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5From Sanitation Science to Geroscience: Public Health Must Transcend ‘Folkbiology’Public Health Ethics 16 (2): 165-174. 2023.Folkbiology refers to people’s everyday understanding of the biological world. The early twentieth-century pioneers of public health C.-E.A Winslow (1877–1957), and his mentor H. Biggs (1859–1923), conceptualized public health as the ‘purchasable’ science of preventing disease and death from unfavorable economic and living conditions. Their ideas were foundational in shaping public health’s strategy of a ‘war against disease’ (Winslow, 1903), a strategy that was very successful in preventing the…Read more
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28Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, Reproductive Freedom, and Deliberative DemocracyJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (2): 135-154. 2009.In this paper I argue that the account of deliberative democracy advanced by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (1996, 2004) is a useful normative theory that can help enhance our deliberations about public policy in morally pluralistic societies. More specifically, I illustrate how the prescriptions of deliberative democracy can be applied to the issue of regulating non-medical uses of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), such as gender selection. Deliberative democracy does not aim to win a …Read more
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Civic Liberalism and the “Dialogical Model” of Judicial ReviewLaw and Philosophy 25 (5): 489-531. 2006.In a world that is inherently indeterminate, a suitable theory of distributive justice must perhaps itself be indeterminate, and its indeterminacies must accommodate those of the world where relevant.Russell Hardin, Indeterminacy and Society.
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144The case for re-thinking incest lawsJournal of Medical Ethics 34 (9). 2008.The recent case of German siblings Patrick Stübing and his sister Susan Karolewski has reignited debate over the criminalisation of sexual intercourse among consanguine descendants. The primary justification for criminalising incest is the purported increased risk of genetic disabilities among offspring, but is criminalising sexual intercourse an empirically sound and proportionate response to this increased risk? To answer this question we must consider the specifics of the harm in question and…Read more
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The "focusing illusion" of Rawlsian ideal theoryIn Sarah Roberts-Cady & Jon Mandle (eds.), John Rawls: Debating the Major Questions, Oup Usa. 2020.
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7Aging, Equality and the Human HealthspanHEC Forum 1-19. forthcoming.John Davis (_New Methuselahs_: _The Ethics of Life_ _Extension_, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2018) advances a novel ethical analysis of longevity science that employs a three-fold methodology of examining the impact of life extension technologies on three distinct groups: the “Haves”, the “Have-nots” and the “Will-nots”. In this essay, I critically examine the egalitarian analysis Davis deploys with respect to its ability to help us theorize about the moral significance of an applied gerontologica…Read more
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14Imagination and idealism in the medical sciences of an ageing worldJournal of Medical Ethics 49 (4): 271-274. 2023.Imagination and idealism are particularly important creative epistemic virtues for the medical sciences if we hope to improve the health of the world’s ageing population. To date, imagination and idealism within the medical sciences have been dominated by a paradigm of disease control, a paradigm which has realised significant, but also limited, success. Disease control proved particularly successful in mitigating the early-life mortality risks from infectious diseases, but it has proved less su…Read more
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32Gene Patents and the Social Justice LensAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (12): 49-51. 2018.I am grateful to Feeney and colleagues for their thoughtful engagement with, and application of, the normative analysis I developed concerning gene patents in Farrelly (2016). Their exploration of...
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42Virtue Ethics and Prenatal Genetic Enhancement (review)Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 1 (1). 2007.
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64Justice in the genetically transformed societyKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (1): 91-99. 2005.: This paper explores some of the challenges raised by human genetic interventions for debates about distributive justice, focusing on the challenges that face prioritarian theories of justice and their relation to the argument advanced by Ronald Lindsay elsewhere in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Also examined are the implications of germ-line genetic enhancements for intergenerational justice, and an argument is given against Fritz Allhoff's conclusion, found in this is…Read more
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405Commentary on Part 3: International political and economic structuresLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 8 (2): 41-52. 2013.Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice is a unique and important contribution to the growing literature on global justice. Risse’s approach to a variety of topics, ranging from domestic justice and common ownership of the earth, to immigration, human rights, climate change, and labour rights, is one that conceives of global justice as a philosophical problem. In this commentary I focus on a number of reservations I have about approaching global justice as a philosophical rather than an inherently pra…Read more
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42Normative Theorizing about GeneticsCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 22 (4): 408-419. 2013.
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143A challenge to Brink's metaphysical egoismRes Publica 9 (3): 243-256. 2003.Those who subscribe to a prudential conception of practical reason do not believe that there is a conflict between other-regarding and self-regarding norms as the former are held to be founded on the latter. Moral conduct, they maintain, is always rationally justifiable. The reasons we should fulfil the demands of other-regarding norms are the same as those we have for fulfilling self-regarding norms. David Brink has put forth an interesting and novel account of this approach to practical reason…Read more
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22Empirical ethics and the duty to extend the “biological warranty period”Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 480-503. 2013.The world's aging populations face novel health challenges never experienced before in human history. The moral landscape thus needs to adapt to reflect this novel empirical reality. In this paper I take for granted one basic moral principle advanced by Peter Singer and explore the implications that empirical considerations from demography, evolutionary biology, and biogerontology have for the way we conceive of fulfilling this principle at the operational level. After bringing to the fore a num…Read more
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148Virtue Ethics and Prenatal Genetic EnhancementStudies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 1 (1). 2007.In this paper I argue that the virtue ethics tradition can enhance the moral discourse on the ethics of prenatal genetic enhancements in distinctive and valuable ways. Virtue ethics prescribes we adopt a much more provisional stance on the issue of the moral permissibility of prenatal genetic enhancements. A stance that places great care on differentiating between the different stakes involved with developing different phenotypes in our children and the different possible means (environmental vs…Read more
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83Public Reason, Neutrality and Civic VirtuesRatio Juris 12 (1): 11-25. 1999.In this paper I argue that political liberalism is not the “minimalist liberalism” characterised by Michael Sandel and that it does not support the vision of public life characteristic of the procedural republic. I defend this claim by developing two points. The first concerns Rawls's account of public reason. Drawing from examples in Canadian free speech jurisprudence I show how restrictions on commercial advertising, obscenity and hate propaganda can be justified by political values. Secondly,…Read more
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192Book Review: Making Deliberative Democracy a More Practical Political Ideal (review)European Journal of Political Theory 4 (2): 200-208. 2005.
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3Making Deliberative Democracy a more practical idealEuropean Journal of Political Theory 4 (2): 200-208. 2004.
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13Introduction to Contemporary Political TheorySAGE. 2004.Colin Farrelly's central objective in writing this introductory text is to demonstrate to students the practical relevance of contemporary theoretical debates to everyday issues in policy creation and implementation and politics.
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33Genetic Intervention and the New Frontiers of JusticeDialogue 41 (1): 139-. 2002.Recent advances in genetic research pose many complex problems for moral and political philosophers. On the one hand, these advances promise great things. Genetic enhancement techniques might allow us to prevent or cure a variety of debilitating diseases. But on the other hand, talk about intervening in people's genetic make-up conjures up memories of the sinister episodes of past eugenic movements. Such movements violated the most basic principles of justice. How can society capitalize on the b…Read more
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106What will the demands of distributive justice be in the postgenetic revolutionary world? Will genetic inheritance be regarded as socially distributed goods? This may seem a more reasonable position to assert as biotechnology progresses further toward human genetic manipulation
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100The genetic difference principleAmerican Journal of Bioethics 4 (2). 2004.In the newly emerging debates about genetics and justice three distinct principles have begun to emerge concerning what the distributive aim of genetic interventions should be. These principles are: genetic equality, a genetic decent minimum, and the genetic difference principle. In this paper, I examine the rationale of each of these principles and argue that genetic equality and a genetic decent minimum are ill-equipped to tackle what I call the currency problem and the problem of weight. The …Read more
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21Contemporary Political Theory: A ReaderSAGE. 2004.Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader provides an accessible introduction to the key works of major contemporary political theorists. Key theorists and writers include John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Susan Okin, Will Kymlicka, Iris Marion Young, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and John Dryzek.
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152Patriarchy and Historical MaterialismHypatia 26 (1): 1-21. 2011.Why does the world have the pattern of patriarchy it currently possesses? Why have patriarchal practices and institutions evolved and changed in the ways they have tended to over time in human societies? This paper explores these general questions by integrating a feminist analysis of patriarchy with the central insights of the functionalist interpretation of historical materialism advanced by G. A. Cohen. The paper has two central aspirations: first, to help narrow the divide between analytical…Read more
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3An introduction to aretaic theories of lawIn Colin Patrick Farrelly & Lawrence Solum (eds.), Virtue jurisprudence, Palgrave-macmillan. 2007.
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Queen's UniversityRegular Faculty
Kingston, Ontario, Canada