•  44
    Pessimism About Motivating Modal Personism
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (3): 630-633. 2018.
    In ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’, Shelly Kagan sketches an account on which both actually being a person and possibly being a person are relevant to one's moral status, labelling this view ‘modal personism’ and supporting its conclusions with appeals to intuitions about a range of marginal cases. I tender a pessimistic response to Kagan's concern about motivating modal personism: that is, of being able to ‘go beyond the mere appeal to brute intuition, eventually offering an account of why moda…Read more
  •  19
    Kantian indifference about moral reason
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.
    The pessimistic arguments May challenges depend on an anti-Kantian philosophical assumption. That assumption is that what I call philosophical optimists about moral reason are also committed to empirical optimism, or what May calls “optimistic rationalism.” I place May's book in the literature by explaining how that assumption is resisted by Christine Korsgaard, one of May's examples of a contemporary Kantian.
  •  17
    Response: Freedom from Pain as a Rawlsian Primary Good
    Bioethics 30 (9): 774-775. 2016.
    In a recent article in this journal, Carl Knight and Andreas Albertsen argue that Rawlsian theories of distributive justice as applied to health and healthcare fail to accommodate both palliative care and the desirability of less painful treatments. The asserted Rawlsian focus on opportunities or capacities, as exemplified in Normal Daniels’ developments of John Rawls’ theory, results in a normative account of healthcare which is at best only indirectly sensitive to pain and so unable to account…Read more
  •  15
    Epistemic Authority and Genuine Ethical Controversies
    Bioethics 31 (4): 321-324. 2017.
    In ‘Professional Hubris and its Consequences’, Eric Vogelstein claims that ‘that there are no good arguments in favor of professional organizations taking genuinely controversial positions on issues of professional ethics’. In this response, I defend two arguments in favour of organisations taking such positions: that their stance‐taking may lead to better public policy, and that it may lead to better practice by medical professionals. If either of those defences succeeds, then Vogelstein's easy…Read more
  •  12
    A framework for assessing the ethics of doctors' strikes
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (11): 698-700. 2016.
  •  6
    Bermúdez describes the extensionality principle as being “almost unquestioned.” This claim might come as a surprise to philosophers who work on agency and ethics. In Kantian deontological ethics and in Platonic or Aristotelian virtue ethics, our preferences for outcomes can be rationally affected by how those outcomes are framed in terms of maxims and character traits.