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196Nancy Cartwright. Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better (review)Philosophy of Science 88 (2): 366-369. 2021.
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186On the Relevance of Experimental Philosophy to NeuroethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 13 (1): 55-57. 2022.
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183Confidence Levels or Degrees of Sentience?Asian Bioethics Review 15 (1): 93-97. 2022.I applaud recent improvements upon previous guidelines for the assessment of pain in non-human species and the application of their framework towards decapod crustaceans. Rather than constituting a mere intermediate solution between the scientific difficulty of settling questions of animal consciousness and the need for a framework for the purposes of animal welfare legislation, I will argue that the longer lists of criteria for animal sentience should make us realize that animal sentience is a …Read more
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181Has the Socio-Political Role of Neuroethics Been Neglected?American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 13 (1): 23-25. 2022.
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180Can ‘eugenics’ be defended?Bioethics Review 39 (1). 2021.In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancemen…Read more
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176Why Socio-Political Beliefs Trump Individual Morality: An Evolutionary PerspectiveAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4): 290-292. 2022.
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174Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness (review)Philosophy of Science 89 (3). 2022.
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163The importance of end-of-life welfareAnimal Frontiers 12 (1). 2022.The conditions of transport and slaughter at the end of their lives are a major challenge to the welfare of agricultural animals. • End-of-life experiences should be of a greater ethical concern than others of similar intensity and duration, due to their position in the animal’s life. • End-of-life welfare can have both internal importance to the animals and external ethical importance to human decision-makers. • We should pay extra care to ensure that the conditions during transport and slau…Read more
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162Dennett and SpinozaAustralasian Philosophical Review 4 (3): 259-265. 2020.ABSTRACT This paper compares Spinoza with Daniel Dennett and uncovers a number of striking parallels. Genevieve Lloyd’s recent work on Spinoza reveals a picture of a philosopher that anticipated many of Dennett’s later ideas. Both share a fervent opposition to Descartes’ conception of mind and body and endorse a strikingly similar naturalist philosophy. It is the goal of this paper to tease out these connections and once again highlight the richness of a Spinozist lens of the world.
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160On the evolutionary origins of the bifocal stanceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.In this commentary we advance Jagiello et al.'s proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the “bifocal stance” that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, which led to a feedback loop between the ritual and instrumental stances.
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154Modeling MoralityIn Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, Springer Verlag. 2019.Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes b…Read more
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130Developmental Programming, Evolution, and Animal Welfare: A Case for Evolutionary Veterinary ScienceJournal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1. 2021.The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring…Read more
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119Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the OrganismConstructivist Foundations 18 (1). 2022.Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
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111Enhancement technologies and inequalityIn Cristian Saborido, Sergi Oms & Javier González de Prado (eds.), Proceedings of the IX Conference of the Spanish Society of Lógic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. 2018.
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85Studying Introspection in Animals and AIsJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 63-74. 2023.The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to address this oversight by offering a non-anthropocentric framework for understanding introspection that could be used to address these questions. However,…Read more
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48Correction to: Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and diseaseTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1): 99-100. 2023.
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47Studying Animal Feelings: Integrating Sentience Research and Welfare ScienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7): 196-222. 2023.The goal of this article is to bring together two fields of research — animal sentience research and animal welfare science — with the aim of advancing our understanding of animal emotions, especially their subjectively experienced or 'felt' component (feelings). While these two research areas share a common interest in animal feelings, they have had surprisingly little interaction. In this paper, we make a call for the integration of these fields and outline some of the ways in which work done …Read more
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45Neural networks, AI, and the goals of modelingBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.
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40Better to be a Pig Dissatisfied than a Plant SatisfiedJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 37 (4): 1-17. 2024.In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and a…Read more
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39Defending SentientismAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 168-170. 2023.The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the possibility of suffering in nonhumans, including animals only very distantly related to us, as well as artificial intelligence systems. Much...
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39Does utilitarianism need a rethink? Review of Louis Narens and Brian Skyrms' The Pursuit of HappinessJournal of Economic Methodology 29 (3): 256-261. 2021.Philosophers have typically shown high confidence in their evaluations of Utilitarianism, whether as an endorsement or a disparagement. Rarely, however, has much effort been spent on investigating...
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38Theory Roulette: Choosing that Climate Change is not a Tragedy of the CommonsEnvironmental Values 32 (1): 65-89. 2023.Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behav…Read more
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37The Origins of Consciousness or the War of the Five DimensionsBiological Theory 17 (4): 276-291. 2022.The goal of this article is to break down the dimensions of consciousness, attempt to reverse engineer their evolutionary function, and make sense of the origins of consciousness by breaking off those dimensions that are more likely to have arisen later. A Darwinian approach will allow us to revise the philosopher’s concept of consciousness away from a single “thing,” an all-or-nothing quality, and towards a concept of phenomenological complexity that arose out of simple valenced states. Finally…Read more
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36Hominin life history, pathological complexity, and the evolution of anxietyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit's pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann's goal of re-characterizing human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.
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32Correction to: Evolution of multicellularity: cheating done rightBiology and Philosophy 35 (1): 1-2. 2019.The author would like to notify the readers about the following.
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31Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and diseaseTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3): 169-186. 2020.If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and…Read more
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30Consciousness, complexity, and evolutionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.The idea that consciousness and complexity are closely related has been a major driver of the popularity of integrated information theory of consciousness, despite its major formal, phenomenological, and neuroscientific shortcomings. Here, I argue that we can recover this intuition by replacing its biologically neutral notion of complexity with an evolutionary one that I shall dub “pathological complexity.”
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28Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab‐Grown MeatJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 21 (1): 167-175. 2024.Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is t…Read more
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28Positive Wild Animal WelfareBiology and Philosophy 38 (2): 1-19. 2023.With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often ha…Read more
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