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394The Significance of the PastJournal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (4): 582-600. 2021.The past is deeply important to many of us. But our concern about history can seem puzzling and needs justification. After all, the past cannot be changed: we can help the living needy, but the tears we shed for the long dead victims of past tragedies help no one. Attempts to justify our concern about history typically take one of two opposing forms. It is assumed either that such concern must be justified in instrumental or otherwise self-centered and present-centered terms or that our interest…Read more
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372Disaster and DebateJournal of Moral Philosophy 15 (5): 516-544. 2018.Faced with a national tragedy, citizens respond in different ways. Some will initiate debate about the possible connections between this tragedy and broader moral and political issues. But others often complain that this is too early, that it is inappropriate to debate such larger issues while ‘the bodies are still warm’. This paper critically examines the grounds for such a complaint. We consider different interpretations of the complaint—cynical, epistemic and ethical—and argue that it can be …Read more
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372The Concept of Harm and the Significance of NormalityJournal of Applied Philosophy 29 (3): 318. 2012.Many believe that severe intellectual impairment, blindness or dying young amount to serious harm and disadvantage. It is also increasingly denied that it matters, from a moral point of view, whether something is biologically normal to humans. We show that these two claims are in serious tension. It is hard explain how, if we do not ascribe some deep moral significance to human nature or biological normality, we could distinguish severe intellectual impairment or blindness from the vast list of …Read more
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361Importance, Value, and Causal ImpactJournal of Moral Philosophy 19 (6): 577-601. 2021.Many believe that because we are so small, we must be utterly insignificant on the cosmic scale. But whether this is so depends on what it takes to be important. On one view, what matters for importance is the difference to value that something makes. On this view, what determines our cosmic importance is not our size, but what else of value is out there. But a rival view also seems plausible: that importance requires sufficient causal impact on the relevant scale; since we have no such impact o…Read more
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359Evolution, Genetic Engineering, and Human EnhancementPhilosophy and Technology 25 (4): 439-458. 2012.There are many ways that biological theory can inform ethical discussions of genetic engineering and biomedical enhancement. In this essay, we highlight some of these potential contributions, and along the way provide a synthetic overview of the papers that comprise this special issue. We begin by comparing and contrasting genetic engineering with programs of selective breeding that led to the domestication of plants and animals, and we consider how genetic engineering differs from other contemp…Read more
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354On the Wrong Track: Process and Content in Moral PsychologyMind and Language 27 (5): 519-545. 2012.According to Joshua Greene’s influential dual process model of moral judgment, different modes of processing are associated with distinct moral outputs: automatic processing with deontological judgment, and controlled processing with utilitarian judgment. This paper aims to clarify and assess Greene’s model. I argue that the proposed tie between process and content is based on a misinterpretation of the evidence, and that the supposed evidence for controlled processing in utilitarian judgment is…Read more
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347Should Atheists Wish That There Were No Gratuitous Evils?Faith and Philosophy 38 (4): 460-483. 2021.Many atheists argue that because gratuitous evil exists, God (probably) doesn’t. But doesn’t this commit atheists to wishing that God did exist, and to the pro-theist view that the world would have been better had God existed? This doesn’t follow. I argue that if all that evil still remains but is just no longer gratuitous, then, from an atheist perspective, that wouldn’t have been better. And while a counterfactual from which that evil is literally absent would have been impersonally better, it…Read more
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322Disease, Normality, and Current Pharmacological Moral ModificationPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (2): 135-137. 2014.Response to commentary. We are grateful to Crockett and Craigie for their interesting remarks on our paper. We accept Crockett’s claim that there is a need for caution in drawing inferences about patient groups from work on healthy volunteers in the laboratory. However, we believe that the evidence we cited established a strong presumption that many of the patients who are routinely taking a medication, including many people properly prescribed the medication for a medical condition, have mora…Read more
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313Feeling pain for the very first time: The normative knowledge argumentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (1): 20-49. 2009.In this paper I present a new argument against internalist theories of practical reason. My argument is inpired by Frank Jackson's celebrated Knowledge Argument. I ask what will happen when an agent experiences pain for the first time. Such an agent, I argue, will gain new normative knowledge that internalism cannot explain. This argument presents a similar difficulty for other subjectivist and constructivist theories of practical reason and value. I end by suggesting that some debates in meta-e…Read more
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309Brain damage and the moral significance of consciousnessJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (1): 6-26. 2009.Neuroimaging studies of brain-damaged patients diagnosed as in the vegetative state suggest that the patients might be conscious. This might seem to raise no new ethical questions given that in related disputes both sides agree that evidence for consciousness gives strong reason to preserve life. We question this assumption. We clarify the widely held but obscure principle that consciousness is morally significant. It is hard to apply this principle to difficult cases given that philosophers of …Read more
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266The Value Question in MetaphysicsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 27-55. 2012.Much seems to be at stake in metaphysical questions about, for example, God, free will or morality. One thing that could be at stake is the value of the universe we inhabit—how good or bad it is. We can think of competing philosophical positions as describing possibilities, ways the world might turn out to be, and to which value can be assigned. When, for example, people hope that God exists, or fear that we do not possess free will, they express attitudes towards these possibilities, attitudes …Read more
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257The trouble with being sincereCanadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2): 215-234. 2011.Questions about sincerity play a central role in our lives. But what makes an assertion insincere? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it has sometimes been taken to be. Until recently the dominant answer has been that a speaker makes an insincere assertion if and only if he does not believe the proposition asserted. There are, however, persuasive counterexamples to this simple account. It has been proposed instead that an insincere assertion that…Read more
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210Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decrease…Read more
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202Evolution and ImpartialityEthics 124 (2): 327-341. 2014.Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer argue that evolutionary considerations can resolve Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason because such considerations debunk moral views that give weight to self-interested or partial considerations but cannot threaten the principle of universal benevolence. I argue that even if we grant these claims, this appeal to evolution is ultimately self-defeating. De Lazari-Radek and Singer face a dilemma. Either their evolutionary argument against partial moral…Read more
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196Mastery Without Mystery: Why there is no Promethean Sin in EnhancementJournal of Applied Philosophy 28 (4): 355-368. 2011.Several authors have suggested that we cannot fully grapple with the ethics of human enhancement unless we address neglected questions about our place in the world, questions that verge on theology but can be pursued independently of religion. A prominent example is Michael Sandel, who argues that the deepest objection to enhancement is that it expresses a Promethean drive to mastery which deprives us of openness to the unbidden and leaves us with nothing to affirm outside our own wills. Sandel'…Read more
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157Normal Human Variation: Refocussing the Enhancement DebateBioethics 29 (2): 133-143. 2013.This article draws attention to several common mistakes in thinking about biomedical enhancement, mistakes that are made even by some supporters of enhancement. We illustrate these mistakes by examining objections that John Harris has recently raised against the use of pharmacological interventions to directly modulate moral decision-making. We then apply these lessons to other influential figures in the debate about enhancement. One upshot of our argument is that many considerations presented a…Read more
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146‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater goodCognition 134 (C): 193-209. 2015.
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142Non-identity, self-defeat, and attitudes to future childrenPhilosophical Studies 145 (2): 193-214. 2009.Although most people believe that it is morally wrong to intentionally create children who have an impairment, it is widely held that we cannot criticize such procreative choices unless we find a solution to Parfit’s non-identity problem. I argue that we can. Jonathan Glover has recently argued that, in certain circumstances, such choices would be self-defeating even if morally permissible. I argue that although the scope of Glover’s argument is too limited, it nevertheless directs attention to …Read more
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133Disability: a welfarist approachClinical Ethics 6 (1): 45-51. 2011.In this paper, we offer a new account of disability. According to our account, some state of a person's biology or psychology is a disability if that state makes it more likely that a person's life will get worse, in terms of his or her own wellbeing, in a given set of social and environmental circumstances. Unlike the medical model of disability, our welfarist approach does not tie disability to deviation from normal species’ functioning, nor does it understand disability in essentialist terms.…Read more
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126Enhancing Human Capabilities (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2011.In general, to enhance something is to raise that thing in degree, intensity, magnitude, or in some sense improve upon it.2 In this context, we are concerned with enhancements, ie amplifications or extensions, of human capabilities, ...
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107The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements should be considered permissible for individuals with no particular “medical” disadvantage along any of the dimensions of interest. Less frequently addressed in the literature, however, is the fact that sometimes the _diminishment_ of a capacity o…Read more
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100The Welfarist Account of DisabilityIn Kimberley Brownlee & Adam Cureton (eds.), Disability and Disadvantage, Oxford University Press. pp. 14-53. 2009.
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87Neuroethics is an interdisciplinary field that arose in response to novel ethical challenges posed by advances in neuroscience. Historically, neuroethics has provided an opportunity to synergize different disciplines, notably proposing a two-way dialogue between an ‘ethics of neuroscience’ and a ‘neuroscience of ethics’. However, questions surface as to whether a ‘neuroscience of ethics’ is a useful and unified branch of research and whether it can actually inform or lead to theoretical insights…Read more
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78Brain damage and the moral significance of consciousnessJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (1): 6-26. 2009.Neuroimaging studies of brain-damaged patients diagnosed as in the vegetative state suggest that the patients might be conscious. This might seem to raise no new ethical questions given that in related disputes both sides agree that evidence for consciousness gives strong reason to preserve life. We question this assumption. We clarify the widely held but obscure principle that consciousness is morally significant. It is hard to apply this principle to difficult cases given that philosophers of …Read more
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77Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2007.Comprising specially commissioned essays from some of the most significant contributors to the field, this volume provides a uniquely authoritative and thorough survey of the main lines of Wittgenstein scholarship over the past 50 years, tracing the history and current trends as well as anticipating the future shape of work on Wittgenstein. The first collection of its kind, this volume presents a range of perspectives on the different approaches to the philosophy of Wittgenstein Written by leadi…Read more
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74“Neglected Personhood” and Neglected Questions: Remarks on the Moral Significance of ConsciousnessAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (9). 2008.
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73Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgmentSocial Neuroscience 10 (5): 551-560. 2015.Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. However, it has been previously shown that some sacrificial dilemmas fail to present a genuine contrast betwe…Read more
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72Lay attitudes toward deception in medicine: Theoretical considerations and empirical evidenceAJOB Empirical Bioethics 7 (1): 31-38. 2016.Background: There is a lack of empirical data on lay attitudes toward different sorts of deception in medicine. However, lay attitudes toward deception should be taken into account when we consider whether deception is ever permissible in a medical context. The objective of this study was to examine lay attitudes of U.S. citizens toward different sorts of deception across different medical contexts. Methods: A one-time online survey was administered to U.S. users of the Amazon “Mechanical Turk” …Read more
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71The Value of Sex in Procreative ReasonsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 10 (7): 22-24. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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65Worth living or worth dying? The views of the general public about allowing disabled children to dieJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (1): 7-15. 2020.BackgroundDecisions about withdrawal of life support for infants have given rise to legal battles between physicians and parents creating intense media attention. It is unclear how we should evaluate when life is no longer worth living for an infant. Public attitudes towards treatment withdrawal and the role of parents in situations of disagreement have not previously been assessed.MethodsAn online survey was conducted with a sample of the UK public to assess public views about the benefit of li…Read more
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Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |