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31What we can - and cannot - learn about the ethics of enhancement by thinking about sportIn Akira Akayabashi (ed.), The Future of Bioethics: International Dialogues, Oxford University Press. pp. 218-223. 2014.In “The misguided quest for the ethics of enhancement”, Tom Murray makes two related claims. First, he argues that “understanding the ethics of enhancement is deeply dependent on context". Second, he suggests that, as a consequence, we should not look for “a single all-purpose ethics for every form of human enhancement”. In this brief response, I argue that while Murray is correct in the first of these claims, there is an important sense in which he is wrong in the second. His focus on the ethic…Read more
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517Egalitarianism and Moral BioenhancementAmerican Journal of Bioethics 14 (4): 20-28. 2014.A number of philosophers working in applied ethics and bioethics are now earnestly debating the ethics of what they term “moral bioenhancement.” I argue that the society-wide program of biological manipulations required to achieve the purported goals of moral bioenhancement would necessarily implicate the state in a controversial moral perfectionism. Moreover, the prospect of being able to reliably identify some people as, by biological constitution, significantly and consistently more moral tha…Read more
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690The March of the robot dogsEthics and Information Technology 4 (4): 305-318. 2002.Following the success of Sony Corporation’s “AIBO”, robot cats and dogs are multiplying rapidly. “Robot pets” employing sophisticated artificial intelligence and animatronic technologies are now being marketed as toys and companions by a number of large consumer electronics corporations. It is often suggested in popular writing about these devices that they could play a worthwhile role in serving the needs of an increasingly aging and socially isolated population. Robot companions, shaped li…Read more
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21Borders, States, Freedom and JusticeArena Magazine 66 25-31. 2003.What are borders? For many in the movement opposing mandatory detention they are simply expressions of the state. Yes this position cannot give us a coherent and critical politics. Rethinking borders is essential to the project of a genuinely democratic society.
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397Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems: The Downside of InvulnerabilityIn Bert Gordijn & Anthony Mark Cutter (eds.), In Pursuit of Nanoethics, Springer. pp. 89-103. 2014.In this paper we examine the ethical implications of emerging Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems (or 'NECS'). Through a combination of materials innovation and biotechnology, NECS are aimed at making combatants much less vulnerable to munitions that pose a lethal threat to soldiers protected by conventional armor. We argue that increasing technological disparities between forces armed with NECS and those without will exacerbate the ethical problems of asymmetric warfare. This will place…Read more
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55Revolutionary and familiar, inevitable and precarious: Rhetorical contradictions in enthusiasm for nanotechnologyNanoEthics 1 (1): 57-68. 2007.This paper analyses rhetorics of scientific and corporate enthusiasm surrounding nanotechnology. I argue that enthusiasts for nanotechnologies often try to have it both ways on questions concerning the nature and possible impact of these technologies, and the inevitability of their development and use. In arguments about their nature and impact we are simultaneously informed that these are revolutionary technologies with the potential to profoundly change the world and that they merely represent…Read more
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37What Pacemakers Can Teach Us about the Ethics of Maintaining Artificial OrgansHastings Center Report 46 (6): 14-24. 2016.One day soon it may be possible to replace a failing heart, liver, or kidney with a long-lasting mechanical replacement or perhaps even with a 3-D printed version based on the patient's own tissue. Such artificial organs could make transplant waiting lists and immunosuppression a thing of the past. Supposing that this happens, what will the ongoing care of people with these implants involve? In particular, how will the need to maintain the functioning of artificial organs over an extended period…Read more
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326In the hands of machines? The future of aged careMinds and Machines 16 (2): 141-161. 2006.It is remarkable how much robotics research is promoted by appealing to the idea that the only way to deal with a looming demographic crisis is to develop robots to look after older persons. This paper surveys and assesses the claims made on behalf of robots in relation to their capacity to meet the needs of older persons. We consider each of the roles that has been suggested for robots in aged care and attempt to evaluate how successful robots might be in these roles. We do so from the perspect…Read more
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139Therapeutic Cloning and Reproductive LibertyJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 33 (2): 1-17. 2008.Concern for “reproductive liberty” suggests that decisions about embryos should normally be made by the persons who would be the genetic parents of the child that would be brought into existence if the embryo were brought to term. Therapeutic cloning would involve creating and destroying an embryo, which, if brought to term, would be the offspring of the genetic parents of the person undergoing therapy. I argue that central arguments in debates about parenthood and genetics therefore suggest tha…Read more
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265Genes, identity, and the expressivist critiqueIn Loane Skene and Janna Thompson (ed.), The Sorting Society, Cambridge University Press. 2008.In this paper, I explore the “expressivist critique” of the use of prenatal testing to select against the birth of persons with impairments. I begin by setting out the expressivist critique and then highlighting, through an investigation of an influential objection to this critique, the ways in which both critics and proponents of the use of technologies of genetic selection negotiate a difficult set of dilemmas surrounding the relationship between genes and identity. I suggest that we may be …Read more
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126The Turing triage testEthics and Information Technology 6 (4): 203-213. 2004.If, as a number of writers have predicted, the computers of the future will possess intelligence and capacities that exceed our own then it seems as though they will be worthy of a moral respect at least equal to, and perhaps greater than, human beings. In this paper I propose a test to determine when we have reached that point. Inspired by Alan Turing’s (1950) original “Turing test”, which argued that we would be justified in conceding that machines could think if they could fill the role of a …Read more
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91Cloning, parenthood, and genetic relatednessBioethics 20 (6). 2006.In this paper I examine what I take to be the best case for reproductive human cloning, as a medical procedure designed to overcome infertility, and argue that it founders on an irresolvable tension in the attitude towards the importance of being ‘genetically related’ to our children implied in the desire to clone. Except in the case where couples are cloning a child they have previously conceived naturally, cloning is unable to establish the right sort of genetic relation to make couples the pa…Read more
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31The Dead Donor Rule and Means-End ReasoningCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 21 (1): 141-146. 2012.
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134Barbarians at the gatesIn Igor Primoratz (ed.), Politics and Morality, Palgrave-macmillan. 2007.The phenomenon of “dirty hands” is often held to be endemic to political life. Success in politics—it has been argued—requires a willingness to sacrifice our moral principles in order to pursue worthwhile goals. I argue that the tension between morality and politics goes deeper than this. The very existence of “politics” requires that morality is routinely violated because political community, within which political discourse is possible, is based on denying the moral claims of non-members. P…Read more
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165Liberalism and eugenicsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (3). 2011.‘Liberal eugenics’ has emerged as the most popular position amongst philosophers writing in the contemporary debate about the ethics of human enhancement. This position has been most clearly articulated by Nicholas Agar, who argues that the ‘new’ liberal eugenics can avoid the repugnant consequences associated with eugenics in the past. Agar suggests that parents should be free to make only those interventions into the genetics of their children that will benefit them no matter what way of life …Read more
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30Harris, harmed states, and sexed bodiesJournal of Medical Ethics 37 (5): 276-279. 2011.This paper criticises John Harris's attempts to defend an account of a ‘harmed condition’ that can stand independently of intuitions about what is ‘normal’. I argue that because Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, determining whether a particular individual is in a harmed condition or not will sometimes require making reference to the normal capacities of their sex. Consequently, Harris's account is unable to play the role he intends for it in debates about the ethics of human enhancem…Read more
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122Imposing Genetic DiversityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (6): 2-10. 2015.The idea that a world in which everyone was born “perfect” would be a world in which something valuable was missing often comes up in debates about the ethics of technologies of prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis . This thought plays an important role in the “disability critique” of prenatal testing. However, the idea that human genetic variation is an important good with significant benefits for society at large is also embraced by a wide range of figures writing in the bioe…Read more
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432War without virtue?In Bradley Jay Strawser (ed.), Killing By Remote Control, Oxford University Press. pp. 84-105. 2013.A number of recent and influential accounts of military ethics have argued that there exists a distinctive “role morality” for members of the armed services—a “warrior code.” A “good warrior” is a person who cultivates and exercises the “martial” or “warrior” virtues. By transforming combat into a “desk job” that can be conducted from the safety of the home territory of advanced industrial powers without need for physical strength or martial valour, long-range robotic weapons, such as the “Preda…Read more
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49Enhancement and Obsolescence: Avoiding an "Enhanced Rat Race"Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 25 (3): 231-260. 2015.A claim about continuing technological progress plays an essential, if unacknowledged, role in the philosophical literature on “human enhancement.” I argue that—should it eventuate—continuous improvement in enhancement technologies may prove more bane than benefit. A rapid increase in the power of available enhancements would mean that each cohort of enhanced individuals will find itself in danger of being outcompeted by the next in competition for important social goods—a situation I…Read more
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3368Talking Sense about Political CorrectnessJournal of Australian Studies 73 119-133. 2002.In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one which itself is used mainly to silence dissenting po…Read more
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598Better than men?: Sex and the therapy/enhancement distinctionKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 20 (2). 2010.The normative significance of the distinction between therapy and enhancement has come under sustained philosophical attack in recent discussions of the ethics of shaping future persons by means of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and other advanced genetic technologies. In this paper, I argue that giving up the idea that the answer to the question as to whether a condition is “normal” should play a crucial role in assessing the ethics of genetic interventions has unrecognized and strongly coun…Read more
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163A Not‐So‐New EugenicsHastings Center Report 41 (1): 32-42. 2011.In Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (2007), John Harris argues that a proper concern for the welfare of future human beings implies that we are morally obligated to pursue enhancements. Similarly, in “Procreative Beneficience: Why We Should Select The Best Children” (2001) and in a number of subsequent publications, Julian Savulescu has suggested that we are morally obligated to use genetic (and other) technologies to produce the best children possible. In this pape…Read more
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42Sexism and human enhancementJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (12): 732-735. 2013.In this paper, I respond to recent criticisms, by Paula Casal, of my arguments about the implications of John Harris and Julian Savulescu's influential arguments for human enhancement for sex selection. I argue that, despite her protestations, her paper relies upon the idea that parents have a moral obligation to have children that will serve the interests of the nation. Casal’s use of dubious claims about inherent psychological differences between men and women to make her hypothetical case fo…Read more
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852Implants and Ethnocide: learning from the Cochlear implant controversyDisability and Society 25 (4): 455-466. 2010.This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in debates about genetic testing are themselves dese…Read more
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742Killer robotsJournal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1). 2007.The United States Army’s Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a “robot army” to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of a decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved in an atrocity of the sort that would normally be de…Read more
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117The Competition of Ideas: Market or Garden?Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 4 (2): 45-58. 2001.The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is an influential metaphor with widespread currency in debates about freedom of speech. We explore a number of ways competition between ideas might be described as occurring in a marketplace and find that none support the use of the metaphor. We suggest that an alternative metaphor, that of the ‘garden of ideas’, may offer more productive insights into issues surrounding the regulation of speech.
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87History and collective responsibilityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (3). 2000.In this paper I will argue that contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians can collectively be held responsible for past injustices committed against the Aboriginal peoples of this land. An examination of the role played by history in determining the nature of the present reveals both the temporal extension of the Australian community that confronts the question of responsibility for historical injustice and the ways in which we continue to participate in those same injustices. Because existing inj…Read more
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221Terraforming, vandalism and virtue ethicsIn Jai Galliott (ed.), Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, Ashgate. pp. 161-178. 2015.‘Terraforming’ is hypothetical climatic and geo-physical engineering of other planets on a grand scale, with the aim of turning the so-called ‘barren’ planets in our (or for that matter another) solar system into habitable earth-like eco-systems. Although terraforming sounds like an idea from science fiction (where it indeed has appeared), it has been seriously proposed as a future project for the human race. With such a technology we could colonise the solar system and perhaps eventually others…Read more
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305Drones, courage, and military cultureIn George R. Jr Lucas (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics, Routledge. pp. 380-394. 2015.In so far as long-range tele-operated weapons, such as the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, allow their operators to fight wars in what appears to be complete safety, thousands of kilometres removed from those whom they target and kill, it is unclear whether drone operators either require courage or have the opportunity to develop or exercise it. This chapter investigates the implications of the development of tele-operated warfare for the extent to which courage will remain central t…Read more
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15The Dead Donor Rule and Means-End Reasoning - A Reply to NapierCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 21 (1): 141-146. 2012.
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |