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8Does the Patterned View Avoid the Ideal Worlds Objection?Utilitas 36 (2): 130-147. 2024.Can we formulate a moral theory that captures the moral significance of patterns of group behaviour we cannot affect through our own action while at the same time avoiding the so-called ‘Ideal Worlds’ objection? In a recent article, Caleb Perl has argued that we can. Specifically, Perl claims that one view that does so is his Patterned View: roughly, you ought to act only in accordance with that set of sufficiently general rules that has optimal moral value (Perl 2021: 98). The Patterned View un…Read more
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13Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, written by Carissa VélizJournal of Moral Philosophy 20 (5-6): 585-587. 2023.
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66Review article: the moral right to health: a survey of available conceptionsCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (4): 508-528. 2017.In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of both the philosophical questions engendered by the idea of a human right to health and the potential of philosophical analysis to help in the formulation of better policy. In this article, I attempt to locate recent work on the moral right to health in a number of historically established conceptions, with the aim of providing a map of the conceptual landscape as to the claims expressed by such a right.
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Freeing human rights from the moral requirement of feasibilityIn Melissa Labonte & Kurt Mills (eds.), Human rights and justice: philosophical, economic, and social perspectives, Routledge. 2018.
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21Re-asserting the Specialness of Health CareJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (3): 272-296. 2021.Is health care “special”? That is, do we have moral reason to treat health care differently from how we treat other sorts of social goods? Intuitively, perhaps, we might think the proper response is “yes.” However, to date, philosophers have often struggled to justify this idea—known as the “specialness thesis about health care” or STHC. In this article, I offer a new justification of STHC, one I take to be immune from objections that have undercut other defenses. Notably, unlike previous utilit…Read more
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25Spinoza’s Analysis of his Imagined Readers’ AxiologyArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (2): 281-312. 2021.Before presenting his own account of value in the Ethics, Spinoza spends much of EIAppendix and EIVPreface attempting to refute a series of axiological ‘prejudices’ that he takes to have taken root in the minds of his readership. In doing so, Spinoza adopts what might be termed a ‘genealogical’ argumentative strategy. That is, he tries to establish the falsity of imagined readership’s prejudices about good and bad, perfection and imperfection, by first showing that the ideas from which they have…Read more
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74Review article: the moral right to health: a survey of available conceptionsCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (4): 508-528. 2017.In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of both the philosophical questions engendered by the idea of a human right to health and the potential of philosophical analysis to help in the formulation of better policy. In this article, I attempt to locate recent work on the moral right to health in a number of historically established conceptions, with the aim of providing a map of the conceptual landscape as to the claims expressed by such a right.
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28Essays on Spinoza's Ethical TheoryBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (5): 1000-1003. 2015.Review of Essays on Spinoza's Ethical Theory edited by MJ Kisner and A Youpa
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347Universal Health Coverage, Priority Setting and the Human Right to Health.The Lancet 390 (10095): 712-14. 2017.As health policy-makers around the world seek to make progress towards universal health coverage, they must navigate between two important ethical imperatives: to set national spending priorities fairly and efficiently; and to safeguard the right to health. These imperatives can conflict, leading some to conclude that rights-based approaches present a disruptive influence on health policy, hindering states’ efforts to set priorities fairly and efficiently. Here, we challenge this perception. We …Read more
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31Tying oneself to the mast: One necessary cost to morally enhancing oneself biomedicallyBioethics 31 (7): 543-551. 2017.In this article I seek to establish what, if anything, might be morally troubling about morally enhancing oneself through biomedical means. Building on arguments by Harris, while simultaneously acknowledging several valid counter-arguments that have been put forth by his critics, I argue that taking BMEs necessarily incurs at least one moral cost in the restrictions they impose on our freedom. This does not necessarily entail that the use of BMEs cannot be overall justified, nor that, in certain…Read more
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58Affordability and Non-Perfectionism in Moral ActionEthical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (4): 973-991. 2019.One rationale policy-makers sometimes give for declining to fund a service or intervention is on the grounds that it would be ‘unaffordable’, which is to say, that the total cost of providing the service or intervention for all eligible recipients would exceed the budget limit. But does the mere fact that a service or intervention is unaffordable present a reason not to fund it? Thus far, the philosophical literature has remained largely silent on this issue. However, in this article, we conside…Read more
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48Self-tests for influenza: an empirical ethics investigationBMC Medical Ethics 18 (1): 33. 2017.In this article we aim to assess the ethical desirability of self-test diagnostic kits for influenza, focusing in particular on the potential benefits and challenges posed by a new, mobile phone-based tool currently being developed by i-sense, an interdisciplinary research collaboration based at University College London and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Our study adopts an empirical ethics approach, supplementing an initial review into the ethical considerati…Read more
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32On Engster's care-justification of the specialness thesis about healthcareJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (8): 501-505. 2017.To say health is 'special' is to say that it has a moral significance that differentiates it from other goods (cars, say or radios) and, as a matter of justice, warrants distributing it separately. In this essay, I critique a new justification for the specialness thesis about healthcare (STHC) recently put forth by Engster. I argue that, regrettably, Engster's justification of STHC ultimately fails and fails on much the same grounds as have previous justifications of STHC. However, I also argue …Read more
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67Spinoza’s genealogical critique of his contemporaries’ axiologyIntellectual History Review 27 (4): 543-560. 2017.Among Spinoza’s principal projects in the Ethics is his effort to “remove” certain metaethical prejudices from the minds of his readers, to “expose” them, as he has similar misconceptions about other matters, by submitting them to the “scrutiny of reason”. In this article, I consider the argumentative strategy Spinoza uses here – and its intellectual history – in depth. I argue that Spinoza’s method is best characterised as a genealogical analysis. As I recount, by Spinoza’s time of writing, the…Read more
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48Public Reasoning and Health-Care Priority Setting: The Case of NICEKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (1): 107-134. 2017.Health systems that provide for universal patient access through a scheme of prepayments—whether through taxes, social insurance, or a combination of the two—need to make decisions on the scope of coverage that they secure. Such decisions are inherently controversial, implying, as they do, that some patients will receive less than comprehensive health care, or less than complete protection from the financial consequences of ill-heath, even when there is a clinically effective therapy to which th…Read more
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48Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ StringencyRes Publica 25 (2): 211-233. 2019.For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’, making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is n…Read more
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147Privacy Rights and Public InformationJournal of Political Philosophy 27 (1): 3-25. 2018.This article concerns the nature and limits of individuals’ rights to privacy over information that they have made public. For some, even suggesting that an individual can have a right to privacy over such information may seem paradoxical. First, one has no right to privacy over information that was never private to begin with. Second, insofar as one makes once-private information public – whether intentionally or unintentionally – one waives one’s right to privacy to that information. In this a…Read more
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16Social Value Judgements in Healthcare: A Philosophical CritiqueJournal of Health Organization and Management 26 (3): 317-30. 2012.PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the philosophical and bioethical issues raised by the creation of the draft social values framework developed to facilitate data collection and country-specific presentations at the inaugural workshop on "Social values and health priority setting" held in February 2011. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Conceptual analysis is used to analyse the term "social values", as employed in the framework, and its relationship to related ideas such as m…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |