-
24Challenges in a Divided Assessment of the Social Benefits and Risks of ResearchAmerican Journal of Bioethics 11 (5): 12-13. 2011.
-
64When bad people do good things: will moral enhancement make the world a better place?Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (6): 374-375. 2014.In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items on the lists…Read more
-
2Performance-Enhancing Technologies and the Values of Athletic CompetitionPhilosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 28 (3/4): 22-27. 2008.What would be objectionable about sports doping if it were safe and legal? Some ethicists have justified their qualms about doping by invoking elusive distinctions between the natural and the artificial. But the harm in doping and other biotechnological enhancements is best understood in terms of the values of athletic competition—specifically, the spectators' identification with the performers, and the continuity and comparability of athletic achievement over time. Instead of endorsing categori…Read more
-
146Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public PolicyRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.How should we respond to individuals with disabilities? What does it mean to be disabled? Over fifty million Americans, from neonates to the fragile elderly, are disabled. Some people say they have the right to full social participation, while others repudiate such claims as delusive or dangerous. In this compelling book, three experts in ethics, medicine, and the law address pressing disability questions in bioethics and public policy. Anita Silvers, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald test i…Read more
-
37Challenges of genetic testing in adolescents with cardiac arrhythmia syndromesJournal of Medical Ethics 38 (3): 163-167. 2012.The ability to sequence individual genomes is leading to the identification of an increasing number of genetic risk factors for serious diseases. Knowledge of these risk factors can often provide significant medical and psychological benefit, but also raises complex ethical and social issues. This paper focuses on one area of rapid progress: the identification of mutations causing long QT syndrome and other cardiac channel disorders, which can explain some previously unexplained deaths in infant…Read more
-
94Criticizing and reforming segregated facilities for persons with disabilitiesJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 5 (2-3): 157-168. 2008.In this paper, we critically appraise institutions for people with disabilities, from residential facilities to outpatient clinics to social organizations. While recognizing that a just and inclusive society would reject virtually all segregated institutional arrangements, we argue that in contemporary American society, some people with disabilities may have needs that at this time can best be met by institutional arrangements. We propose ways of reforming institutions to make them less isolatin…Read more
-
51Devoured by our own children: the possibility and peril of moral status enhancementJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (2): 78-79. 2013.Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu1 warn of our destruction by the cognitively enhanced beings we create. Now, in a fascinating paper, Nicholas Agar2 warns of an even more disturbing prospect: cognitively enhanced beings may be entitled to sacrifice us for their own ends. These post-humans would likely conclude that they had higher moral status than we mere human beings, and we would have good reason to defer to their vastly superior moral knowledge. We would lack even the consolation of moral …Read more
-
39Bioethics and Disability: What's Health Got to Do with It?American Journal of Bioethics 1 (3): 59-60. 2001.
-
60Seeing Responsibility: Can Neuroimaging Teach Us Anything about Moral and Legal Responsibility?Hastings Center Report 44 (s2): 37-49. 2014.As imaging technologies help us understand the structure and function of the brain, providing insight into human capabilities as basic as vision and as complex as memory, and human conditions as impairing as depression and as fraught as psychopathy, some have asked whether they can also help us understand human agency. Specifically, could neuroimaging lead us to reassess the socially significant practice of assigning and taking responsibility?While responsibility itself is not a psychological pr…Read more
-
208In her latest writing on the trolley problem, 'Turning the Trolley,' Judith Jarvis Thomson defends the following counter-intuitive position: if confronted with a choice of allowing a trolley to hit and kill five innocent people on the track straight ahead, or turning it onto one innocent person on a side-track, a bystander must allow it to hit the five straight ahead. In contrast, Thomson claims, the driver of the trolley has a duty to turn it from the five onto the one. Thomson’s argument is fu…Read more
-
12Is There Value in Identifying Individual Genetic Predispositions to Violence?Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 32 (1): 24-33. 2004.In this article I want to ask what we should do, either collectively or individually, if we could identify by genetic and family profding the 12% of the male population likely to commit almost half the violent crime in our society. What if we could identify some individuals in that 12% not only at birth, but in utero, or before implantation? I will explain the source of these figures later; for now, I will use them only to provide a concrete example of the kind of predictive claims we can expect…Read more
-
90Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem (edited book)Springer. 2009.This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, from our own future offspring to distant future generations.
-
102Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce? (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2015.While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation w…Read more
-
17What qualifies as a live embryo?American Journal of Bioethics 5 (6). 2005.This Article does not have an abstract
-
53A Duty to Discriminate?American Journal of Bioethics 12 (4): 22-24. 2012.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 4, Page 22-24, April 2012
-
5Quality of Life and Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Health Care, and Disability (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.This study brings together two important literatures together in the one volume. One concerns the role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy. The second concerns ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability. Hitherto, these two literatures have had little contact with each other: few scholars have written about both, or have compared the two domains in a systematic way, while people with disabilities and disability scholars are underrepresented …Read more
-
23Disability Rights in Sports and EducationIn William J. Morgan (ed.), Ethics in Sport, Human Kinetics. pp. 451. 2007.
-
73Issues in the pharmacological induction of emotionsJournal of Applied Philosophy 25 (3): 178-192. 2008.abstract In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that the…Read more
-
32Impairment, disadvantage, and equality: A reply to Anita SilversJournal of Social Philosophy 25 (3): 181-188. 1994.
-
56Disability, Diversity, and Preference for the Status Quo: Bias or Justifiable Preference?American Journal of Bioethics 15 (6): 11-12. 2015.
-
8'Healthy' Human Embryos and Reproduction Making Embryos Healthy or Making Healthy Embryos: How Much of a Difference Between Prenatal Treatment and Selection?In Adrienne Asch & David Wasserman (eds.), The 'Healthy' Embryo: Social, Biomedical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives, . pp. 201-18. 2010.
-
15[Book review] genetics and criminal behavior (review)Ethics 113 (1): 185-187. 2002.In this 2001 volume a group of leading philosophers address some of the basic conceptual, methodological and ethical issues raised by genetic research into criminal behavior. The essays explore the complexities of tracing any genetic influence on criminal, violent or antisocial behavior; the varieties of interpretations to which evidence of such influences is subject; and the relevance of such influences to the moral and legal appraisal of criminal conduct. The distinctive features of this colle…Read more
-
163The nonidentity problem, disability, and the role morality of prospective parentsEthics 116 (1): 132-152. 2005.