-
48Love Addiction: Reply to Jenkins and LevyPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (1): 101-103. 2017.We thank Carrie Jenkins and Neil Levy for their thoughtful comments on our article about love and addiction. Although we do not have room for a comprehensive reply, we will touch on a few main issues.Jenkins points out, correctly in our view, that the word ‘addiction’ can trigger “connotations of reduced autonomy.” It may therefore be used, she argues, to “excuse” violent or otherwise harmful behaviors—disproportionately carried out by men—within the context of romantic relationships. Debates ab…Read more
-
1778If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical BreakupAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (11): 3-17. 2013.“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even ins…Read more
-
34Binocularity in Bioethics—and Beyond: A Review of Erik Parens, Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking (review)American Journal of Bioethics 16 (2): 3-6. 2016.
-
104Addicted to Love: What Is Love Addiction and When Should It Be Treated?Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (1): 77-92. 2017.By nature we are all addicted to love... meaning we want it, seek it and have a hard time not thinking about it. We need attachment to survive and we instinctively seek connection, especially romantic connection. [But] there is nothing dysfunctional about wanting love.Throughout the ages, love has been rendered as an excruciating passion. Ovid was the first to proclaim: “I can’t live with or without you”—a locution made famous to modern ears by the Irish band U2. Contemporary film expresses a si…Read more
-
79The Benefits and Risks of Quantified Relationship Technologies: Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Quantified Relationship”American Journal of Bioethics 18 (2): 3-6. 2018.The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article,…Read more
-
4363The Quantified RelationshipAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (2): 3-19. 2018.The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article,…Read more
-
221Generative AI entails a credit–blame asymmetryNature Machine Intelligence 5 (5): 472-475. 2023.Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.
-
52Normality and the Treatment-Enhancement DistinctionNeuroethics 16 (2): 1-14. 2023.There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, us…Read more
-
515Recognizing the Diversity of Cognitive EnhancementsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4): 250-253. 2020.
-
31Toward a Broader Psychedelic BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 126-129. 2023.Peterson et al. (2023) present a range of ethical issues that arise when considering the use of psychedelic substances within medicine. But psychedelics are, by their nature, boundary-dissolving, a...
-
94Ethical Issues Regarding Nonsubjective Psychedelics as Standard of CareCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (4): 464-471. 2022.Evidence suggests that psychedelics bring about their therapeutic outcomes in part through the subjective or qualitative effects they engender and how the individual interprets the resulting experiences. However, psychedelics are contraindicated for individuals who have been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses, on the grounds that these subjective effects may be disturbing or otherwise counter-therapeutic. Substantial resources are therefore currently being devoted to creating psychedelic su…Read more
-
216Evaluating Tradeoffs between Autonomy and Wellbeing in Supported Decision MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (11): 21-24. 2021.
-
Psychedelic Moral EnhancementIn Michael Hauskeller & Lewis Coyne (eds.), Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
-
The child's right to bodily integrityIn David Edmonds (ed.), Ethics and the Contemporary World, Routledge. 2019.
-
27Medical ethics and the climate change emergencyJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (12): 939-940. 2022.The editors of the _Journal of Medical Ethics_ support the call of the UK Health Alliance on Climate for urgent action to ensure that the current Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries’. 1 As they note ‘Africa has suffered disproportionately although it has done little to cause the crisis’. The burden of climate change has thus far fallen disproportionately on Global South countr…Read more
-
328Bioethics, Experimental ApproachesIn M. Sellers & S. Kirste (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Springer. pp. 279-286. 2023.This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi”. Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-…Read more
-
21Against Externalism in Capacity Assessment—Why Apparently Harmful Treatment Refusals Should Not Be Decisive for Finding Patients IncompetentAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (10): 65-70. 2022.Pickering et al. argue that patients who refuse doctor-recommended treatments should in some cases be deemed incompetent to decide about their own medical care—in part because of their decis...
-
29Non-therapeutic penile circumcision of minors: current controversies in UK law and medical ethicsClinical Ethics 18 (1): 36-54. 2023.The current legal status and medical ethics of routine or religious penile circumcision of minors is a matter of ongoing controversy in many countries. We focus on the United Kingdom as an illustrative example, giving a detailed analysis of the most recent British Medical Association guidance from 2019. We argue that the guidance paints a confused and conflicting portrait of the law and ethics of the procedure in the UK context, reflecting deeper, unresolved moral and legal tensions surrounding …Read more
-
270How to Use AI Ethically for Ethical Decision-MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (7): 1-3. 2022.
-
18EndosexJournal of Medical Ethics 49 (3): 225-226. 2023.Endosex, in contrast to intersex, refers to innate physical sex characteristics judged to fall within the broad range of what is considered normative or typical for ‘binary’ female or male bodies by the medical field, or to persons with such characteristics1 (p. 437). In this short contribution, we explain the origins and increasing use of this little-known term and discuss its practical and ethical relevance to medicine as well as to scholarship from a range of disciplines concerned with indivi…Read more
-
344Experimental Philosophical Bioethics and Normative InferenceTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3-4): 91-111. 2021.This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situ…Read more
-
3549Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on DrugsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (4): 4-19. 2021.Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational…Read more
-
36New Findings on Unconsented Intimate Exams Suggest Racial Bias and Gender ParityHastings Center Report 52 (2): 7-9. 2022.Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 7-9, March‐April 2022.
-
35Meta-surrogate decision making and artificial intelligenceJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (5): 287-289. 2022.How shall we decide for others who cannot decide for themselves? And who—or what, in the case of artificial intelligence — should make the decision? The present issue of the journal tackles several interrelated topics, many of them having to do with surrogate decision making. For example, the feature article by Jardas et al 1 explores the potential use of artificial intelligence to predict incapacitated patients’ likely treatment preferences based on their sociodemographic characteristics, raisi…Read more
-
32Broad Medical Uncertainty and the ethical obligation for opennessSynthese 200 (2): 1-29. 2022.This paper argues that there exists a collective epistemic state of ‘Broad Medical Uncertainty’ regarding the effectiveness of many medical interventions. We outline the features of BMU, and describe some of the main contributing factors. These include flaws in medical research methodologies, bias in publication practices, financial and other conflicts of interest, and features of how evidence is translated into practice. These result in a significant degree of uncertainty regarding the effectiv…Read more
-
26Studying Vulnerable Populations Through an Epigenetics Lens: Proceed with CautionCanadian Journal of Bioethics / Revue canadienne de bioéthique 5 (1). 2022.Epigenetics – the study of mechanisms that influence and modify gene expression – is providing unique insights into how an individual’s social and physical environment impact the body at a molecular level, particularly in populations that experience stigmatization and trauma. Researchers are employing epigenetic studies to illuminate how epigenetic modifications lead to imbalances in health outcomes for vulnerable populations. However, the investigation of factors that render a population epigen…Read more
-
65Enhancing GenderJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 19 (2): 225-237. 2022.Transgender healthcare faces a dilemma. On the one hand, access to certain medical interventions, including hormone treatments or surgeries, where desired, may be beneficial or even vital for some gender dysphoric trans people. But on the other hand, access to medical interventions typically requires a diagnosis, which, in turn, seems to imply the existence of a pathological state—something that many transgender people reject as a false and stigmatizing characterization of their experience or id…Read more
-
301Are Generational Welfare Trades Always Unjust?American Journal of Bioethics 20 (9): 70-72. 2020.In their thoughtful article, Malm and Navin (2020) raise concerns about a potentially unjust generational welfare tradeoff between children and adults when it comes to chicken pox. We share their c...
-
411Evaluating Tradeoffs between Autonomy and Wellbeing in Supported Decision MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (11): 21-24. 2021.A core challenge for contemporary bioethics is how to address the tension between respecting an individual’s autonomy and promoting their wellbeing when these ideals seem to come into conflict (Not...
-
98Experimental Philosophical Bioethics of Personal IdentityIn Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self, Bloomsbury. pp. 183-202. 2022.The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more re…Read more
Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Experimental Philosophy: Bioethics |