•  468
    What (if anything) is wrong with bestiality?
    Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (3). 2003.
  •  22
  •  257
    A will of one's own: Consciousness, control, and character
    with Tim Bayne
    International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 (5): 459-470. 2004.
  •  279
    Virtual child pornography: The eroticization of inequality
    Ethics 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
  •  95
    Cases in which we find ourselves irrationally worried about whether we have done something we habitually do are familiar to most people, but they have received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I argue that available accounts designed to explain superficially similar mismatches between agents’ behavior and their beliefs fail to explain these cases. In the kinds of cases which have served as paradigms for extant accounts, contents are poised to drive be…Read more
  •  17
  •  261
    Addiction is not a brain disease (and it matters)
    Frontiers in Psychiatry 4 (24): 1--7. 2013.
    The claim that addiction is a brain disease is almost universally accepted among scientists who work on addiction. The claim’s attraction rests on two grounds: the fact that addiction seems to be characterized by dysfunction in specific neural pathways and the fact that the claim seems to the compassionate response to people who are suffering. I argue that neural dysfunction is not sufficient for disease: something is a brain disease only when neural dysfunction is sufficient for impairment. I c…Read more
  •  26
    There May Be Costs to Failing to Enhance, as Well as to Enhancing
    American Journal of Bioethics 13 (7): 38-39. 2013.
    No abstract
  •  158
      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
  •  1
    Neuromarketing: Ethical and Political Challenges
    Etica 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
  •  18
    The best of all possible paternalisms?
    Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (5): 304-305. 2014.
    I am grateful to the commentators, for their kind words and for their probing challenges. They range in the views they express, from those who seem to think I have not gone far enough in questioning the value of autonomy to those who think I have not challenged it at all. Given this diversity, it seems best to address their remarks sequentially.J D Trout is sympathetic to my project, and highlights his own work which supports it.1 Indeed, Trout's work—together with Michael Bishop and his own sta…Read more
  •  22
    Editorial
    Neuroethics 1 (2): 73-74. 2008.
  •  140
    Moore on Twin Earth
    Erkenntnis 75 (1): 137-146. 2011.
    In a series of articles, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have argued that Richard Boyd’s defence of moral realism, utilizing a causal theory of reference, fails. Horgan and Timmons construct a twin Earth-style thought experiment which, they claim, generates intuitions inconsistent with the realist account. In their thought experiment, the use of (allegedly) moral terms at a world is causally regulated by some property distinct from that regulating their use here on Earth; nevertheless, Horgan and …Read more
  •  29
    Self-Ownership
    Social Theory and Practice 28 (1): 77-99. 2002.
  •  148
    It is, as Dana Nelkin (2004) says, a rare point of agreement among participants in the free will debate that rational deliberation presupposes a belief in freedom. Of course, the precise content of that belief – and, indeed, the nature of deliberation – is controversial, with some philosophers claiming that deliberation commits us to a belief in libertarian free will (Taylor 1966; Ginet 1966), and others claiming that, on the contrary, deliberation presupposes nothing more than an epistemic open…Read more
  •  32
    What 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.
  •  612
    Most philosophers believe that wrongdoers sometimes deserve to be punished by long prison sentences. They also believe that such punishments are justified by their consequences: they deter crime and incapacitate potential offenders. In this article, I argue that both these claims are false. No one deserves to be punished, I argue, because our actions are shot through with direct or indirect luck. I also argue that there are good reasons to think that punishing fewer people and much less harshly …Read more
  •  22
    What 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.
  •  353
    Implicit Bias and Moral Responsibility: Probing the Data
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3): 3-26. 2016.
  •  567
    Analytic and continental philosophy: Explaining the differences
    Metaphilosophy 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
  •  77
    The wisdom of the pack
    Philosophical Explorations 9 (1). 2006.
    This short article is a reply to Fine's criticisms of Haidt's social intuitionist model of moral judgement. After situating Haidt in the landscape of meta-ethical views, I examine Fine's argument, against Haidt, that the processes which give rise to moral judgements are amenable to rational control: first-order moral judgements, which are automatic, can nevertheless deliberately be brought to reflect higher-order judgements. However, Haidt's claims about the arationality of moral judgements seem…Read more
  •  128
    In this paper, I introduce the notion of a Frankfurt Enabler, a counterfactual intervener poised, should a signal for intervention be received, to enable an agent to perform a mental or physical action. Frankfurt enablers demonstrate, I claim, that merely counterfactual conditions are sometimes relevant to assessing what capacities agents possess. Since this is the case, we are not entitled to conclude that agents in standard Frankfurt-style cases retain their responsibility-ensuring capacities.…Read more
  •  32
  •  52
    The Intrinsic Value of Cultures
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 9 (2): 49-57. 2002.
    Our intuitions concerning cultures show that we are committed to thinking that they are intrinsically valuable. I set out the conditions under which we attribute such value to cultures, and show that coming to possess intrinsic value is a matter of having the right kind of causal history.