•  45
    The Future of Practical Philosophy
    International Journal of Philosophical Practice 2 (2): 38-45. 2004.
    Over the last two decades the practice of applied philosophy has undergone re­surgence. It is now common for philosophers to sit on ethics committees in hospitals, or to provide ethical advice to businesses, and many universities and colleges now offer courses in practical philosophy. Despite this, practical philosophy is subject to increasing criticism, with persons charging that (1) it is philosophically shallow, and (2) it has little to offer persons grappling with concrete ethical problems, …Read more
  •  56
    Comments on Professor Elliot Cohen, “Philosophy With Teeth”
    International Journal of Philosophical Practice 2 (2): 10-13. 2004.
    This paper comments on Cohen’s “Philosophy with Teeth” (also in this issue), and raises four questions surrounding the relationship between philosophy and psychology, most of which are requests for clarification from Cohen but two of which are more critical in character: Against Cohen’s claim that APPE disavows any intrinsic connection between philosophical counseling and psychology, it is suggested that this still leaves open the pos­sibility of an instrumental connection. And against Cohen’s c…Read more
  •  143
    The Irrelevance of Harm for a Theory of Disease
    with Dane Muckler
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (3): 332-349. 2020.
    Normativism holds that there is a close conceptual link between disease and disvalue. We challenge normativism by advancing an argument against a popular normativist theory, Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account. Wakefield maintains that medical disorders are breakdowns in evolved mechanisms that cause significant harm to the organism. We argue that Wakefield’s account is not a promising way to distinguish between disease and health because being harmful is neither necessary nor suffici…Read more
  •  89
    Satz and Semiotics
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (2): 243-257. 2019.
    Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski have recently developed an argument against semiotic objections to markets. They argue that all such semiotic arguments are unsound because they fail to recognize that the meaning of market transactions is a contingent socially-constructed fact. They attribute this type of argument to Debra Satz. This paper argues both that Brennan and Jaworski are mistaken to attribute this particular semiotic objection to Satz and that they are mistaken to attribute to her a…Read more
  •  111
    Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (5): 579-581. 2005.
  •  88
    Social Autonomy and Family-Based Informed Consent
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 44 (5): 621-639. 2019.
    The Western focus on personal autonomy as the normative basis for securing persons’ consent to their treatment renders this autonomy-based approach to informed consent vulnerable to the charge that it is based on an overly atomistic understanding of the person. This leads to a puzzle: how does this generally-accepted atomistic understanding of the person fits with the emphasis on familial consent that occurs when family members are provided with the opportunity to veto a prospective donor’s wish…Read more
  •  122
    Buying and Selling Friendship
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2): 187-202. 2019.
    It is widely believed that the nature of love and friendship precludes them from being bought or sold. It will be argued in this paper that this view is false: There is no conceptual bar to the commodification of love and friendship. The arguments offered for this view will lead to another surprising conclusion: That these goods are asymmetrically alienable goods, goods whose nature is such that separate arguments must be provided for the views that they can be bought and sold. The possibility o…Read more
  •  47
    Introduction: Autonomy in Healthcare
    HEC Forum 30 (3): 187-189. 2018.
  •  95
    In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in the degree of philosophical attention devoted to the question of the morality of offering financial compensation in an attempt to increase the medical supply of human body parts and products, such as plasma. This paper will argue not only that donor compensation is ethically acceptable, but that plasma donors should not be prohibited from being offered compensation if they are to give their informed consent to donate. Regulatory regimes …Read more
  •  281
    The Case Against the Case for Colonialism
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 32 (1): 19-32. 2018.
    In a recent paper entitled “The Case for Colonialism” Bruce Gilley argued that Western colonialism was “as a general rule” both beneficial to those subject to it and considered by them to be legitimate. He then advocated for a return to the Western colonization of the Third World. Gilley’s article provoked a furious response, with calls for its retraction being followed by the resignation of much of the publishing journal’s editorial board. In this paper I note that Gilley’s article meets none o…Read more
  •  40
    Semiotic Arguments and Markets in Votes
    Business Ethics Journal Review 5 (6): 35-39. 2017.
    Jacob Sparks has developed a semiotic critique of markets that is based on the fact that “market exchanges express preferences.” He argues that some market transactions will reveal that the purchaser of a market good inappropriately prefers it to a similar non-market good. This avoids Brennan and Jaworski’s criticism that semiotic objections to markets fail as the meaning of market transactions are contingent social facts. I argue that Sparks’ argument is both incomplete and doomed to fail. It c…Read more
  •  25
    Introduction to Symposium: Kidney for Sale By Owner, Revisited
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2): 115-117. 2017.
  •  92
    Markets in Votes, Voter Liberty, and the Burden of Justification
    Journal of Philosophical Research 42 325-340. 2017.
    Christopher Freiman, Jason Brennan, and Peter M. Jaworski have recently defended markets in votes. While their views differ in several respects they all believe that the primary justificatory burden lies not with those who defend markets in votes but with those who oppose them. Yet while the burden of proof should typically rest with those who wish to prohibit markets in certain goods this does not hold for the debate over markets in votes. Votes are crucially different from other goods in that …Read more
  •  101
    From Directed Donation to Kidney Sale: Does the Argument Hold Up?
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (5): 597-614. 2017.
    The UCLA Medical Center has initiated a “voucher program” under which a person who donated a kidney would receive a voucher that she could provide to someone of her choosing who could then use it to move to the top of the renal transplantation waiting list. If the use of such vouchers as incentives for donors is morally permissible, then cash payments for kidneys are also morally permissible. But, that argument faces five objections. First, there are some goods whose nature allows them to be exc…Read more
  •  72
    What Limits Should Markets be Without?
    Business Ethics Journal Review 4 (7): 41-46. 2016.
    In Markets Without Limits Brennan and Jaworski defend the view that there are “no legitimate worries about what we buy, trade, and sell.” But rather than being a unified defense of this position Brennan and Jaworski unwittingly offer three distinct pro-commodification views—two of which are subject to counterexamples. This Commentary will clarify what should be the thesis of their volume and identify the conditions that any counterexample to this must meet.
  •  138
    In Defense of Routine Recovery of Cadaveric Organs: A Response to Walter Glannon
    with Aaron Spital
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 17 (3): 337-343. 2008.
    Walter Glannon argues that our proposal for routine recovery of transplantable cadaveric organs is unacceptable After carefully reviewing his counterarguments, we conclude that, although some of them have merit, none are sufficiently strong to warrant abandoning this plan. Below we respond to each of Glannon's concerns.
  •  138
    Autonomy has recently become one of the central concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and has generated much debate over its nature and value. This 2005 volume brings together essays that address the theoretical foundations of the concept of autonomy, as well as essays that investigate the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility, freedom, political philosophy, and medical ethics. Written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in these areas, this book represents re…Read more
  •  210
    Autonomy and Organ Sales, Revisited
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (6): 632-648. 2009.
    In this paper I develop and defend my arguments in favor of the moral permissibility of a legal market for human body parts in response to the criticisms that have been leveled at them by Paul M. Hughes and Samuel J. Kerstein
  •  164
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes is one of the most prominent critics of markets in human organs. Unfortunately, Scheper-Hughes rejects the view that markets should be used to solve the current shortage of transplant organs without engaging with the arguments in favour of them. Scheper-Hughes’s rejection of such markets is of especial concern, given her influence over their future, for she holds, among other positions, the status of an adviser to the World Health Organization on issues related to global tra…Read more
  •  77
    The Carelessness of Affordable Care
    Hastings Center Report 42 (5): 24-27. 2012.
    The Affordable Care Act has been touted as a long‐overdue remedy for what is perceived to be the chronic problem of large numbers of Americans living without adequate health insurance. While much of the discussion of the ACA has focused on its legality, it should also be assessed on the basis of its economic implications and its moral acceptability. On its face, the ACA appears to do well on both counts. Given that the uninsured often secure their health care from expensive emergency room treatm…Read more
  •  114
    Public Moralities and Markets in Organs
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (3): 223-227. 2014.
    Schweda and Schicktanz argue that the debate over the ethics of using financial incentives to procure human transplant organs rests on socioempirical premises that need to be critically assessed. They contend that once this is achieved a completely new perspective on the debate should be adopted, with organ donation being viewed primarily as a reciprocal social interaction between donor and recipient. This paper challenges this conclusion, arguing that rather than supporting a new perspective on…Read more
  •  103
    Organs: tradable, but not necessarily inheritable
    Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (1): 62-62. 2014.
    Teck Chuan Voo and Soren Holm argue that “organs should be inheritable if they were to be socially and legally recognised as tradable property.”1 To support this view they first observe that “…legal recognition of objects as property… opens up the possibility of the legal recognition of the survival of the property rights and their inheritability after the death of the source/owner, even if those rights are intimately bound with the person.”1 They also note that if organs are tradable property t…Read more
  •  59
    In recent years a concern with the value of personal autonomy has come to dominate discussions in medical ethics. This emphasis on autonomy has naturally led to discussions of what criteria must be met for a person to be autonomous, or to be autonomous with respect to her decisions, her actions, or those of her desires that motivate her to make or to perform the decisions or the actions that she makes or does. It has also led to discussions of whether autonomy is valuable in itself, instrumental…Read more
  •  111
  •  9
    Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts Are Morally Imperative
    Philosophical Quarterly 56 (225): 627-629. 2006.