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148The Closeness Problem and the Doctrine of Double Effect: A Way ForwardCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (4): 849-863. 2016.A major challenge to the Doctrine of Double Effect is the concern that an agent’s intention can be identified in such a fine-grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from a putative example of an intended harm, and yet, the resulting case appears to be a case of impermissibility. This is the so-called “closeness problem.” Many people believe that one can address the closeness problem by adopting Warren Quinn’s version of the DDE, call it DDE*, which distinguishes between harmful direct a…Read more
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65Neuroethical concerns about moderating traumatic memoriesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 7 (9). 2007.No abstract
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Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (review)Philosophy in Review 20 261-263. 2000.
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Scanlon’s book aims to offer us a moral theory of right and wrong and of our obligations to one another. The theory is called contractualism and its central claim is that an act is right or wrong if and only if it could or could not be justified to others on grounds that they could not reasonably reject (p. 4). Scanlon recognizes that so stated, his contractualism might seem empty in the sense that one might think that the aim of offering grounds that others could not reasonably reject is an aim…Read more
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114Twinning, inorganic replacement, and the organism viewRatio 23 (1): 59-72. 2010.In explicating his version of the Organism View, Eric Olson argues that you begin to exist only after twinning is no longer possible and that you cannot survive a process of inorganic replacement. Assuming the correctness of the Organism View, but pace Olson, I argue in this paper that the Organism View does not require that you believe either proposition. The claim I shall make about twinning helps to advance a debate that currently divides defenders of the Organism View, while the claim I shal…Read more
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518Selecting children: The ethics of reproductive genetic engineeringPhilosophy Compass 3 (5): 973-991. 2008.Advances in reproductive genetic engineering have the potential to transform human lives. Not only do they promise to allow us to select children free of diseases, they can also enable us to select children with desirable traits. In this paper, I consider two clusters of arguments for the moral permissibility of reproductive genetic engineering, what I call the Perfectionist View and the Libertarian View; and two clusters of arguments against reproductive genetic engineering, what I call the Hum…Read more
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165Intentions and Moral Permissibility: The Case of Acting Permissibly with Bad IntentionsLaw and Philosophy 31 (6): 703-724. 2012.Many people believe in the intention principle, according to which an agent’s intention in performing an act can sometimes make an act that would otherwise have been permissible impermissible, other things being equal. Judith Jarvis Thomson, Frances Kamm and Thomas Scanlon have offered cases that seem to show that it can be permissible for an agent to act even when the agent has bad intentions. If valid, these cases would seem to cast doubt on the intention principle. In this paper, I point out …Read more
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91Biological Parenting as a Human RightJournal of Moral Philosophy 13 (6): 652-668. 2016._ Source: _Volume 13, Issue 6, pp 652 - 668 Do biological parents have the right to parent their own biological children? It might seem obvious that the answer is yes, but the philosophical justification for this right is uncertain. In recent years, there has been a flurry of philosophical activity aimed at providing fresh justifications for this right. In this paper, I shall propose a new answer, namely, the right to parent one’s own biological children is a human right. I call this the human r…Read more
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280The right of children to be lovedJournal of Political Philosophy 14 (4). 2006.A number of international organizations have claimed that children have a right to be loved, but there is a worry that this claim may just be an empty rhetoric. In this paper, I seek to show that there could be such a right by providing a justification for this right in terms of human rights, by demonstrating that love can be an appropriate object of a duty, and by proposing that biological parents should normally be made the primary bearers of this duty, while all other able persons in appropri…Read more