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1006The rise of artificial intelligence and the crisis of moral passivityAI and Society 35 (4): 991-993. 2020.Set aside fanciful doomsday speculations about AI. Even lower-level AIs, while otherwise friendly and providing us a universal basic income, would be able to do all our jobs. Also, we would over-rely upon AI assistants even in our personal lives. Thus, John Danaher argues that a human crisis of moral passivity would result However, I argue firstly that if AIs are posited to lack the potential to become unfriendly, they may not be intelligent enough to replace us in all our jobs. If instead they …Read more
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558Improving the justice‐based argument for conducting human gene editing research to cure sickle cell diseaseBioethics 34 (2): 200-202. 2019.In a recent article, Marilyn Baffoe-Bonnie offers three arguments for conducting CRISPR/Cas9 biotechnology research to cure sickle-cell disease (SCD) based on addressing historical and current injustices in SCD research and care. I show that her second and third arguments suffer from roughly the same defect, which is that they really argue for something else rather than for conducting CRISPR/Cas9 research in particular. For instance, the second argument argues that conducting this gene therapy r…Read more
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457A Platonic Kind-Based Account of GoodnessPhilosophia 49 (4): 1369-1389. 2021.Robert Adams defends a platonic account of goodness, understood as excellence, claiming that there exists a platonic good that all other good things must resemble, identifying the Good with God. Mark Murphy agrees, but argues that this platonic account is in need of Aristotelian supplementation, as resemblance must take into account a thing’s kind-membership. While this article will accept something like Murphy’s account of goodness, it will further develop its details and support. Without relyi…Read more
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400An Ebola-Like Microbe and The Limits of Kind-Based GoodnessPhilosophia 50 (2): 451-471. 2022.Aristotelian theory, as found in Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot, claims that to be good is to be good as a member of that kind. Moreover, Foot argues in effect that goodness admits of only the kind-based sort, obtaining solely in virtue of something’s satisfying kind-based standards. However, I contend that something can satisfy kind-relative standards but nonetheless be bad—I propose a hypothetical Ebola-like microbe that meets its kind-standards of being destructive for its own sake, but i…Read more
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335The demonstrative use of names, and the divine-name co-reference debateInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 93 (2): 107-120. 2023.Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? For an account of the reference of divine names, I follow Bogardus and Urban (2017) in advocating in favour of using Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. However, I argue further that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this demonstrative use of names offers a promising …Read more
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298Zabarella on Prime Matter and ExtensionPhilosophia 50 (5): 2405-2422. 2022.The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a philosophical shift that would help pave the way for modern science, a shift from metaphysical theories of material objects to other views embracing only the empirically-accessible parts of material things. One much-debated topic in the course of this shift was regarding prime matter. The late scholastic Jacobus Zabarella (1533-1589) arrived upon his views about prime matter via his version of the regressus method, a program for a sort of scientific reason…Read more
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282Black-box assisted medical decisions: AI power vs. ethical physician careMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (3): 285-292. 2023.Without doctors being able to explain medical decisions to patients, I argue their use of black box AIs would erode the effective and respectful care they provide patients. In addition, I argue that physicians should use AI black boxes only for patients in dire straits, or when physicians use AI as a “co-pilot” (analogous to a spellchecker) but can independently confirm its accuracy. I respond to A.J. London’s objection that physicians already prescribe some drugs without knowing why they work.
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238Are Katamenia a First Potentiality or First Actuality of a Human?Filosofia Unisinos 23 (2): 1-10. 2022.In Aristotle’s writings regarding the biology of embryology, especially in the Generation of Animals, he contends that the mother’s menstrual fluids provide the material for the generation of the offspring, and the father’s form determines its formation as a member of that species (e.g. human). The katamenia (menstrual fluids) of the mother are said to be potentially all the body parts of the offspring, though actually none of them. So, the fluids are potentially the offspring. But are they a fi…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Metaphysics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Moral Naturalism and Non-Naturalism |
Philosophy of Religion |