Vegans face a problem, at least if they base their arguments upon principles against causing harm. As Donald Bruckner (2020) has pointed out, these same principles risk ruling out a great many other practices – even eating dessert. Eating dessert risks being impermissible because of the crop deaths associated with agricultural practices, especially the use of insecticides and rodenticides. I suggest that the extent to which this problem emerges depends on the exact principle vegans appeal to. Under some principles against causing harm, the problem indeed stands. I suggest that the vegan has a couple of options for escaping this problem. She might appeal to a principle that doesn’t have such implications. Alternatively, she might simply bite the bullet and accept that morality really is much more demanding here than we might have thought. I’ll give some reasons why biting this bullet isn’t as bad an option as one might suppose.

On the Dual View, absolute and comparative welfare provide moral reasons to make individuals well off and better off. Given that dual reason-giving force, what reason does welfare provide overall? I explore two approaches. The Collective Approach first aggregates the absolute and comparative reasons separately before combining them at the collective level. However, it implies that, if an individual gains or loses enough welfare, we have reasons to create an unhappy rather than another happy individual. The Individual Approach combines the absolute and comparative reasons for each individual before aggregating across all individuals. It avoids the objection if comparative reasons mitigate but don’t outweigh absolute reasons. That, however, implies hypersensitivity and contradicts the prioritarian idea. We could also restrict comparative reasons, but only on pain of effectively abandoning the Dual View. Or we accept one half of the objection and adopt an asymmetry for comparative welfare to avoid the other half.

In his ‘The Countefactual Argument Against Abortion’ (2023) Ryan Kulesa argues that it is prima facie wrong to kill a ‘counterfactual person’. Some early foetuses, though still lacking consciousness, are counterfactual persons. Hence, it is prima facie wrong to kill (abort) these foetuses. Kulesa’s aim is to reconcile apparently conflicting intuitions about abortion and related acts, e.g., the failure to rescue frozen foetuses in abortion rescue cases, which philosophers writing about abortion find it hard to reconcile. I argue that he does not succeed because his argument does not establish that the mere fact that an entity is a counterfactual person is a sufficient condition of the prima face wrongness of killing it. More generally, Kulesa does not establish that the concept of counterfactual personhood is of utility in the debates he is concerned with at all.