•  795
    Is a vegetarian diet morally safe?
    Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie. forthcoming.
    If non-human animals have high moral status, then we commit a grave moral error by eating them. Eating animals is thus morally risky, while many agree that it is morally permissible to not eat animals. According to some philosophers, then, non-animal ethicists should err on the side of caution and refrain from eating animals. I argue that this precautionary argument assumes a false dichotomy of dietary options: a diet that includes farm-raised animals or a diet that does not include animals of a…Read more
  •  737
    Dilemma for appeals to the moral significance of birth
    Journal of Medical Ethics (12). 2020.
    Giubilini and Minerva argue that the permissibility of abortion entails the permissibility of infanticide. Proponents of what we refer to as the Birth Strategy claim that there is a morally significant difference brought about at birth that accounts for our strong intuition that killing newborns is morally impermissible. We argue that strategy does not account for the moral intuition that late-term, non-therapeutic abortions are morally impermissible. Advocates of the Birth Strategy must either …Read more
  •  482
    It is envisioned that one day xenotransplantation will bring about a future where transplantable organs can be safely and efficiently grown in transgenic pigs to help meet the global organ shortage. While recent advances have brought this future closer, worries remain about whether it will be beneficial overall. The unique challenges and risks posed to humans that arise from transplanting across the species barrier, in addition to the costs borne by non-human animals, has led some to question th…Read more
  •  234
    God, Time and the Kalām Cosmological Argument
    Sophia 52 (4): 593-600. 2013.
    The Kalām cosmological argument deploys the following causal principle: whatever begins to exist has a cause. Yet, under what conditions does something ‘begin to exist’? What does it mean to say that ‘X begins to exist at t’? William Lane Craig has offered and defended various accounts that seek to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for when something ‘begins to exist.’ I argue that all of the accounts that William Lane Craig has offered fail on the following grounds: either they …Read more
  •  98
    Hope and practical deliberation
    Analysis 77 (3): 495-497. 2017.
    Accounts of practical deliberation tend to overlook any possible role for hope. I offer an argument showing that hope sets the ends of our practical deliberations and is thereby necessary for practical deliberation. It is because I hope to summit the mountain by midday that I deliberate about how to do so. Absent this particular hope, I could not deliberate about how to summit the mountain by midday.
  •  93
    Thomas Aquinas divides the sensory appetite into two powers: the irascible and the concupiscible. The irascible power moves creatures toward arduous goods and away from arduous evils, while the concupiscible power moves creatures toward pleasant goods and away from non-arduous evils. Despite the importance of this distinction, it remains unclear what counts as an arduous good or evil, and why arduousness is the defining feature of the division. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I argue th…Read more
  •  88
    What Would the Virtuous Person Eat? The Case for Virtuous Omnivorism
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 34 (3): 1-19. 2021.
    Would the virtuous person eat animals? According to some ethicists, the answer is a resounding no, at least for the virtuous person living in an affluent society. The virtuous person cares about animal suffering, and so, she will not contribute to practices that involve animal suffering when she can easily adopt a strict plant-based diet. The virtuous person is temperate, and temperance involves not indulging in unhealthy diets, which include diets that incorporate animals. Moreover, it is unjus…Read more
  •  87
    Why Hope is not a Moral Virtue: Aquinas's Insight
    Ratio 31 (2): 214-232. 2018.
    There is a growing consensus among philosophers that hope is a moral virtue: the virtuously hopeful person experiences the right amount of hope for the right things. This moralization of hope presents us with a puzzle. The historical consensus is that hope is a passion and hope is a theological virtue, not a moral virtue. Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher who wrote most extensively on hope, offers an explanation for why hope is not a moral virtue. The aim of this paper is argue that Aquinas is rig…Read more
  •  84
    Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology and Divine Revelation
    Philosophia 42 (2): 309-320. 2014.
    Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) states that for S to have knowledge, S must have a virtuously formed safe true belief. S’s belief that p is safe if, in most near-by possible worlds where S’s belief is formed in the same manner as in the actual world, S’s belief is true. S’s safe belief that p is virtuously formed if S’s safe belief is formed using reliable and well-integrated cognitive processes and it is to S’s credit that she formed the belief. In this paper, I offer a novel counterexampl…Read more
  •  73
    David DeGrazia (2009) and Stuart Rachels (2011), among others, offer moral arguments in favor of adopting a vegetarian diet that have, they claim, broad appeal. Rather than relying on an account of animal rights or a particular ethical theory, these arguments rely on the moral principle that an extensive amount of pain requires moral justification. Since people do not need to eat meat in order to survive, the arguments conclude that the pain that animals experience in factory farming is unjustif…Read more
  •  72
    Revisiting Anselm on Time and Divine Eternity
    Heythrop Journal 62 (4): 665-679. 2021.
    How to understand Saint Anselm of Canterbury on time and divine eternity is subject to debate. Katherin Rogers argues that Anselm is a four‐dimensionalist, whereas Brian Leftow argues that he is a presentist. Despite the disagreement, both scholars assume that Anselm has a positive account of time and divine eternity to offer. I challenge this assumption, arguing that Anselm is not interested in offering an account of the metaphysics of time and divine eternity. The reading defended here is defl…Read more
  •  66
    New omnivorism is a term coined by Andy Lamey to refer to arguments that – paradoxically – our duties towards animals require us to eat some animal products. Lamey’s claim to have identified a new, distinctive position in food ethics is problematic, however, for some of his interlocutors are not new (e.g., Leslie Stephen in the nineteenth century), not distinctive (e.g., animal welfarists), and not obviously concerned with eating animals (e.g., plant neurobiologists). It is the aim of this paper…Read more
  •  59
    Varieties of the Cruelty-Based Objection to Factory Farming
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (3): 377-390. 2019.
    Timothy Hsiao defends industrial animal agriculture from the “strongest version of the cruelty objection” :37–54, 2017). The cruelty objection, following Rachels Food for thought: the debate over eating meat, Prometheus, Amherst, 2004), is that, because it is wrong to cause pain without a morally good reason, and there is no morally good reason for the pain caused in factory farming, factory farming is morally indefensible.In this paper, I do not directly engage Hsiao’s argument for the moral pe…Read more
  •  56
    Orphans and the relational significance of birth: a response to Singh
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (6): 439-440. 2021.
    Prabhpal Singh has defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns. Newborns stand in the parent-child relation while fetuses do not, and standing in the parent-child relationship brings with it higher moral status for newborns. Orphans pose a problem for this account because they do not stand in a parent-child relationship. I argue that Singh has not satisfactorily responded to the problem.
  •  54
    Aquinas on the Emotion of Hope
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (3): 379-404. 2020.
    Hope is important in Thomas Aquinas’s account of the emotions: it is one of the four primary emotions and the first of the irascible emotions. Yet his account of hope as a movement of the sensory appetite toward a future possible good that is arduous to attain appears to be overly restrictive, for people often hope for things that are not cognized as arduous. This paper examines Aquinas’s reasons for limiting hope to arduous goods.
  •  53
    Why appeals to the moral significance of birth are saddled with a dilemma
    Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (7): 490-491. 2022.
    In ‘Dilemma for Appeals to the Moral Significance of Birth’, we argued that a dilemma is faced by those who believe that birth is the event at which infanticide is ruled out. Those who reject the moral permissibility of infanticide by appeal to the moral significance of birth must either accept the moral permissibility of a late-term abortion for a non-therapeutic reason or not. If they accept it, they need to account for the strong intuition that her decision is wrong as well as deny the underl…Read more
  •  48
    The Conciliatory View and the Charge of Wholesale Skepticism
    Logos and Episteme 3 (4): 619-627. 2012.
    If I reasonably think that you and I enjoy the same evidence as well as virtues and vices, then we are epistemic peers. What does rationality require of usshould we disagree? According to the conciliatory view, I should become less confident in my belief upon finding out that you, whom I take to be my peer, disagree with me. Question: Does the conciliatory view lead to wholesale skepticism regarding areas of life where disagreement is rampant? After all, people focusing on the same arguments and…Read more
  •  46
    Animal rights, animal research, and the need to reimagine science
    with Noah Reinhardt and Kate Pawlowski
    The New Bioethics 30 (1): 63-76. 2024.
    What would it look like for researchers to take non-human animal rights seriously? Recent discussions foster the impression that scientific practice needs to be reformed to make animal research ethical: just as there is ethically rigorous human research, so there can be ethically rigorous animal research. We argue that practically little existing animal research would be ethical and that ethical animal research is not scalable. Since animal research is integral to the existing scientific paradig…Read more
  •  42
    Leibniz on unbaptized infant damnation
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 80 (2): 185-194. 2016.
    Leibniz consistently denies that unbaptized infants are condemned to hell in virtue of original sin. He is less than forthcoming, however, about where they go when they die. Scholars are divided on this issue. Some think that, according to Leibniz, they go to limbo, while others think that he is committed to the view that they go to heaven. The aim of this paper is to show that this scholarly attention is misguided and that Leibniz does not defend a position regarding the fate of unbaptized infa…Read more
  •  42
    Extending the Impairment Argument to Sentient Non-Human Animals
    Between the Species 25 (1): 1-24. 2022.
    This paper offers a new argument against raising and killing sentient non-human animals for food. It is immoral to non-lethally impair sentient non-human animals for pleasure, and since raising and killing sentient animals for gustatory pleasure impairs them to a much greater degree, it also is wrong. This is because of the impairment principle: if it is immoral to impair an organism to some degree, then, ceteris paribus, it is immoral to impair it to a higher degree. This argument is structural…Read more
  •  40
    Virtue Ethics and the Spheres of Morality Framework
    American Journal of Bioethics 23 (12): 37-38. 2023.
    Doernberg and Truog (2023) offer a “spheres of morality framework” (11) to illuminate ethical conflicts and improve ethical decision making in healthcare. A sphere of morality is the collection of...
  •  36
    Xenotransplantation Clinical Trials and Equitable Patient Selection
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (3): 425-434. 2024.
    Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) the guidelines conflict with criteria for equitabl…Read more
  •  33
    Should we eat the human-pig chimera?
    Food Ethics 5 (1-2). 2019.
    Scientists will soon be able to grow human-transplantable organs in pigs. This paper focuses on the question of whether it is morally permissible to eat genetically altered pigs after harvesting their organs. Despite a lack of scholarly discussion of this question, the impetus for it is straightforward. There is no reason to think that peoples’ taste for pig will subside when scientists reach the point of being able to growing mature human organs inside them. In this paper, I argue that there is…Read more
  •  33
    The Hopefull Leviathan: Hope, Deliberation and the Commonwealth
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (3): 455-480. 2021.
    According to a common reading of Thomas Hobbes, fear is the most philosophically important passion, responsible for the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. I argue that this common reading is incorrect by focusing on the necessary and important role of hope in human action as well as in the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. Life in the Hobbesian commonwealth, on the reading defended in this paper, is less fearful and more hopeful than scholars have noticed.
  •  31
    In Defense of Virtue-Responsibilism
    Logos and Episteme 4 (2): 201-216. 2013.
    Modest realism affirms that some of the objects of our beliefs exist independently of our beliefs. That is, there is a mind-independent world that we canepistemically access. The Cartesian skeptic claims that we can’t offer any non-question-begging arguments in favor of modest realism and therefore we are not justified in believing that modest realism is true. Reliabilists argue that the skeptic assumes an evidentialist-internalist account of justification and that a proper account of justificat…Read more
  •  29
    The Impairment Argument and Future-Like-Ours: A Problematic Dependence
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 20 (3): 353-357. 2023.
    In response to criticism of the impairment argument for the immorality of abortion, Bruce Blackshaw and Perry Hendricks appeal to Don Marquis’s future-like-ours (FLO) account of the wrongness of killing to explain why knowingly causing fetal impairments is wrong. I argue that wedding the success of the impairment argument to FLO undermines all claims that the impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is novel. Moreover, I argue that relying on FLO when there are alternative explanations…Read more
  •  29
    A critical examination of the false hope harms argument
    Bioethics 35 (2): 221-224. 2021.
    Marleen Eijkholt presents a new argument in healthcare ethics, the false hope harms (FHH) argument. In brief, false hope promotes a host of individual harms (e.g., financial, physical, and psychological harms) and system‐level harms (e.g., distrust of medical practitioners, increased complexity of care and the associated costs), all of which provide reason for healthcare providers to stop promoting false hope in medicine. The goal of this paper is to show that the FHH argument is unsuccessful.