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315Should we be afraid of medical AI?Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (8): 556-558. 2019.I analyse an argument according to which medical artificial intelligence represents a threat to patient autonomy—recently put forward by Rosalind McDougall in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The argument takes the case of IBM Watson for Oncology to argue that such technologies risk disregarding the individual values and wishes of patients. I find three problems with this argument: it confuses AI with machine learning; it misses machine learning’s potential for personalised medicine through big da…Read more
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221984 and philosophy, is resistance futile? (edited book)Open Court. 2018.Philosophers debate how Orwell's nightmare world compares to today's world of political acrimony and discontent.
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419Reproduktionstechnologien und Bionormative FamilienkonzeptionenIn Johannes Drerup & Gottfried Schweiger (eds.), Handbuch Philosophie der Kindheit, J.b. Metzler. 2019.
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6Ethics in Healthcare: A Philosophical IntroductionRowman & Littlefield International. 2018.Increasingly, students and professionals within healthcare are faced with difficult questions and decisions: this book meet those ethical needs by providing an accessible guide to ethical theories and practices, which does not presuppose any background or training in philosophy.
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160Refuting a Frankfurtian Objection to Frankfurt-Type CounterexamplesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2). 2010.In this paper I refute an apparently obvious objection to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities according to which if in the counterfactual scenario the agent does not act, then the agent could have avoided acting in the actual scenario. And because what happens in the counterfactual scenario cannot count as the relevant agent's actions given the sort of external control that agent is under, then we can ground responsibility on that agent having been able to …Read more
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175Simply, falseAnalysis 69 (1). 2009.According to the Simple View of intentional action famously refuted by Bratman , φ-ing is intentional only if the agent intended to φ. In this paper I show that none of five different objections to Bratman's counter-example – McCann's , Garcia's , Sverdlik's , Stout's , and Adams's – works. Therefore Bratman's contention that SV is false still stands
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154Rational constraints and the Simple ViewAnalysis 70 (3). 2010.According to the Simple View of intentional action, I have intentionally switched on the light only if I intended to switch on the light. The idea that intending to is necessary for intentionally -ing has been challenged by Bratman (1984, 1987) with a counter-example in which a videogame player is trying to hit either of two targets while knowing that she cannot hit both targets. When a target is hit, the game finishes. And if both targets are about to be hit simultaneously, the game shuts down…Read more
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266Frankfurt counterexample defendedAnalysis 71 (1). 2011.Frankfurt sets out to refute the principle according to which ‘a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise’ . Frankfurt devises a counterexample in which an agent is intuitively responsible even though she could not have done otherwise: Suppose someone – Black, let us say – wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until …Read more
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494I love my children: am I racist? On the wish to be biologically related to one’s childrenJournal of Medical Ethics 44 (12): 814-816. 2018.Is the wish to be biologically related to your children legitimate? Here, I respond to an argument in support of a negative answer to this question according to which a preference towards having children one is biologically related to is analogous to a preference towards associating with members of one’s own race. I reject this analogy, mainly on the grounds that only the latter constitutes discrimination; still, I conclude that indeed a preference towards children one is biologically related to…Read more
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147Abortion: Strong's counterexamples failJournal of Medical Ethics 35 (5): 304-305. 2009.This paper shows that the counterexamples proposed by Strong in 2008 in the Journal of Medical Ethics to Marquis’s argument against abortion fail. Strong’s basic idea is that there are cases — for example, terminally ill patients — where killing an adult human being is prima facie seriously morally wrong even though that human being is not being deprived of a "valuable future". So Marquis would be wrong in thinking that what is essential about the wrongness of killing an adult human being is tha…Read more
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257Knowing Future ContingentsLogos and Episteme 3 (1): 43-50. 2012.This paper argues that we know the future by applying a recent solution of the problem of future contingents to knowledge attributions about the future. MacFarlane has put forward a version of assessment-context relativism that enables us to assign a truth value 'true' (or 'false') to future contingents such as There Will Be A Sea Battle Tomorrow. Here I argue that the same solution can be applied to knowledge attributions about the future by dismissing three disanalogies between the case of fut…Read more
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485Drones and the Threshold for Waging WarPolitik. forthcoming.I argue that, if drones make waging war easier, the reason why they do so may not be the one commonly assumed within the philosophical debate – namely the promised reduction in casualties on either side – but a more complicated one which has little to do with concern for one’s own soldiers or, for that matter, the enemy; and a lot more to do with the political intricacies of international relations and domestic politics; I use the example of the Obama Administration’s drone policies to illustrat…Read more
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2344Sexual Rights and DisabilityJournal of Medical Ethics 37 (3): 158-161. 2011.I argue against Appel's recent proposal – in this JOURNAL – that there is a fundamental human right to sexual pleasure, and that therefore the sexual pleasure of severely disabled people should be publicly funded – by thereby partially legalizing prostitution. I propose an alternative that does not need to pose a new positive human right; does not need public funding; does not need the legalization of prostitution; and that would offer a better experience to the severely disabled: charitable non…Read more
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711Avoiding and Alternate PossibilitiesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (5): 1001-1007. 2014.Greg Janzen has recently criticised my defence of Frankfurt’s counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by arguing that Jones avoids killing Smith in the counterfactual scenario. Janzen’s argument consists in introducing a new thought-experiment which is supposed to be analogous to Frankfurt’s and where the agent is supposed to avoid A-ing. Here I argue that Janzen’s argument fails on two counts, because his new scenario is not analogous to Frankfurt’s and because the agent in h…Read more
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1237I offer eight arguments against the Doctrine of Double Effect, a normative principle according to which in pursuing the good it is sometimes morally permissible to bring about some evil as a side-effect or merely foreseen consequence: the same evil would not be morally justified as an intended means or end.
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3570Trolleys and Double Effect in Experimental EthicsIn Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl (eds.), Experimental Ethics, Palgrave-macmillan. forthcoming.I analyse the relationship between the Doctrine of Double Effect and the Trolley Problem: the former offers a solution for the latter only on the premise that killing the one in Bystander at the Switch is permissible. Here I offer both empirical and theoretical arguments against the permissibility of killing the one: firstly, I present data from my own empirical studies according to which the intuition that killing the one is permissible is neither widespread nor stable; secondly, I defend a nor…Read more
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1276Habits, Nudges, and ConsentAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (6). 2013.I distinguish between 'hard nudges' and 'soft nudges', arguing that it is possible to show that the latter can be compatible with informed consent - as Cohen has recently suggested; but that the real challenge is the compatibility of the former. Hard nudges are the more effective nudges because they work on less than conscious mechanisms such as those underlying our habits: whether those influences - which are often beyond the subject's awareness - can be reconciled with informed consent in heal…Read more
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738Besser ist besser? Enhancement der Moral aus einer handlungstheoretischen PerspektiveIn Raphael van Riel, Ezio Di Nucci & Jan Schildmann (eds.), Enhancement der Moral, Mentis. forthcoming.Enhancement ist eine tolle Sache: dieser Begriff ist notwendigerweise positiv (ein bisschen wie der traditionelle Gottbegriff), so dass wenn eine Änderung keine richtige Verbesserung hervorbringt, es auch kein richtiges Enhancement gewesen ist: sehr praktisch. Wie könnte man unter diesen Umständen überhaupt gegen Enhancement sein? Beim Enhancement geht es nicht mal um das plausible aber nicht unumstrittene „mehr ist besser“; vielmehr geht es um das tautologische „besser ist besser“.
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195On how to interpret the role of the future within the abortion debateJournal of Medical Ethics 35 (10): 651-652. 2009.In a previous paper, I had argued that Strong’s counterexamples to Marquis’s argument against abortion—according to which terminating fetuses is wrong because it deprives them of a valuable future—fail either because they have no bearing on Marquis’s argument or because they make unacceptable claims about what constitutes a valuable future. In this paper I respond to Strong’s criticism of my argument according to which I fail to acknowledge that Marquis uses "future like ours" and "valuable futu…Read more
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858MindlessnessCambridge Scholars Press. 2013.Thinking is overrated: golfers perform best when distracted and under pressure; firefighters make the right calls without a clue as to why; and you are yourself ill advised to look at your steps as you go down the stairs, or to try and remember your pin number before typing it in. Just do it, mindlessly. Both empirical psychologists and the common man have long worked out that thinking is often a bad idea, but philosophers still hang on to an intellectualist picture of human action. This book ch…Read more
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2045Double Effect and Terror BombingIn T. Spitzley, M. Hoeltje & W. Spohn (eds.), Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun? Sektionsbeiträge des achten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V., Gap. 2013.I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber which dominates this debate is underdetermined in three crucial respects: (1) the non-psychological worlds of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; (2) the psychologies of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; and (3) the structure of the thought-experiment, especially in relation to its sim…Read more
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789Withdrawing artificial nutrition and patients' interestsJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (9): 555-556. 2013.I argue that the arguments brought by Counsel for M to the English Court of Protection are morally problematic in prioritising subjective interests that are the result of ‘consistent autonomous thought’ over subjective interests that are the result of a more limited cognitive perspective
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2394Aristotle and Double EffectJournal of Ancient Philosophy 8 (1): 20. 2014.There are some interesting similarities between Aristotle’s ‘mixed actions’ in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics and the actions often thought to be justifiable with the Doctrine of Double Effect. Here I analyse these similarities by comparing Aristotle’s examples of mixed actions with standard cases from the literature on double effect such as, amongst others, strategic bombing, the trolley problem, and craniotomy. I find that, despite some common features such as the dilemmatic structure and …Read more
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205Ethics Without IntentionBloomsbury Academic. 2014.Ethics Without Intention tackles the questions raised by difficult moral dilemmas by providing a critical analysis of double effect and its most common ethical and political applications. The book discusses the philosophical distinction between intended harm and foreseen but unintended harm. This distinction, which, according to the doctrine of double effect, makes a difference to the moral justification of actions, is widely applied to some of the most controversial ethical and political questi…Read more
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42Pushing the Margins of Responsibility: Lessons from Parks’ Somnambulistic KillingNeuroethics 11 (1): 35-46. 2017.David Shoemaker has claimed that a binary approach to moral responsibility leaves out something important, namely instances of marginal agency, cases where agents seem to be eligible for some responsibility responses but not others. In this paper we endorse and extend Shoemaker’s approach by presenting and discussing one more case of marginal agency not yet covered by Shoemaker or in the other literature on moral responsibility. Our case is that of Kenneth Parks, a Canadian man who drove a long …Read more
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759IVF, same-sex couples and the value of biological tiesJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (12): 784-787. 2016.Ought parents, in general, to value being biologically tied to their children? Is it important, in particular, that both parents be biologically tied to their children? I will address these fundamental questions by looking at a fairly new practice within IVF treatments, so-called IVF-with-ROPA ( Reception of Oocytes from Partner ), which allows lesbian couples to „share motherhood‟ with one partner providing the eggs while the other becomes pregnant. I believe that IVF-with-ROPA is, just like o…Read more
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895Broadening the future of value account of the wrongness of killingMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (4): 587-590. 2015.On Don Marquis’s future of value account of the wrongness of killing, ‘what makes it wrong to kill those individuals we all believe it is wrong to kill, is that killing them deprives them of their future of value’. Marquis has recently argued for a narrow interpretation of his future of value account of the wrongness of killing and against the broad interpretation that I had put forward in response to Carson Strong. In this article I argue that the narrow view is problematic because it violates …Read more
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3442Priming Effects and Free WillInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (5): 725-734. 2012.I argue that the empirical literature on priming effects does not warrant nor suggest the conclusion, drawn by prominent psychologists such as J. A. Bargh, that we have no free will or less free will than we might think. I focus on a particular experiment by Bargh – the ‘elderly’ stereotype case in which subjects that have been primed with words that remind them of the stereotype of the elderly walk on average slower out of the experiment’s room than control subjects – and I show that we cannot …Read more
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