue that sometimes it is morally permissible not to be sorry when bad things happen. Perhaps it is even permissible to be happy about it

In some ways, virtually every individual can make a difference because even the ?small' differences that we can undoubtedly make do often matter, and sometimes our actions can have wider effects. In the larger scheme of things, however, most individuals will not matter much, if at all. I have sought to offer a broad outline of ways whereby the fact (when it is a fact) that one single person cannot make much difference in this world is significant and, surprisingly, in many ways positive. The illusion that it is otherwise can be conducive to our happiness but here the truth also has its benefits. Frequently, our impotence is a piece of good fortune.

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I have argued that compatibilism cannot resist in a principled way the temptation to prepunish people, and that it thus emerges as a much more radical view than is typically presented and perceived; and is at odds with fundamental moral intuitions. Stephen Kearns has replied, and in the present paper I examine his arguments.

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I consider two difficulties which have been presented to egalitarianism: Parfit?s ?Levelling Down Objection? and my ?Paradox of the Baseline?. I show that making things worse for some people even with no gain to anyone is actually an ordinary and indeed necessary feature of our moral practice, yet nevertheless the LDO maintains its power in the egalitarian context. I claim that what makes the LDO particularly forceful in the case against egalitarianism is not the very idea of making some people worse off with no gain to others, but the disrespect for value inherent in egalitarianism; and similarly that the POB is a reductio of choice -egalitarianism because of its inversion of the intuitively correct attitude to the generation of value. I conclude that in the light of the absurdity and paradox so frequently lurking in moral and social life, and particularly with the complexity of modern life and obliquity of change, we need to be much more modest than egalitarians have been in putting forth ambitious moral and social models.