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126Hope and ExploitationHastings Center Report 38 (5): 49-55. 2008.How do we encourage patients to be hopeful without exploiting their hope? A medical researcher or a pharmaceutical company can take unfair advantage of someone's hope by much subtler means than simply giving misinformation. Hope shapes deliberation, and therefore can make deliberation better or worse, by the deliberator's own standards of deliberation.
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51The expressive meaning of enhancementAmerican Journal of Bioethics 5 (3). 2005.This Article does not have an abstract
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275Hopes and DreamsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (1). 2010.It is a commonplace in both the popular imagination and the philosophical literature that hope has a special kind of motivational force. This commonplace underwrites the conviction that hope alone is capable of bolstering us in despairinducing circumstances, as well as the strategy of appealing to hope in the political realm. In section 1, I argue that, to the contrary, hope’s motivational essence is not special or unique—it is simply that of an endorsed desire. The commonplace is not entirely m…Read more
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117Love, IncorporatedEthical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (4): 691-702. 2015.In this paper, I outline a Kantian moral psychology and use it to generate an analysis of the emotional attitude, love. At the heart of this moral psychology is a distinction between rational and subrational motives, and the thesis that interpersonal emotional attitudes like love are governed by a norm of respect. I show how an analysis of love that relies on this moral psychology—which I call “the incorporation conception” of love—tightly fits with paradigmatic cases of romantic love, reveals b…Read more
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1Why Instruments Aren't ReasonsDissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2004."[R]easons for action must have their source in goals, desires, or intentions....[T]he possession of rationality is not sufficient to provide a source for relevant reasons,...certain desires, goals, or intentions are also necessary." ;So says Gilbert Harman. So say many other philosophers, from Aristotle to Hume to Harman and David Gauthier. To these many philosophers, this is a home truth, as obvious as the nose on your face. And yet as many philosophers---from the Stoics to Kant to Nagel and K…Read more
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44CommentaryHastings Center Report 41 (2): 18-18. 2012.There are instances where religious beliefs can negatively impact a patient's decision-making capability. Any belief system that categorically prohibits psychiatric treatment in all cases is dangerous. The situation is illustrated through a case of a patient with schizophrenia who refuses to acknowledge her disease because of her religion.
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275Owning up and lowering down: The power of apologyJournal of Philosophy 107 (10): 534-553. 2010.Apologies are strange. They are, in a certain sense, very small. An apology is just a gesture—a set of words, a physical posture, perhaps a gift. But an apology can also be very powerful—this power is implicit in the facts that it can be difficult to offer an apology and that, when we are wronged, we may want an apology very much. More, even we have been severely wronged, we are sometimes willing to forgive or pardon the wrongdoer, if we receive a sincere apology. In this paper, I want to begin …Read more
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57Emotion and the emotionsIn Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2013.The dominant consequentialist, Kantian, and contractualist theories by virtue ethicists such as G.E.M. Anscombe, Alisdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Stocker have been criticized for their neglect of the emotions. There are three reasons why it might be a mistake for moral philosophy to neglect the emotions. Emotions have an important influence on motivation, and proper cultivation of the emotions is helpful, perhaps essential, to our ability to lead ethical lives. It is a plausible …Read more
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Claremont McKenna CollegeDepartment of PhilosophyMurty And Sunak Professor Of Philosophy, Politics & Economics
Claremont, California, United States of America