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22Friendship and role moralityIn Kim Chong Chong, Sor-Hoon Tan & C. L. Ten (eds.), The moral circle and the self: Chinese and Western approaches, Open Court. 2003.
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364Will the Real Moral Judgment Please Stand Up?Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (1): 77-96. 2009.The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgment…Read more
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7Normative agencyIn Catriona MacKenzie Kim Atkins (ed.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, Routledge. 2008.20 page
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86Mental Time Travel, Dynamic Evaluation, and Moral AgencyMind 126 (501): 259-268. 2017.Mental time travel is the ability to simulate alternative pasts and futures. It is often described as the ability to project a sense of self in the service of diachronic agency. It requires not only semantic representation but affective sampling of alternative futures. If people lose this ability for affective sampling their sense of self is diminished. They have less of a self to project hence are compromised as agents. If they cannot “feel the future” they cannot imaginatively inhabit it and h…Read more
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59Beyond dualism : a plea for an extended taxonomy of agency impairment in addictionAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (2): 56-57. 2012.Pickard (2012) claims that the neurobiological or disease model of addiction hinders the recovery of people because it undermines their feeling of self-efficacy and agency. Sub- stance users are “not aided by being treated as victims of a neurobiological disease, as opposed to agents of their own recovery” (40).Although Pickard acknowledges that claims of powerlessness or loss of agency can have a functional role in the self-narratives of substance users in excusing them from blame, she primaril…Read more
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46Kant claimed both that "moral feeling is the capacity to be affected by a moral judgment" and that moral motivation is motivation by principle. What are the psychological mechanism that could enable principles to motivate? This chapter develops in more detail a suggestion made elsewhere by the author that posits a connection between susceptibility to the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and moral motivation of a broadly Kantian kind. The chapter argues that the possession of principles is cons…Read more
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32Living With One's Choices Moral Reasoning In Vitro and In VivoIn Robyn Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning, Psychology Press. pp. 257. 2012.22 page
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50Autism, empathy and moral agencyPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 340-357. 2002.Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath's amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath's amoralism. How is emp…Read more
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63Friendship and the selfEthics 108 (3): 502-527. 1998.We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close or companion friendship…Read more
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16Lying, Narrative, and Truth ShareabilityAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (4): 86-87. 2012.2 page
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16The moral goal of treatment in cases of dual diagnosisIn John Kleinig & Stanley Einstein (eds.), Ethical challenges for intervening in drug use: policy, research and treatment issues, Oicj. pp. 409-36. 2006.Substance use and misuse occurs at a very high rate among people with mental health problems and the relationship between the two conditions is complex. In this paper we argue that treatment of substance use in dual diagnosis clients must begin from an understanding of the losses suffered by those with mental illness. We outline the fundamental condition of effective agency, unified agency, which is disrupted in mental illness and show how this is needed to secure access to central social and mo…Read more
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41Pleasure and addictionFrontiers in Psychiatry 4. 2013.What is the role and value of pleasure in addiction? Foddy and Savulescu have claimed that substance use is just pleasure-oriented behavior. They describe addiction as "strong appetites toward pleasure" and argue that addicts suffer in significant part because of strong social and moral disapproval of lives dominated by pleasure seeking. But such lives, they claim, can be autonomous and rational. The view they offer is largely in line with the choice model and opposed to a disease model of addic…Read more
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238Identity, control and responsibility: The case of Dissociative Identity DisorderPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 509-526. 2002.Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the pers…Read more
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32Neurosentimentalism and Moral AgencyMind 119 (475): 585-614. 2010.Metaethics has recently been confronted by evidence from cognitive neuroscience that tacit emotional processes play an essential causal role in moral judgement. Most neuroscientists, and some metaethicists, take this evidence to vindicate a version of metaethical sentimentalism. In this paper we argue that the ‘dual process’ model of cognition that frames the discussion within and without philosophy does not do justice to an important constraint on any theory of deliberation and judgement. Namel…Read more
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25IntroductionIn Fritz Allhoff, Jessica Wolfendale & Jeanette Kennett (eds.), Fashion - Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style, Wiley. 2011.This chapter contains sections titled: Who Cares about Fashion? Being Fashionable and Being Cool Fashion, Style, and Design Fashion, Identity, and Freedom Can We Be Ethical and Fashionable?
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60Friendship and moral dangerJournal of Philosophy 97 (5): 278-296. 2000.We focus here on some familiar kinds of cases of conflict between friendship and morality, and, on the basis of our account of the nature of friendship, argue for the following two claims: first, that in some cases where we are led morally astray by virtue of a relationship that makes its own demands on us, the relationship in question is properly called a friendship; second, that relationships of this kind are valuable in their own right.
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12What's the buzz? Undercover marketing and the corruption of friendshipJournal of Applied Philosophy 25 (1). 2008.Undercover marketing targets potential customers by concealing the commercial nature of an apparently social transaction. In a typical case an individual approaches a marketing target apparently to provide some information or advice about a product in a way that makes it seem like they are a fellow consumer. In another kind of case, a friend displays a product to you, and encourages its purchase, but fails to disclose their association with the marketing firm. We focus on this second type of cas…Read more
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195Mental disorder, moral agency, and the selfIn Bonnie Steinbock (ed.), The Oxford handbook of bioethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 90-113. 2007.A person suffering a mental illness or disorder may differ dramatically from his or her previous well self. Family and close friends who knew the person before the onset of illness tend to regard the illness as obscuring their loved one's true self and see the goal of treatment as the restoration of that self. ‘He is not really like this,’ they will say with increasing desperation. Treatment teams and others, who have no acquaintance with the person when well, respond to what they see in front o…Read more
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29Delusion, dissociation and identityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (1): 31-49. 2003.The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders. We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically ext…Read more
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155Mental impairment, moral understanding and criminal responsibility: Psychopathy and the purposes of punishmentInternational Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 (5): 425-443. 2004.We have argued here that to attribute criminal responsibility to psychopathic individuals is to ignore substantial and growing evidence that psychopathic individuals are significantly impaired in moral understanding. They do not appear to know why moral transgressions are wrong in the full sense required by the law. As morally blameless offenders, punishment as a basis for detention cannot be justified. Moreover, as there are currently no successful treatment programs for psychopathy, nor can de…Read more
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125Mental time travel, agency and responsibilityIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.We have argued elsewhere that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this chapter we explore the importance of mental time travel - our ordinary ability to mentally travel to temporal locations outside the present, involving both memory of our personal past and the ability to imagine ourselves in the future - to our agential capacities for planning and control. We suggest that in many individuals with…Read more
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57Reasons, emotion, and moral judgment in the psychopathIn Luca Malatesti & John McMillan (eds.), Responsibility and Psychopathy: Interfacing Law, Psychiatry and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2010.17 page
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9Imagining ReasonsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1): 181-192. 2011.In this article, I explore the implications of Karsten Stueber's account of imaginative resistance, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding described by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues. I suggest that Stueber's account allows us to redescribe the phenomenon as a failure of the folk psychological project of interpretation and so to challenge Haidt's metaethical conclusions. I close by considering some implications for moral deliberation and judgment in those, such as auti…Read more
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19Agency and responsibility: a common-sense moral psychologyOxford University Press. 2001.Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness…Read more
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |