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26From Sex Robots to Love Robots: Is Mutual Love with a Robot Possible?In John Danaher & Neil McArthur (eds.), Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, Mit Press. pp. 219-244. 2017.Some critics of sex-robots worry that their use might spread objectifying attitudes about sex, and common sense places a higher value on sex within love-relationships than on casual sex. If there could be mutual love between humans and sex-robots, this could help to ease the worries about objectifying attitudes. And mutual love between humans and sex-robots, if possible, could also help to make this sex more valuable. But is mutual love between humans and robots possible, or even conceivable? We…Read more
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84Revisiting Kant's Universal Law and Humanity FormulasDe Gruyter. 2015.This book offers new readings of Kant’s “universal law” and “humanity” formulations of the categorical imperative. It shows how, on these readings, the formulas do indeed turn out being alternative statements of the same basic moral law, and in the process responds to many of the standard objections raised against Kant’s theory. Its first chapter briefly explores the ways in which Kant draws on his philosophical predecessors such as Plato (and especially Plato’s Republic) and Jean-Jacque Roussea…Read more
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139Ingmar Persson, From Morality to the End of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 336 (review)Utilitas 26 (3): 321-325. 2014.Persson argues that common sense morality involves various “asymmetries” that don’t stand up to rational scrutiny. (One example is that intentionally harming others is commonly thought to be worse than merely allowing harm to happen, even if the harm involved is equal in both cases.) A wholly rational morality would, Persson argues, be wholly symmetrical. He also argues, however, that when we get down to our most basic attitudes and dispositions, we reach the “end of reason,” at which point we s…Read more
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271Anti-Meaning and Why It MattersJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (4). 2015.It is widely recognized that lives and activities can be meaningful or meaningless, but few have appreciated that they can also be anti-meaningful. Anti-meaning is the polar opposite of meaning. Our purpose in this essay is to examine the nature and importance of this new and unfamiliar topic. In the first part, we sketch four theories of anti-meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. In the second part, we argue that anti-meaning has significance not only for our attempts to theor…Read more
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93Love Troubles: Human Attachment and Biomedical EnhancementsJournal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2): 190-202. 2014.In fascinating recent work, Julian Savulescu and his various co-authors argue that human love is one of the things we can improve upon using biomedical enhancements. Is that so? This article first notes that Savulescu and his co-authors mainly treat love as a means to various other goods. Love, however, is widely regarded as an intrinsic good. To investigate whether enhancements can produce the distinctive intrinsic good of love, this article does three things. Drawing on Philip Pettit's recent …Read more
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584The Ethics of Accident-Algorithms for Self-Driving Cars: an Applied Trolley Problem?Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (5): 1275-1289. 2016.Self-driving cars hold out the promise of being safer than manually driven cars. Yet they cannot be a 100 % safe. Collisions are sometimes unavoidable. So self-driving cars need to be programmed for how they should respond to scenarios where collisions are highly likely or unavoidable. The accident-scenarios self-driving cars might face have recently been likened to the key examples and dilemmas associated with the trolley problem. In this article, we critically examine this tempting analogy. We…Read more
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85Reason-based Value or Value-based Reasons?In Björn Haglund & Helge Malmgren (eds.), Kvantifikator För En Dag. Essays Dedicated to Dag Westerståhl on His Sixtieth Birthday, Philosophical Communications. pp. 193-202. 2006.In this paper, I discuss practical reasons and value, assuming a coexistence thesis according to which reasons and value always go together. I start by doing some taxonomy, distinguishing among three different ways of accounting for the relation between practical reasons and the good. I argue that, of these views, the most plausible one is that according to which something’s being good just consists in how certain facts about the thing in question – other than that of how it is good – give us re…Read more
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49Just Freedom?: Philip Pettit: Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. Norton Books, New York, 2014, 288 pp (review)Res Publica 20 (4): 441-445. 2014.In Just Freedom, Pettit presents a powerful new statement and defense of the traditional “republican” conception of liberty or freedom. And he claims that freedom can serve as an ecumenical value with broad appeal, which we can put at the basis of a distinctively republican theory of justice. That is, Pettit argues that this “conception of freedom as non-domination allows us to see all issues of justice as issues, ultimately, of what freedom demands.” It is not, however, clear that liberty is th…Read more
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66Deep Brain Stimulation, Continuity over Time, and the True SelfCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 25 (4): 647-658. 2016.One of the topics that often comes up in ethical discussions of deep brain stimulation (DBS) is the question of what impact DBS has, or might have, on the patient’s self. This is often understood as a question of whether DBS poses a “threat” to personal identity, which is typically understood as having to do with psychological and/or narrative continuity over time. In this article, we argue that the discussion of whether DBS is a “threat” to continuity over time is too narrow. There are other qu…Read more
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Ludwig Maximilians Universität, MünchenFaculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of ReligionProfessor
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Neuroethics |
Technology Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Kantian Ethics |
Objections to Kantian Ethics |
Kantian Ethics, Misc |