•  99
    What in the World Is Collective Responsibility?
    Dialectica 72 (2): 191-217. 2018.
  •  59
    Taking responsibility for health in an epistemically polluted environment
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (2): 123-141. 2018.
    Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibilit…Read more
  •  46
    Showing our seams: A reply to Eric Funkhouser
    Philosophical Psychology 31 (7): 991-1006. 2018.
    ABSTRACTIn a recent paper published in this journal, Eric Funkhouser argues that some of our beliefs have the primary function of signaling to others, rather than allowing us to navigate the world. Funkhouser’s case is persuasive. However, his account of beliefs as signals is underinclusive, omitting both beliefs that are signals to the self and less than full-fledged beliefs as signals. The latter set of beliefs, moreover, has a better claim to being considered as constituting a psychological k…Read more
  •  13
    Justice for Psychopaths
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 4 (2): 23-24. 2013.
  •  23
    Free Will Doesn't Come For Free
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 4 (4): 53-54. 2013.
  •  14
  •  35
    Responsibility as an Obstacle to Good Policy: The Case of Lifestyle Related Disease
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 15 (3): 459-468. 2018.
    There is a lively debate over who is to blame for the harms arising from unhealthy behaviours, like overeating and excessive drinking. In this paper, I argue that given how demanding the conditions required for moral responsibility actually are, we cannot be highly confident that anyone is ever morally responsible. I also adduce evidence that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs: it undermines public support for the measures that are likely to have the most impact …Read more
  •  71
    The regulation of cognitive enhancement devices : extending the medical model
    with Hannah Maslen, Thomas Douglas, Roi Cohen Kadosh, and Julian Savulescu
    Journal of Law and the Biosciences 1 (1): 68-93. 2014.
    This article presents a model for regulating cognitive enhancement devices. Recently, it has become very easy for individuals to purchase devices which directly modulate brain function. For example, transcranial direct current stimulators are increasingly being produced and marketed online as devices for cognitive enhancement. Despite posing risks in a similar way to medical devices, devices that do not make any therapeutic claims do not have to meet anything more than basic product safety stand…Read more
  •  69
    Do-it-yourself brain stimulation: a regulatory model
    with Hannah Maslen, Tom Douglas, Roi Cohen Kadosh, and Julian Savulescu
    Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (5): 413-414. 2015.
  •  1549
    Moral significance of phenomenal consciousness
    with Julian Savulescu
    Progress in Brain Research. 2009.
    Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many people seem to think. There are several different kinds of consciousness, and though all kinds of consciou…Read more
  •  82
    Routledge Companion to Free Will. (edited book)
    Routledge. 2017.
    Questions concerning free will are intertwined with issues in almost every area of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of mind to moral philosophy, and are also informed by work in different areas of science. Free will is also a perennial concern of serious thinkers in theology and in non-western traditions. Because free will can be approached from so many different perspectives and has implications for so many debates, a comprehensive survey needs to encompass an enormous range of approa…Read more
  •  35
    Agency is realized by subpersonal mechanisms too
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
  •  90
    You meta believe it
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 814-826. 2018.
    Because of the privileged place of beliefs in explaining behaviour, mismatch cases—in which agents sincerely claim to believe that p, but act in a way that is inconsistent with that belief—have attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, I argue that some of these cases, at least, are at least partially explained by agents believing that they believe that p, while failing to believe that p. Agents in these cases do not believe that ~p; rather, they have an indistinct first‐order, beliefy…Read more
  •  33
    Nudges to reason: not guilty
    Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (10): 723-723. 2018.
    I am to grateful to Geoff Keeling for his perceptive response1 to my paper.2 In this brief reply, I will argue that he does not succeed in his goal of showing that nudges to reason do not respect autonomy. At most, he establishes only that such nudges may threaten autonomy when used in certain ways and in certain circumstances. As I will show, this is not a conclusion that should give us grounds for particular concerns about nudges. Before turning to this issue, let me correct some small issues …Read more
  •  6
    Love is a central preoccupation of art and literature, of popular culture and autobiography. This book is an attempt to understand its central themes, to discover why love is so important to most of us, why we seek it, and why we so frequently fail to hold on to it. John Armstrong is a philosopher whose primary interest is aesthetics. Accordingly, his meditations on love often proceed by way of reflection upon works of art and literature.
  •  1
    Handbook on Neuroethics (edited book)
    with Jens Clausen
    Springer. 2014.
  •  31
    Strong hermeneutics: Contingency and moral identity
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2). 2001.
    Book Information Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. By Nicholas H. Smith. Routledge. London. 1997. Pp. x + 197. Paperback, £14.99.
  •  96
    What (if Anything) Is Wrong with Bestiality?
    Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (3): 444-456. 2003.
  •  57
    Stepping Into the Present
    Social Theory and Practice 25 (3): 471-490. 1999.
  •  134
    Obsessive–compulsive disorder as a disorder of attention
    Mind and Language 33 (1): 3-16. 2018.
    An influential model holds that obsessive–compulsive disorder is caused by distinctive personality traits and belief biases. But a substantial number of sufferers do not manifest these traits. I propose a predictive coding account of the disorder, which explains both the symptoms and the cognitive traits. On this account, OCD centrally involves heightened and dysfunctionally focused attention to normally unattended sensory and motor representations. As these representations have contents that pr…Read more
  •  127
    Nudges in a post-truth world
    Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (8): 495-500. 2017.
  •  15
    Conspiracy Theories (review)
    Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 24 (1-2): 47-48. 2004.
  •  274
    Am I a Racist? Implicit Bias and the Ascription of Racism
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268): 534-551. 2017.
    There is good evidence that many people harbour attitudes that conflict with those they endorse. In the language of social psychology, they seem to have implicit attitudes that conflict with their explicit beliefs. There has been a great deal of attention paid to the question whether agents like this are responsible for actions caused by their implicit attitudes, but much less to the question whether they can rightly be described as racist in virtue of harbouring them. In this paper, I attempt t…Read more
  • Preface
    In James J. Giordano & Bert Gordijn (eds.), Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
  •  7
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  5
    The prehistory of archaeology: Heidegger and the early Foucault
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27 (2): 157-175. 1996.
  •  191
    There is a robust scientific consensus concerning climate change and evolution. But many people reject these expert views, in favour of beliefs that are strongly at variance with the evidence. It is tempting to try to explain these beliefs by reference to ignorance or irrationality, but those who reject the expert view seem often to be no worse informed or any less rational than the majority of those who accept it. It is also tempting to try to explain these beliefs by reference to epistemic ove…Read more
  •  164
    What, and where, luck is: A response to Jennifer Lackey
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3). 2009.
    In 'What Luck Is Not', Lackey presents counterexamples to the two most prominent accounts of luck: the absence of control account and the modal account. I offer an account of luck that conjoins absence of control to a modal condition. I then show that Lackey's counterexamples mislocate the luck: the agents in her cases are lucky, but the luck precedes the event upon which Lackey focuses, and that event is itself only fortunate, not lucky. Finally I offer an account of fortune. Fortune is luck-in…Read more
  •  117
    Dissolving the Puzzle of Resultant Moral Luck
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 127-139. 2016.
    The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely deserve but of our epistemic situation. On this account, there is no genuine resultant moral luck; there is only luck in wha…Read more