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50Just 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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70Deep 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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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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39The 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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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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189Kant's Universal Law Formula RevisitedMetaphilosophy 46 (2): 280-299. 2015.Kantians are increasingly deserting the universal law formula in favor of the humanity formula. The former, they argue, is open to various decisive objections; the two are not equivalent; and it is only by appealing to the humanity formula that Kant can reliably generate substantive implications from his theory of an acceptable sort. These assessments of the universal law formula, which clash starkly with Kant's own assessment of it, are based on various widely accepted interpretative assumption…Read more
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460Deep Brain Stimulation, Authenticity and ValueCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 26 (4): 658-670. 2017.In this paper, we engage in dialogue with Jonathan Pugh, Hannah Maslen, and Julian Savulescu about how to best interpret the potential impacts of deep brain stimulation on the self. We consider whether ordinary people’s convictions about the true self should be interpreted in essentialist or existentialist ways. Like Pugh et al., we argue that it is useful to understand the notion of the true self as having both essentialist and existentialist components. We also consider two ideas from existent…Read more
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6On the Universal Law and Humanity FormulasDissertation, University of Michigan. 2012.Whereas the universal law formula says to choose one’s basic guiding principles (or “maxims”) on the basis of their fitness to serve as universal laws, the humanity formula says to always treat the humanity in each person as an end, and never as a means only. Commentators and critics have been puzzled by Kant’s claims that these are two alternative statements of the same basic law, and have raised various objections to Kant’s suggestion that these are the most basic formulas of a fully justified…Read more
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38When 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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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 |