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2Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 1. The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008, pp. xix + 583, US$30.00/£17.95 (paper) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 523-525. 2009.
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487The case for physician assisted suicide: how can it possibly be proven?Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (6): 335-338. 2006.In her paper, The case for physician assisted suicide: not proven, Bonnie Steinbock argues that the experience with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act fails to demonstrate that the benefits of legalising physician assisted suicide outweigh its risks. Given that her verdict is based on a small number of highly controversial cases that will most likely occur under any regime of legally implemented safeguards, she renders it virtually impossible to prove the case for physician assisted suicide. In thi…Read more
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5320 Intuitions and experimental philosophy: comfortable bedfellowsIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 381. 2013.
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35What evolves when morality evolves?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (3): 612-620. 2006.
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168Evolutionary psychology, human universals, and the standard social science modelBiology and Philosophy 19 (3): 459-72. 2004.Proponents of evolutionary psychology take the existence of humanuniversals to constitute decisive evidence in favor of their view. Ifthe same social norms are found in culture after culture, we have goodreason to believe that they are innate, they argue. In this paper Ipropose an alternative explanation for the existence of humanuniversals, which does not depend on them being the product of inbuiltpsychological adaptations. Following the work of Brian Skyrms, I suggestthat if a particular con…Read more
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50Review of Experimental Philosophy (review)Metapsychology 12 (33). 2008.This anthology mixes together previously published and new work in experimental philosophy, by many of its leading figures (among whom the editors feature prominently). Experimental philosophy is a burgeoning movement that urges philosophers to leave their armchairs and test their philosophical claims empirically. It builds upon but goes further than the movement that Jesse Prinz, in his contribution, calls empirical philosophy; philosophy that turns to existing scientific literature to find evi…Read more
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23What Difference Does Consciousness Make?Monash Bioethics Review 28 (2): 13-25. 2009.The question whether and when it is morally appropriate to withdraw life-support from patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state is one of the most controversial in bioethics. Recent work on the neuroscience of consciousness seems to promise fundamentally to alter the debate, by demonstrating that some entirely unresponsive patients are in fact conscious. In this paper, I argue that though this work is extremely important scientifically, it ought to alter the debate over the …Read more
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2Neuromarketing: Ethical and Political ChallengesEtica E Politica 11 (2): 10-17. 2009.Ethicists and ordinary people are typically more worried by interventions that alter agents’ mind by directly altering their brains than interventions than are focused on the environment, and thereby indirectly change minds. I argue that the causal route to changing minds is not itself important. Moreover, some of the most powerful techniques whereby behavior is altered without the consent or knowledge of agents involve environmental manipulations: manipulations of social space, for the benefit …Read more
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179The Value of ConsciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 21 (1-2): 127-138. 2014.Consciousness, or its lack, is often invoked in debates in applied and normative ethics. Conscious beings are typically held to be significantly more morally valuable than non-consious, so that establishing whether a being is conscious becomes of critical importance. In this paper, I argue that the supposition that phenomenal consciousness explains the value of our experiences or our lives, and the moral value of beings who are conscious, is less well-grounded than is commonly thought. A great d…Read more
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59Conspiracy Theories (review)Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 24 (1-2): 47-48. 2004.
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Michel FoucaultFoucault Studies 20-31. 2004.ABSTRACT: In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo‐American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule‐based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest t…Read more
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192Consciousness and Moral ResponsibilityOxford University Press. 2014.Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true
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40Justin Garson, The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 35 (5): 259-260. 2015.
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Stephen Cohen The Nature of Moral Reasoning (review)Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 6 (1). 2004.
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132History as struggle: Foucault's genealogy of genealogyHistory of the Human Sciences 11 (4): 159-170. 1998.
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12Ethics and Rules: A Political Reading of Foucault's Aesthetics of ExistencePhilosophy Today 42 (1): 79-84. 1998.
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71Peter Ulric Tse , The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 33 (4): 331-333. 2013.
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311Virtual child pornography: The eroticization of inequalityEthics and Information Technology 4 (4): 319-323. 2002.The United States Supreme Court hasrecently ruled that virtual child pornographyis protected free speech, partly on the groundsthat virtual pornography does not harm actualchildren. I review the evidence for thecontention that virtual pornography might harmchildren, and find that it is, at best,inconclusive. Saying that virtual childpornography does not harm actual children isnot to say that it is completely harmless,however. Child pornography, actual or virtual,necessarily eroticizes inequality…Read more
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5Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid and G. Lynn Stephens, eds. Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 28 (1): 67-70. 2008.
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Nomy Arpaly, Merit, Meaning and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free WillPhilosophy in Review 27 (2): 89. 2007.
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33There May Be Costs to Failing to Enhance, as Well as to EnhancingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (7): 38-39. 2013.No abstract
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300Culpable ignorance and moral responsibility: A reply to FitzPatrickEthics 119 (4): 729-741. 2009.
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47Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (eds.) , Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 34 (3-4): 132-135. 2014.
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154The apology paradox and the non-identity problemPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 358-368. 2002.Janna Thompson has outlined ‘the apology paradox’, which arises whenever people apologize for an action or event upon which their existence is causally dependent. She argues that a sincere apology seems to entail a wish that the action or event had not occurred, but that we cannot sincerely wish that events upon which our existence depends had not occurred. I argue that Thompson’s paradox is a backward-looking version of Parfit’s (forward-looking) ‘non-identity problem’, where backward- and forwa…Read more
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613Analytic and continental philosophy: Explaining the differencesMetaphilosophy 34 (3): 284-304. 2003.A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy.I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious.I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, proble…Read more
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2368Consciousness and moralityIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2020.It is well known that the nature of consciousness is elusive, and that attempts to understand it generate problems in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Less appreciated are the important – even if still elusive – connections between consciousness and issues in ethics. In this chapter we consider three such connections. First, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status. Second, we consider the relevance of consciousne…Read more
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University of OxfordRegular Faculty (Part-time)
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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |