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3What is Addiction?In K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Graham, John Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini & Tim Thornton (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychiatry, Oxford University Press. 2013.Variation in addiction suggests that a good definition will be précising: it should serve a purpose. The authors canvass the various purposes served by a definition of addiction in psychiatric, social, legal, economic, interpersonal and scientific contexts. They argue that addiction is a strong and habitual want that significantly reduces control and leads to significant harm. What counts as significant varies relative to purpose and context. The authors offer a basic account of the nature of co…Read more
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35A Personalized Patient Preference Predictor for Substituted Judgments in Healthcare: Technically Feasible and Ethically DesirableAmerican Journal of Bioethics 1-14. forthcoming.When making substituted judgments for incapacitated patients, surrogates often struggle to guess what the patient would want if they had capacity. Surrogates may also agonize over having the (sole) responsibility of making such a determination. To address such concerns, a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) has been proposed that would use an algorithm to infer the treatment preferences of individual patients from population-level data about the known preferences of people with similar demographi…Read more
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15Who did it? Moral wrongness for us and them in the UK, US, and BrazilPhilosophical Psychology. forthcoming.Morality has traditionally been described in terms of an impartial and objective “moral law”, and moral psychological research has largely followed in this vein, focusing on abstract moral judgments. But might our moral judgments be shaped not just by what the action is, but who is doing it? We looked at ratings of moral wrongness, manipulating whether the person doing the action was a friend, a refugee, or a stranger. We looked at these ratings across various moral foundations, and conducted th…Read more
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1Should responsibility affect who gets the kidney?In Ben Davies, Gabriel De Marco, Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Responsibility and Healthcare, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 35-60. 2024.When two people need a kidney transplant, but only one kidney is available, we need to decide who gets it. If one of the potential recipients needs the kidney because of their own voluntary behavior, but the other is not at all responsible for needing a kidney, then we need to decide whether this fault should be a consideration in favor of the other patient getting the kidney. While there has been considerable philosophical debate on this issue, there is far less research into the views of the p…Read more
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29Neuroscience and philosophy (edited book)The MIT Press. 2022.State-of-the-art collection on how neuroscience and philosophy can mutually illuminate each other on core psychological concepts. An interdisciplinary collection in the best sense.
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3R. M. Hare (1919–)In A. P. Martinich & David Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Blackwell. 2001.This chapter contains sections titled: Definition of moral judgments Prescriptivism Universalizability Rationality The master argument Utilitarianism.
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10Playing by the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule‐based Decision‐Making in Law and in LifePhilosophical Books 33 (2): 116-118. 1992.
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Mixed-up meta-ethicsIn Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2009.
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23Understanding arguments: an introduction to informal logicCengage Learning. 2015.ADVANGEBOOKS - UNDERSTANDING ARGUMENTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO INFORMAL LOGIC, 9E shows readers how to construct arguments in everyday life, using everyday language. In addition, this easy-to-read textbook also devotes three chapters to the formal aspects of logic including forms of argument, as well as propositional, categorical, and quantificational logic. Plus, this edition helps readers apply informal logic to legal, moral, scientific, religious, and philosophical scenarios, too. Important Notic…Read more
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7Think again: how to reason and argue--and whyOxford University Press. 2018.Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today, from countries refusing to negotiate, to politicians pandering to their base. Social media has produced a virulent world where extreme positions dominate. There is much demonization of the other side, very little progress is made, and the end result is further widening of positions. How did this happen, and wha…Read more
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Partisanship, humility, and epistemic polarizationIn Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2020.
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35Free will: philosophers and neuroscientists in conversation (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2022.What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have been debating these questions for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of their own. Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? What are intentional actions? Do contemporary developments in neuroscience rule out free will or, instead, illuminate how it works? Over the past few years, neuroscientists and p…Read more
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40How Stable are Moral Judgments?Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (4): 1377-1403. 2023.Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series o…Read more
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21Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedomConsciousness and Cognition 101 103318. 2022.
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19Which features of patients are morally relevant in ventilator triage? A survey of the UK publicBMC Medical Ethics 23 (1): 1-14. 2022.BackgroundIn the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health systems, including those in the UK, developed triage guidelines to manage severe shortages of ventilators. At present, there is an insufficient understanding of how the public views these guidelines, and little evidence on which features of a patient the public believe should and should not be considered in ventilator triage.MethodsTwo surveys were conducted with representative UK samples. In the first survey, 525 participants w…Read more
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67Moral knowledge?: new readings in moral epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1996.In Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology, editors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons bring together eleven specially commissioned essays by distinguished moral philosophers exploring the nature and possibility of moral knowledge. Each essay represents a major position within the exciting field of moral epistemology in which a proponent of the position presents and defends his or her view and locates it vis-a-vis competing views. The authors include established philosophers s…Read more
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15Moral Psychology, Vol. 3, The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development (edited book)MIT Press. 2007.Since the 1990s, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. These three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging, collaboratory field.
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27Think Again: How to Reason and ArgueOxford University Press. 2018.Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today, from countries refusing to negotiate, to politicians pandering to their base. Social media has produced a virulent world where extreme positions dominate. There is much demonization of the other side, very little progress is made, and the end result is further widening of positions. How did this happen, and wha…Read more
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82Moral framing effects within subjectsPhilosophical Psychology 34 (5): 611-636. 2021.Several philosophers and psychologists have argued that evidence of moral framing effects shows that many of our moral judgments are unreliable. However, all previous empirical work on moral framing effects has used between-subject experimental designs. We argue that between-subject designs alone do not allow us to accurately estimate the extent of moral framing effects or to properly evaluate the case from framing effects against the reliability of our moral judgments. To do better, we report r…Read more
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45Making moral principles suit yourselfPsychonomic Bulletin & Review 1. 2021.Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In two preregistered studies, we found consistent evidence that agreement with general moral principles shifted depending upon events recently accessed in memory. After recalling their own personal violations of moral principles, participants agreed less strongly …Read more
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1Scrupulosity and Moral ResponsibilityIn Matt King & Joshua May (eds.), Agency in Mental Disorder: Philosophical Dimensions, Oxford University Press. 2022.Scrupulosity is a form of OCD where patients obsess about morality and sometimes compulsively confess or atone. It involves chronic doubt and anxiety as well as deviant moral judgments. This chapter argues that Scrupulosity is a mental illness and that its distortion of moral judgments undermines, or at least reduces, patients’ moral responsibility. The authors go on to argue that this condition challenges popular deep-self theories of responsibility, which assert that one is only blameworthy or…Read more
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28Alfred R. Mele's Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious WillPhilosophical Books 51 (3): 127-143. 2010.
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340How AI can AID bioethicsJournal of Practical Ethics. forthcoming.This paper explores some ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve human moral judgments in bioethics by avoiding some of the most common sources of error in moral judgment, including ignorance, confusion, and bias. It surveys three existing proposals for building human morality into AI: Top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches. Then it proposes a multi-step, hybrid method, using the example of kidney allocations for transplants as a test case. The paper concludes wit…Read more
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56The truth of performativesInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1). 1994.No abstract
Huckleberry Spring, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
4 more
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Psychology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Neuroscience |
Psychology |
Areas of Interest
4 more
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Psychology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Neuroscience |
Psychology |