David S. Oderberg

The vigorous legal and ethical debates over conscientious objection have taken place largely within the domain of health care. Is this because conscience in medicine is of a special kind, or are there other reasons why it tends to dominate these debates? Beginning with an analysis of the analogy between medical conscience and conscientious objection in wartime, I go on to examine various possible grounds for distinguishing between medicine and other professional contexts (taking law and accountancy as examples). The conclusion is that no principled difference exists between the military and medical cases, nor between the health professions and other professions. Nevertheless, there are practical reasons why medical conscience has distinctive importance, mainly concerning the rapid advance of medical technology. Medical conscience will, for these reasons, continue to drive the debate over conscientious objection, even though legal protection should in principle extend to all professions.

We live in a liberal, pluralistic, largely secular society where, in theory, there is fundamental protection for freedom of conscience generally and freedom of religion in particular. There is, however, both in statute and common law, increasing pressure on religious believers and conscientious objectors (outside wartime) to act in ways that violate their sincere, deeply held beliefs. This is particularly so in health care, where conscientious objection is coming under extreme pressure. I argue that freedom of religion and conscience need to be put on a sounder footing both legislatively and by the courts, particularly in health care. I examine a number of important legal cases in the UK and US, where freedom of religion and conscience have come into conflict with government mandates or equality and anti-discrimination law. In these and other cases we find one of two results: either the conscientious objector loses out against competing rights, or the conscientious objector succeeds, but due to what I consider unsound judicial reasoning. In particular, cases involving cooperation in what the objector considers morally impermissible according to their beliefs have been wrongly understood by some American courts. I argue that a reasonable theory of cooperation incorporated into judicial thinking would enable more acceptable results that gave sufficient protection to conscientious objectors without risking a judicial backlash against objectors who wanted to take their freedoms too far. I also venture into broader, more controversial waters concerning what I call freedom of dissociation – the fundamental right to withdraw from associating with people, groups, and activities. It is no more than the converse of freedom of association, which all free societies recognise as a basic right. How far should freedom of dissociation go? What might society be like if freedom of dissociation were given more protection in law than it currently has? It would certainly give freedom of religion and conscience a substantial foundation, but it could also lead to discriminatory behaviour to which many people would object. I explore some of these issues, before going back to the narrower area of freedom of conscience and religion in health care, making some proposals about how the law could strengthen these basic pillars of a liberal, free society.

I explore the increasingly important issue of co-operation in immoral actions, particularly in connection with health care. Conscientious objection, especially as pertains to religious freedom in health care, has become a pressing issue in the light of the US Supreme Court judgment in Hobby Lobby. Section 2 outlines a theory of co-operation inspired by Catholic moral theologians such as those cited by the Court. The theory has independent plausibility and is at least worthy of serious consideration – in part because it is an instance of double-effect reasoning, which is also independently plausible despite its association with moral theology. Section 3 examines Hobby Lobby in detail. Even if the judgment was correct in that case, the reasoning was not, as it involved applying a ‘mere sincerity’ test to the co-operation question. The mere sincerity test leads to absurd consequences, whereas a reasonableness test applied using the theory of co-operation defended here would avoid absurdity. Section 4 explores the post-Hobby Lobby problem further, examining opt-outs and accommodations: the Little Sisters of the Poor case shows how opt-outs are misunderstood on a mere sincerity test, which the court rightly rejected. Section 5 discusses the UK case of Doogan and Wood, concerning participation in abortion. Again, a judicially-recognised ethic of co-operation, if it were part of the fabric of legal reasoning in such cases, would have enabled the conscientious objectors in this and similar situations to have their freedom of conscience and religion respected in a way that it currently is not.

Hylemorphism holds that material substances are composites of prime matter and substantial form: matter as pure potentiality, form as the actualizing and specifying principle. After early modern attacks, recent work has revived hylemorphism chiefly as a theory of substance. This paper extends the project: hylemorphism can function as a general research programme for sublunary phenomena beyond substance ontology. I sketch, analogically, how form/matter analysis illuminates: (i) language, via a unified linguistic form rather than separate syntactic and semantic forms; (ii) ethics, treating bodily motion as matter and volitional states as form; and (iii) politics, understanding the polis as constitutionally informed matter. I conclude by rejecting attempts to reduce form to structure.

Tyron Goldschmidt has recently published a non-paper in which he claims to demonstrate the causal power of absences. His non-paper is, precisely, an empty page. The non-paper is ingenious and at first ‘glance’ the ‘reader’ might think that the absence of words on the page does prove that negative beings can literally cause states such as surprise or disappointment. Closer analysis, however, shows that Goldschmidt’s clever non-paper not only lacks words but also lacks causal power. Serious metaphysical problems pile up if we suppose otherwise.

Contemporary liberal societies are seeing increasing pressure on individuals to act against their consciences. Most of the pressure is directed at freedom of religion but it also affects ethical beliefs more generally, contrary to the recognition of freedom of religion and conscience as a basic human right. I propose that freedom of dissociation, as a corollary of freedom of association, could be a practical and ethically acceptable solution to the conscience problem. I examine freedom of association and explain how freedom of dissociation follows from it, showing how dissociation protects freedom of religion and conscience. Extreme cases, such as the problem of the Satanist nurse, can be handled within a dissociationist framework, so it is reasonable to think less extreme cases can also be dealt with. The serious objection that dissociationism entails unjust discrimination is answered primarily by appeal to the need for ‘full and fair access’ to goods and services by all groups. I then allay important concerns about what kind of liberal society we should want to live in. Next, I refute the charge that a dissociationist society violates liberalism's ‘higher good’, arguing that liberalism strictly does not have a higher good. I conclude with some reflections on what a dissociationist society might look like.

Panmoralism is the thesis that every reason for human action is a moral reason. The thesis is easily misunderstood. It does not say that every cause of behaviour is a moral reason, or that every fact relevant to the explanation of an event is morally significant. It concerns reasons in the practical sense: considerations under which free and rational agents act, may act, or may be justified in acting. I argue that once reasons for action are understood in this way, and once morality is understood as the rational ordering of human action to the human good, the standard distinction between moral and non-moral reasons becomes artificial. Reasons of prudence, taste, etiquette, permissibility, supererogation, and even explanatory reasons – where these genuinely explain action – are not rivals to moral reasons but species or varieties of them. The contrary view depends partly on an unduly narrow conception of morality as centred on obligation, and partly on a failure to distinguish reasons from causes, background conditions, and merely enabling facts.

The making of mistakes by organisms and living systems generally is an underexplored way of conceptualising biology and organising experimental research. We set out an informal account of biological mistakes and why they should be taken seriously in biological investigation. We then give an indirect defence of their importance by applying the concept of mistake making to three kinds of activity: timing, calculation, and communication. We give a range of examples to show that mistakes in these kinds of behaviour can be found across a diversity of scales and systems. We also suggest ideas for empirical research that naturally arise from these cases. The reality and potential for mistake making across such a wide range of biological entities shows that it is not a purely human phenomenon. Getting it wrong seems to be central to biology as a whole, and to be a potentially productive organising principle for generating novel research questions and experimental hypotheses.

The making of mistakes by organisms and other living systems is a theoretically and empirically unifying feature of biological investigation. Mistake theory is a rigorous and experimentally productive way of understanding this widespread phenomenon. It does, however, run up against the long-standing “functions” debate in philosophy of biology. Against the objection that mistakes are just a kind of malfunction, and that without a position on functions there can be no theory of mistakes, we reply that this is to misunderstand the theory. In this paper we set out the basic concepts of mistake theory and then argue that mistakes are a distinctive phenomenon in their own right, not just a kind of malfunction. Moreover, the functions debate is, to a large degree, independent of the concept of biological mistakes we outline. In particular, although the popular selected effects theory may retain its place within a more pluralistic conception of biological function, there is also need for a more forward-looking approach, where a robust concept of normativity can be an important driver of future experimental work.

The active/passive distinction, once a hallmark of classical metaphysics, has largely been discarded from contemporary thought. The revival of powers theory has not seen an equally vigorous rehabilitation of the real distinction between active and passive powers. I begin an analysis and vindication with a critique of E.J. Lowe’s discussion. I then argue that the active/passive problem is a metaphysical one, not a logical or logico-linguistic one, and so logic is impotent to solve it. Following this is a discussion of the rights and wrongs of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s (identical) defence of the distinction. We will see that one main part of their analysis is a bright red herring while the other part contains the solution to the problem. I then state and clarify the key Scholastic principle concerning action and passion, which I call the Fundamental Thesis – one that will appear scandalous to contemporary ears, yet from which we can derive the tools needed to understand action and passion in the right way. I end with a definition of what I call the Minimal Metaphysical Agent, where the formulation is to be understood as an epistemic criterion for identifying agent and patient in a given causal interaction.

It is a matter of contention whether or not a general explanatory framework for the biological sciences would be of scientific value, or whether it is even achievable. In this paper we suggest that both are the case, and we outline proposals for a framework capable of generating new scientific questions. Starting with one clear characteristic of biological systems – that they all have the potential to make mistakes - we aim to describe the nature of this potential and the common processes that lie behind it. Given that under most circumstances biological systems function effectively, an examination of different kinds of mistake-making provides pointers to mechanisms that must exist to make failure uncommon. This in turn informs a framework for systematic enquiry, which in this paper we apply to the haemostatic system, but which we believe could be applied to any system across biology.

Proponents of physical intentionality argue that the classic hallmarks of intentionality highlighted by Brentano are also found in purely physical powers. Critics worry that this idea is metaphysically obscure at best, and at worst leads to panpsychism or animism. I examine the debate in detail, finding both confusion and illumination in the physical intentionalist thesis. Analysing a number of the canonical features of intentionality, I show that they all point to one overarching phenomenon of which both the mental and the physical are kinds, namely finality. This is the finality of ‘final causes’, the long-discarded idea of universal action for an end to which recent proponents of physical intentionality are in fact pointing whether or not they realise it. I explain finality in terms of the concept of specific indifference, arguing that in the case of the mental, specific indifference is realised by the process of abstraction, which has no correlate in the case of physical powers. This analysis, I conclude, reveals both the strength and weakness of rational creatures such as us, as well as demystifying (albeit only partly) the way in which powers work.

The Dead Donor Rule holds that removing organs from a living human being without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation possible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death, brain death and circulatory death, are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definitions of human death, and therefore of no epistemic value in themselves. I first set out a neo-Aristotelian theory of death as separation of soul (understood as organising principle) and body, which is then fleshed out as loss of organismic integrity. The brain and circulatory criteria are shown to have severe weaknesses as physiological manifestations of loss of integrity. Given the mismatch between what death is metaphysically speaking, and the dominant criteria accepted by clinicians and philosophers, it turns out that only actual bodily decomposition is a sure sign of death. In this I differ from Alan Shewmon, whose important work I discuss in detail.

This paper challenges the Eddington–Sellars tradition of positing ‘scientific’ objects – microphysical counterparts of ordinary, ‘middle-sized’ things such as tables. I argue that familiar eliminativist and reductionist constructions involving swarms, clouds, aggregates, or pluralities lack coherent identity and membership conditions. Kit Fine’s distinction between rigid and variable embodiments further undermines the idea of a distinct ‘scientific’ table: the former yields only extensional fusions with no principled boundaries, the latter collapses into the ordinary table itself. Turning to solid state and condensed matter physics, I show that nothing in contemporary microphysics supplies a determinate plurality of particles arranged table-wise. Consequently, ‘scientific’ tables dissolve as metaphysical fictions.

Common sense tells us that biological systems are goal-directed, and yet the concept remains philosophically problematic. We propose a novel characterization of goal-directed activities as a basis for hypothesising about and investigating explanatory mechanisms. We focus on survival goals such as providing adequate nutrition to body tissues, highlighting two key features – normativity and action. These are closely linked inasmuch as goal-directed actions must meet normative requirements such as that they occur when required and not at other times. We illustrate how goal-directed actions are initiated and terminated not by environmental features and goals themselves, but by markers for them. For example, timely blood clotting is the essential response to injury, but platelet activation, required for clotting, is initiated not by the injury itself but by a short sequence of amino acids (GPO) that provides a reliable marker for it. We then make the case that the operation of markers is a prerequisite for common biological phenomena such as mistake-proneness and mimicry. We go on to identify properties of markers in general, including those that are genetically determined, and those which can be acquired through associative learning. Both provide the basis for matching actions to changing environments and hence adaptive goal-directedness. We describe how goal-directed activities such as bird nest construction and birdsong learning, completed in anticipation of actions in the environment, have to be evaluated and practised against a standard of correctness. This characterization of goal-directedness is sufficiently detailed to provide a basis for the scientific study of mechanisms.

Transhumanism is the school of thought that advocates the use of technology to enhance the human species, to the point where some supporters consider that a new species altogether could arise. Even some critics think this at least a technological possibility. Some supporters also believe the emergence of a new, improved, superhuman species raises no special ethical questions. Through an examination of the metaphysics of species, and an analysis of the essence of the human species, I argue that the existence of an embodied, genuinely superhuman species is a metaphysical impossibility. Finally, I point out an interesting ethical consideration that this metaphysical truth raises.

The Guise of the Good thesis has received much attention since Anscombe's brief defence in her book Intention. I approach it here from a less common perspective - indirectly, via a theory explaining how it is that moral behaviour is even possible. After setting out how morality requires the employment of a fundamental test, I argue that moral behaviour involves orientation toward the good. Immoral behaviour cannot, however, involve orientation to evil as such, given the theory of evil as privation. There must always be orientation to good of some kind for immorality even to be possible. Evil can, nevertheless, be intended, but this must be carefully understood in terms of the metaphysic of good and evil I set out. Given that metaphysic, the Guise of the Good is a virtual corollary.