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Frances Kamm

Frances Kamm is an American moral philosopher who has taught at New York University, Harvard and Rutgers. She is known for exceptionally detailed analysis…

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Also known as F. M. Kamm, Frances Myrna Kamm

active 1980s – present · New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New Brunswick, New Jersey

Traditions: Analytic

Frances Kamm is an American moral philosopher who has taught at New York University, Harvard and Rutgers. She is known for exceptionally detailed analysis of nonconsequentialist ethics: the constraints that forbid harming some people to help others, and the permissions that let agents pursue their own projects. Working through carefully varied cases, including many trolley variants, she has proposed principles that try to explain where the line between permissible and impermissible harming falls.

Key ideas

  • Moral constraints and permissions need precise principles, tested against carefully constructed cases.
  • Her Principle of Permissible Harm holds that harms may be permissible when they come from the greater good or its means, but not when they are the means to it.
  • The doctrine of triple effect distinguishes acting because an effect will occur from acting in order to bring it about.
  • The inviolability of persons is itself a kind of status that constraints express.

Major works

  • Creation and Abortion (1992)
  • Morality, Mortality (two volumes, 1993 and 1996)
  • Intricate Ethics (2007)
  • The Trolley Problem Mysteries (2015)

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The questions of philosophy where Frances Kamm takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.