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10Catholic Moral Philosophy in Practice and Theory: An IntroductionPaulist Press. 2016.Cutting across the boundary of philosophy and theology, this book serves as an introduction to the living tradition of Catholic moral philosophy.
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11At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan (review)Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 29 (1): 165-168. 2019.
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8Paying for the Priceless ChildProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 86 103-113. 2012.As the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has observed, the twentieth century saw a “profound cultural transformation in children’s economic and sentimental value”: in brief, “the priceless child displaced the useful child.” Yet, the great value that we place on children of our own has gone hand-in-hand, again in Zelizer’s words, with a “collective indifference to other people’s children.” This paper focuses on the question of public responsibility for children: that is, on who should pay for the price…Read more
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49Aquinas, Double-Effect Reasoning, and the Pauline PrincipleAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 505-520. 2015.This paper reconsiders whether Aquinas is rightly read as a double-effect thinker and whether it is right to understand him as concurring with Paul’s dictum that evil is not to be done that good may come. I focus on what to make of Aquinas’s position that, though the private citizen may not intend to kill a man in self-defense, those holding public authority, like soldiers, may rightly do so. On my interpretation, we cannot attribute to Aquinas the position that aiming to kill in self-defense is…Read more
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45A Defense of Dignity: Creating Life, Destroying Life, and Protecting the Rights of Conscience, written by Christopher Kaczor (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (2): 237-239. 2017.
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9Conscience and Conscientiousness in Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral TheoryAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4): 679-700. 2021.Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory takes as its foundation “exemplars of goodness identified directly by the emotion of admiration.” This paper’s basic question is whether Zagzebski’s trust in the emotion of admiration is well-founded. In other words, do we have good reason to trust that those we admire on conscientious reflection warrant our admiration, such that we will not be led astray? The paper’s thesis is that Zagzebski’s theory would be stronger with a more fully developed accoun…Read more
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9What Kant Reconstructed Brings to Aquinas Reconstructed; Or, Why and How the New Natural Law Needs to Be ExtendedProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 82 99-113. 2008.The thesis of this paper is that the new natural law has reason to try to integrate Kant’s ethics, not reject it. My argument breaks into two parts. First I provide a critical account of the new natural law, taking as my exemplar of this theory Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis’s 1987 article “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends.” My criticism in the end is that the new natural law is vulnerable to much the same criticism that Boyle has made of Alan Donagan’s Kantian…Read more
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12Frederick J. Crosson, Ten Philosophical Essays in the Christian Tradition (review)Augustinian Studies 47 (2): 247-249. 2016.
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37Rethinking "Liberal Eugenics": Reflections and Questions on Habermas on BioethicsHastings Center Report 35 (6): 31. 2005.: In the new "liberal eugenics," children could be genetically improved as long as the enhancements let children choose from among a wide range of ways to live their lives. The German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas has opened a debate with the proponents of this view. Habermas suggests that a person could not really regard her life as her own if she lived with a body that somebody else had, without asking her opinion, "enhanced" for her
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64The Ticking Time Bomb Case for TortureSocial Philosophy Today 23 201-209. 2007.I make two arguments in this paper. First, I argue briefly that the ticking time bomb case is unrealistic and as such is liable to mislead us badly on the ground. Second, after conceding that the conditions of the ticking time bomb case might someday be realized, I argue that it may in fact be morally permissible to torture a terrorist in this case on the grounds of self-defense. My reason for making this argument is that rejecting torture in even the ticking time bomb case risks discrediting ob…Read more
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75When words fail us: Reexamining the conscience of huckleberry FinnJournal of Aesthetic Education 45 (4): 1-22. 2011.At least some (perhaps the most serious) moral problems, public as well as private, concern the ways in which we should construe and specify the problems we face. The present paper, as the subtitle indicates, reexamines the conscience of Huckleberry Finn, which means both that I provide a close reading of key chapters of Mark Twain’s great novel and that I engage Jonathan Bennett’s well-known and oft-cited paper, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” Bennett tells us, early in his paper, that an…Read more
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16Faith and Reason in Theory and PracticeAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1): 23-40. 2006.This paper takes up the question, “What is the responsibility of the philosopher, specifically the Catholic philosopher, in teaching ethics at a Catholic university?” Examination of the constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae reveals that answering this question requires examining in turn the relationship between theology and philosophy. Accordingly, the paper proceeds to an analysis of the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Th is analysis shows, however, that the very distinction betw…Read more
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10Cooperation with Evil: Thomistic Tools of Analysis (review)The New Bioethics 26 (3): 281-283. 2020.Volume 26, Issue 3, September 2020, Page 281-283.
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13The Ancients, the Moderns, and the CourtProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 79 189-200. 2005.This paper examines the case of Lawrence v. Texas to bring out the philosophical commitments of Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. It is proposed that Justices Kennedy and Scalia, while both Catholics, represent fundamentally different visions of the “ends and reasons” of democratic law. A close reading of the Justices’ opinions in Lawrence indicates that Justice Scalia belongs to the tradition of the “ancients” and Justice Kennedy to the tradition of the “moderns.” The paper focuses i…Read more
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The Laughing Body: Helmuth Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology RevisitedDissertation, Boston University. 2003.This dissertation critically examines Helmuth Plessner's philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter presented in his Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Plessner's philosophical anthropology makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the human capacity to laugh and, in the process, to our knowledge of human nature. This dissertation is accordingly addressed not only to philosophers interested in the qu…Read more
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15What Was to Be DemonstratedAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83 (4): 593-597. 2009.In his reply to my paper “The Problem with the Problem of the Embryo,” which appeared in the Summer 2008 (82:3) issue of ACPQ, Christopher Tollefsen claims that (1) I muddle matters by failing to keep distinct questions of biology from questions having to do with personhood; (2) I have the science wrong in my account of the debate over the fact that the embryo depends on “maternal donation” for its development; and (3) my so-called “counsel of pragmatism” is unlikely to lead to any progress, sin…Read more
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115Double effect, all over again: The case of Sister Margaret McBrideTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (4): 271-283. 2011.As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, th…Read more
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12Review of Cynthia Willett, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (3). 2009.
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13Parental Obligations and Bioethics: The Duties of a CreatorRoutledge. 2013.This book examines the question of what parental obligations procreators incur by bringing children into being. Prusak argues that parents, as procreators, have obligations regarding future children that constrain the liberty of would-be parents to do as they wish. Moreover, these obligations go beyond simply respecting a child’s rights. He addresses in turn the ethics of adoption, child support, gamete donation, surrogacy, prenatal genetic enhancement, and public responsibility for children
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26Kids, Kidneys, and the Moral Limits of MarketsJournal of Catholic Social Thought 11 (2): 375-389. 2014.
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54What Are Parents For?: Reproductive Ethics after the Nonidentity ProblemHastings Center Report 40 (2): 37-47. 2010.Bioethicists often use the “nonidentity problem”—the idea that a child born with a disability would actually be a different child if she were born without the disability—to defend parents' rights to have whatever children they want. After all, a child is not harmed by being brought into the world with a disability; without the disability, she would not be brought into the world at all. But what happens if we turn the moral question around and ask, not about the benefits and harms to the child, b…Read more
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24The science of laughter: Helmuth Plessner's laughing and crying revisitedContinental Philosophy Review 38 (1-2): 41-69. 2005.
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28Whither the “Offices of Nature”?: Kant and the Obligation to LoveProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 83 113-128. 2009.Since Kant, the standard response to the commandment to love has been that our affections are not ours to command, and so an obligation to feel lovefor another cannot reasonably be demanded. On this account, we must say that a parent who fails to love his or her child, in the sense of feeling affection for himor her, has not violated any obligation toward that child. Maybe we could say still that the parent is deficient somehow, but we could not characterize this deficiency as a moral failing. H…Read more
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John Carroll UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |