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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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73Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and AnthropomorphismRowman & Littlefield International. 2020.This book argues that we need to explore how human beings can best coordinate and collaborate with robots in responsible ways. It investigates ethically important differences between human agency and robot agency to work towards an ethics of responsible human-robot interaction.
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73The Benefits and Risks of Quantified Relationship Technologies: Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Quantified Relationship”American Journal of Bioethics 18 (2): 3-6. 2018.The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article,…Read more
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68Steve Clarke, Julian Savulescu, C. A. J. Coady, Alberto Giubilini, and Sagar Sanyal (eds.), The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate, Oxford University Press, 2016, 269pp (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2017. 2017.The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate has two chief aims. These aims are to help readers understand the existing debate and to move the debate forward. The book consists of an introductory chapter by Alberto Giubilini and Sagar Sanyal (which lays out some prominent bioconservative objections to enhancement), eight essays grouped under the theme of "Understanding the Debate" (Section I), and eight devoted to "Advancing the Debate" (Section II). In this review, we offer brief s…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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64Do We Always Act on Maxims?Kantian Review 22 (2): 233-255. 2017.It is commonly thought that on Kant’s view of action, ‘everyone always acts on maxims.’ Call this the ‘descriptive reading.’ This reading faces two important problems: first, the idea that people always act on maxims offends against common sense: it clashes with our ordinary ideas about human agency. Second, there are various passages in which Kant says that it is ‘rare’ and ‘admirable’ to firmly adhere to a set of basic principles that we adopt for ourselves. This article offers an alternative:…Read more
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62Artificial Intelligence and Human Enhancement: Can AI Technologies Make Us More (Artificially) Intelligent?Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (1): 76-88. 2024.This paper discusses two opposing views about the relation between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence: on the one hand, a worry that heavy reliance on AI technologies might make people less intelligent and, on the other, a hope that AI technologies might serve as a form of cognitive enhancement. The worry relates to the notion that if we hand over too many intelligence-requiring tasks to AI technologies, we might end up with fewer opportunities to train our own intelligence. Con…Read more
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62Is the Personal Identity Debate a “Threat” to Neurosurgical Patients? A Reply to Müller et alNeuroethics 11 (2): 229-235. 2017.In a recent article, Sabine Müller, Merlin Bittlinger, and Henrik Walter launch a sweeping attack against what they call the "personal identity debate" as it relates to patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). In this critique offered by Müller et al., the so-called personal identity debate is said to: (a) be metaphysical in a problematic way, (b) constitute a threat to patients, and (c) use "vague" and "contradictory" statements from patients and their families as direct evidence for…Read more
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55Is Academic Enhancement Possible by Means of Generative AI-Based Digital Twins?American Journal of Bioethics 23 (10): 44-47. 2023.Large Language Models (LLMs) “assign probabilities to sequences of text. When given some initial text, they use these probabilities to generate new text. Large language models are language models u...
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55Meaning in Life in AI Ethics—Some Trends and PerspectivesPhilosophy and Technology 36 (2): 1-24. 2023.In this paper, we discuss the relation between recent philosophical discussions about meaning in life (from authors like Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and others) and the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). Our goal is twofold, namely, to argue that considering the axiological category of meaningfulness can enrich AI ethics, on the one hand, and to portray and evaluate the small, but growing literature that already exists on the relation between meaning in life and AI ethics, on the other hand.…Read more
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54Meaning and Anti-Meaning in LifeIn Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press. pp. 277-91. 2022.
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51Kantianism and the Problem of Child Sex RobotsJournal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1): 132-147. 2021.Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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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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47Lorraine Besser-Jones, Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014. 2014.Besser-Jones holds that well-being consists in having the experience of satisfying three innate psychological needs at the core of human nature: "relatedness," "autonomy," and "competence." Of these three, the first is the most central one, and we satisfy it by interacting with our fellows in caring and respectful ways: by "acting well." To act well, we need, Besser-Jones argues, a virtuous character: we need certain moral beliefs, and we need those to interact with our intentions in ways that r…Read more
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41Should a medical digital twin be viewed as an extension of the patient's body?Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (6): 401-402. 2021.The concept of a digital twin comes from engineering.1 It refers to a digital model of an artefact in the real world, which takes data about the artefact itself, data about other such artefacts, among other things, as inputs. The idea is that the maintenance of artefacts—such as jet engines—can be vastly improved if we work with digital twins that simulate actual objects. Similarly, personalised medicine might benefit from the digital modelling of body parts or even whole human bodies. A medical…Read more
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39Emotional Embodiment in Humanoid Sex and Love RobotsIn Janina Loh & Wulf Loh (eds.), Social Robotics and the Good Life: The Normative Side of Forming Emotional Bonds with Robots, Transcript Verlag. pp. 233-256. 2022.
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39Is tomorrow’s car appealing today? Ethical issues and user attitudes beyond automationAI and Society 35 (4): 1033-1046. 2020.The literature on ethics and user attitudes towards AVs discusses user concerns in relation to automation; however, we show that there are additional relevant issues at stake. To assess adolescents’ attitudes regarding the ‘car of the future’ as presented by car manufacturers, we conducted two studies with over 400 participants altogether. We used a mixed methods approach in which we combined qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first study, our respondents appeared to be more concerned …Read more
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38Reason with me: Confabulation and Interpersonal Moral ReasoningEthical Perspectives 22 (2): 315-332. 2015.According to Haidt’s “social intuitionist model”, empirical moral psychology supports the following conclusion: intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. Critics have responded by arguing that intuitions can depend on non-conscious reasons, that not being able to articulate one’s reasons doesn’t entail not being responsive to reasons, and that the relations between intuitions and reasoning can be truth-tracking and principled in ways overlooked by Haidt. This debate involves a false dic…Read more
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37Robotic Animism: The Ethics of Attributing Minds and Personality to Robots with Artificial IntelligenceIn Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion, Springer Verlag. pp. 313-340. 2022.In this chapter, I use the expression “robotic animism” to refer to the tendency that many people have to interact with robots as if the robots have minds or a personality. I compare the idea of robotic animism with what philosophers and psychologists sometimes refer to as “mind-reading”, as it relates to human interaction with robots. The chapter offers various examples of robotic animism and mind-reading within different forms of human-robot interaction, and it also considers ethical and prude…Read more
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36Climate Change and Anti-MeaningEthical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (5): 709-724. 2023.In this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) me…Read more
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36The Normative and Evaluative Status of Moral Distress in Health Care ContextsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (12): 17-19. 2016.Stephen Campbell, Connie Ulrich, and Christine Grady argue that we need to a broader understanding of moral distress – broader, that is, than the one commonly used within nursing-ethics and, more recently, healthcare ethics in general. On their proposed definition, moral distress is any self-directed negative attitude we might have in response to viewing ourselves as participating in a morally undesirable situation. While being in general agreement with much of what Campbell et al. say, I make t…Read more
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35When Is Deep Brain Stimulation a Medical Benefit, and What Is Required for Consent?American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 7 (3): 150-152. 2016.Hübner and White argue that we should not administer DBS to psychopathic prisoners. While we are sympathetic to their conclusion, we argue that the authors’ two central arguments for this conclusion are problematic. Their first argument appeals to an overly restrictive conception of individual medical benefit: namely, that an individual medical benefit must alleviate subjective suffering. We highlight cases that clearly constitute individual medical benefits although there is no relief of subjec…Read more
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35Is Being “Paid to Endure” Compatible With Autonomy? Paid Research Participation and Five (Rather Than Four) Goods of WorkAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (9): 41-43. 2019.Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 41-43.
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33Tools and/or Agents? Reflections on Sedlakova and Trachsel’s Discussion of Conversational Artificial IntelligenceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (5): 17-19. 2023.Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) consider conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) as a new way of providing psychotherapy to patients. This is an important topic, and Sedlakova and Trachsel have...
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33Pettit on Love and Its Value: A Critical AssessmentMoral Philosophy and Politics 5 (1): 87-102. 2018.Philip Pettit has identified some interesting apparent commonalities among core human values like love, friendship, virtue, and respect. These are all, Pettit argues, ‘robustly demanding’: they require us to provide certain benefits across ranges of alternative scenarios. Pettit also suggests a general ‘rationale’ for valuing such goods, which draws on his work on freedom. In this paper, I zoom in on love in particular. I critically assess whether Pettit’s schematic account of love’s value adequ…Read more
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29In Evaluating Technological Risks, When and Why Should We Consult Our Emotions?Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (4): 1903-1912. 2020.
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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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26Motivation-Enhancements and Domain-Specific ValuesAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 6 (1): 37-39. 2015.Recent research suggests that “smart drugs” don’t make healthy individuals who use them smarter. The main effects are instead on levels of motivation and interest. So the main ethical question here is not whether there is anything wrong or regrettable about healthy individuals’ using these drugs to make themselves smarter. It is rather whether there is anything problematic about their using these drugs to control or modulate their levels of motivation and interest. This question can either be di…Read more
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24Review of Jennifer S. Blumenthal-Barby, Good Ethics and Bad Choices: The Relevance of Behavioral Economics for Medical Ethics (review)American Journal of Bioethics 22 (5): 4-5. 2022.When Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby was a bioethics intern at the Cleveland Clinic while she was still a graduate student, she was puzzled by the decision making of some patients at the clinic. For exam...
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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 |