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34Authenticating an Online IdentityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 12 (10): 39-41. 2012.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 39-41, October 2012
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200Delusion, dissociation and identityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (1): 31-49. 2003.The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders. We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically ext…Read more
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194Personal identity, multiple personality disorder, and moral personhoodPhilosophical Psychology 11 (1): 67-88. 1998.Marya Schechtman argues that psychological continuity accounts of personal identity, as represented by Derek Parfit's account, fail to escape the circularity objection. She claims that Parfit's deployment of quasi-memory (and other quasi-psychological) states to escape circularity implicitly commit us to an implausible view of human psychology. Schechtman suggests that what is lacking here is a coherence condition, and that this is something essential in any account of personal identity. In resp…Read more
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4Failed Agency and the Insanity DefenceInternational Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 413-424. 2004.In this article I argue that insanity defences such as M’Nagten should be abolished in favour of a defence of failed agency. It is not insanity per se, or any other empirical condition, which constitutes the moral reason for exculpation. Rather, we should first recognize the conditions for being a responsible moral agent. These include some capacity to direct and control one’s behavior, a non-delusional component, and the capacity to recognize that one’s behavior is expressive of what they have …Read more
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9A History of Philosophy of Mind in AustralasiaIn Graham Oppy N. N. Trakakis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Monash University Publishing. 2010.
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16The moral goal of treatment in cases of dual diagnosisIn John Kleinig & Stanley Einstein (eds.), Ethical challenges for intervening in drug use: policy, research and treatment issues, Oicj. pp. 409-36. 2006.Substance use and misuse occurs at a very high rate among people with mental health problems and the relationship between the two conditions is complex. In this paper we argue that treatment of substance use in dual diagnosis clients must begin from an understanding of the losses suffered by those with mental illness. We outline the fundamental condition of effective agency, unified agency, which is disrupted in mental illness and show how this is needed to secure access to central social and mo…Read more
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31The Imprudence of the VulnerableEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4): 791-805. 2014.Significant numbers of people believe that victims of violent crime are blameworthy in so far as they imprudently place themselves in dangerous situations. This belief is maintained and fuelled by ongoing social commentary. In this paper I describe a recent violent criminal case, as a foil against which I attempt to extract and refine the argument based on prudence that seems to support this belief. I then offer a moral critique of what goes wrong when this argument, continually repeated as soci…Read more
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36Neuromarketing: what is it, and is it a threat to privacy?In Jens Clausen Neil Levy (ed.), Handbook on Neuroethics, Springer. pp. 1627-1645. 2014.This entry has two general aims. The first is to profile the practices of neuromarketing (both current and hypothetical), and the second is to identify what is ethically troubling about these practices. It will be claimed that neuromarketing does not really present novel ethical challenges, and that marketers are simply continuing to do what they have always done, only now they have at their disposal the tools of neuroscience which they have duly recruited. What will be presupposed is a principl…Read more
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30Dementia and the Power of Music TherapyBioethics 29 (8): 573-579. 2015.Dementia is now a leading cause of both mortality and morbidity, particularly in western nations, and current projections for rates of dementia suggest this will worsen. More than ever, cost effective and creative non-pharmacological therapies are needed to ensure we have an adequate system of care and supervision. Music therapy is one such measure, yet to date statements of what music therapy is supposed to bring about in ethical terms have been limited to fairly vague and under-developed claim…Read more
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90Anonymity and the Social SelfAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 47 (4). 2010.We will analyze the concept of anonymity, along with cognate notions, and their relation to privacy, with a view to developing an understanding of how we control our identity in public and why such control is important in developing and maintaining our social selves. We will take anonymity to be representative of a suite of techniques of nonidentifiability that persons use to manage and protect their privacy. At the core of these techniques is the aim of being untrackable; this means that others…Read more
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235Identity, control and responsibility: The case of Dissociative Identity DisorderPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 509-526. 2002.Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the pers…Read more
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159Personal Identity, the Causal Condition, and the Simple ViewPhilosophical Papers 39 (2): 183-208. 2010.Among theories of personal identity over time the simple view has not been popular among philosophers, but it nevertheless remains the default view among non philosophers. It may be construed either as the view that nothing grounds a claim of personal identity over time, or that something quite simple (a soul perhaps) is the ground. If the former construal is accepted, a conspicuous difficulty is that the condition of causal dependence between person-stages is absent. But this leaves such a view…Read more
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453Attacking authorityAustralian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 13 (2): 59-70. 2011.The quality of our public discourse – think of the climate change debate for instance – is never very high. A day spent observing it reveals a litany of misrepresentation and error, argumentative fallacy, and a general lack of good will. In this paper I focus on a microcosmic aspect of these practices: the use of two types of argument – the argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority – and a way in which they are related. Public debate is so contaminated by the misuse of the ad hominem tactic …Read more
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67Blaming agents and excusing persons: The case of DIDPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 169-74. 2003.
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133The unity and disunity of agencyPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (4): 308-312. 2003.Effective agency, according to contemporary Kantians, requires a unity of purpose both at a time, in order that we may eliminate conflict among our motives, and over time, because many of the things we do form part of longer-term projects and make sense only in the light of these projects and life plans. Call this the unity of agency thesis. This thesis can be regarded as a normative constraint on accounts of personal identity and indeed on accounts of what it is to have the life of a person in …Read more
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92Truth, Lies, and the Narrative SelfAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4): 301-316. 2012.Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jes…Read more
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21Sailing, Flow and FulfilmentIn Patrick Goold (ed.), Sailing and Philosophy, . pp. 96-109. 2012.In this essay I want to focus on a quality inherent in that range of feelings we associate with an experience described as ‘flow’. Csíkszentmihályi describes it as a state that arises in people involved in some skilled activity who become fully immersed in it; they reach a state of ‘intrinsic motivation’ and loss of self-awareness; their actions seem to occur spontaneously so that they seem to become simultaneously a passive witness to their own highly skilled agency. There are skilled movements…Read more
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114Mental time travel, agency and responsibilityIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.We have argued elsewhere that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this chapter we explore the importance of mental time travel - our ordinary ability to mentally travel to temporal locations outside the present, involving both memory of our personal past and the ability to imagine ourselves in the future - to our agential capacities for planning and control. We suggest that in many individuals with…Read more
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236Establishing personal identity in cases of DIDPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 143-51. 2003.In some recent criminal cases in the United States a defense has been mounted based on an affliction known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). The crux of the defense rests on the proposition that a dominant personality was incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of wrongfulness of conduct caused by an alter personality. This defense has been successful in some cases, but not others, and so philosophers, lawyers, and psychiatrists are now in…Read more
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43Addiction, Competence, and CoercionJournal of Philosophical Research 39 199-234. 2014.In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe …Read more
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40Normative agencyIn Catriona MacKenzie Kim Atkins (ed.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, Routledge. 2008.20 page
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103Privacy, Separation, and ControlThe Monist 91 (1): 130-150. 2008.Defining privacy is problematic because the condition of privacy appears simultaneously to require separation from others, and the possibility of choosing not to be separate. This latter feature expresses the inherent normative dimension of privacy: the capacity to control the perceptual and informational spaces surrounding one’s person. Clearly the features of separation and control as just described are in tension because one may easily enough choose to give up all barriers between oneself and…Read more
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18Bio-technical challenges to moral autonomyIn Jai Galliott Mianna Lotz (ed.), Super Soldiers: the Ethical, Legal and Social Consequences, Ashgate. pp. 109-121. 2015.When are soldier enhancements permissible in so far as they affect moral autonomy? This question is answered via the setting out of an important condition for moral autonomy: the capacity agents have for appropriating actions and experiences into a unified morally coherent self-conception.
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40Identity and Information TechnologyIn Jeroen den Hoven John Weckervant (ed.), Moral Philosophy and Information Technology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 142. 2008.