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669Innateness and the sciencesBiology and Philosophy 21 (2): 155-188. 2006.The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists. This concept has a legitimate role to play in science only if the colloquial usage relates to a coherent body of evidence. We examine many different candidates for the post of scientific successor of the folk concept of innateness. We argue that none of these candidates is entirely satisfactory. Some of the candidates are more interesting and useful than others, but the interesting candidate…Read more
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44The Context of Clinical Research and Its Ethical Relevance: The COMPAS Trial as a Case StudyAmerican Journal of Bioethics 12 (1). 2012.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 39-40, January 2012
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35Epistocracy for Online Deliberative BioethicsCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24 (3): 272-280. 2015.
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91Meat made us moral: a hypothesis on the nature and evolution of moral judgmentBiology and Philosophy 28 (6): 903-931. 2013.In the first part of the article, an account of moral judgment in terms of emotional dispositions is given. This account provides an expressivist explanation of three important features of moral demands: inescapability, authority independence and meriting. In the second part of the article, some ideas initially put forward by Christopher Boehm are developed and modified in order to provide a hypothesis about the evolution of the ability to token moral judgments. This hypothesis makes evolutionar…Read more
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37Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspectiveIn Robin Dunbar & Louise Barrett (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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96The role of emotions in ecological and practical rationalityIn Dylan Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 159--178. 2004.
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557On Dennett and the natural sciences of free willBiology and Philosophy 18 (5): 731-742. 2003._Freedom Evolves _is an ambitious book. The aim is to show that free will is compatible with what physics, biology and the neurosciences tell us about the way we function and that, moreover, these sciences can help us clarify and vindicate the most important aspects of the common-sense conception of free will, those aspects that play a fundamental role in the way we live our lives and in the way we organize our society
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191Reproductive cloning, genetic engineering and the autonomy of the child: the moral agent and the open futureJournal of Medical Ethics 33 (2): 87-93. 2007.Some authors have argued that the human use of reproductive cloning and genetic engineering should be prohibited because these biotechnologies would undermine the autonomy of the resulting child. In this paper, two versions of this view are discussed. According to the first version, the autonomy of cloned and genetically engineered people would be undermined because knowledge of the method by which these people have been conceived would make them unable to assume full responsibility for their ac…Read more