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19Gamete donation: anti-anonymity does not equate to anti-donationHuman Reproduction Open 1 (4). 2022.What is the relationship between the position that anonymous gamete donation is wrong (i.e. the anti-anonymity position) and the position that all gamete donation is wrong (i.e. the anti-donation position)? Some argue that people who accept the anti-anonymity position should also accept the anti-donation position on the grounds that the two positions share the same main arguments. But that’s not true. One argument in favor of anti-anonymity does not generate genuine dialectical pressure to accep…Read more
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5The Open Donor View and Procreative BeneficenceHastings Center Report 54 (3): 60-61. 2024.This letter responds to the article “What Do Prospective Parents Owe to Their Children?,” by Abigail Levin, in the March‐April 2024 issue of the Hastings Center Report.
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Withholding Information to Protect a Loved OnePediatrics 6 (136). 2016.Parents respond to the death of a child in very different ways. Some parents may be violent or angry, some sad and tearful, some quiet and withdrawn, and some frankly delusional. We present a case in which a father’s reaction to his daughter’s death is a desire to protect his wife from the stressful information. The wife is in the second trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and so is particularly fragile. We asked pediatricians and bioethicists to discuss the ways in which they might respond to th…Read more
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37Walking a Tightrope: Responding to Roth, Brandt, Russell, and SkowInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16 (1): 214-231. 2023.Responses to Brad Skow, Reuven Brandt, Camisha Russell and Amanda Roth's commentaries on *Conceiving People*
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33Review of Duty to Self: Moral, Political, and Legal Self-Relation by Paul Schofield (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (3): 669-676. 2022.
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419Naturalizing parenthood: Lessons from (some forms of) non‐traditional family‐makingJournal of Social Philosophy 53 (3): 356-370. 2021.Cases of non-traditional family-making offer a rich seam for thinking about normative parenthood. Gamete donors are genetically related to the resulting offspring but are not thought to be normative parents. Gestational surrogates are also typically not thought to be normative parents, despite having gestated a child. Adoptive parents are typically thought to be normative parents even though they are neither genetically nor gestationally related to their child. Philosophers have paid attention t…Read more
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35Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg DonationOxford University Press. 2021.Each year, tens of thousands of children are conceived with donated gametes (sperm or eggs). By some estimates, there are over one million donor-conceived people in the United States and, of course, many more the world over. Some know they are donor-conceived. Some do not. Some know the identity of their donors. Others never will. Questions about what donor-conceived people should know about their genetic progenitors are hugely significant for literally millions of people, including donor-concei…Read more
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612On the (In)Significance of Moral Disagreement for Moral Knowledge 1Oxford Studies in Metaethics 8. 2009.This chapter considers an epistemological argument from disagreement which concludes that many of most people’s moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge. Various ways of understanding the argument are considered and it is argued that each relies on an epistemic principle that is under-motivated, overgeneralizes, and is indeed self-incriminating. These problems, it is suggested, infect many conciliationist theses in the epistemology of disagreement. Knowledge, it is argued, can withstand not only…Read more
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605Well-being, Gamete Donation, and Genetic Knowledge: The Significant Interest ViewJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (6): 758-781. 2021.The Significant Interest view entails that even if there were no medical reasons to have access to genetic knowledge, there would still be reason for prospective parents to use an identity-release donor as opposed to an anonymous donor. This view does not depend on either the idea that genetic knowledge is profoundly prudentially important or that donor-conceived people have a right to genetic knowledge. Rather, it turns on general claims about parents’ obligations to help promote their children…Read more
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121Paternalism, Disagreements, and The Moral DifferenceAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 57-70. 2019.Cases of paternalism usually involve disagreement between the paternalist and the paternalized subject. But not all the disagreements that give rise to paternalism are of the same kind and, as a result, not all instances of paternalism are morally on a par. There is, in other words, a moral difference between different kinds of paternalism, which can be explained in terms of the nature of the disagreements that give rise to the paternalism in the first place. This paper offers a novel account of…Read more
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447Paternalism and RightsIn Kalle Grill & Jason Hanna (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Paternalism, Routledge. 2018.Are there any deep or systematic connections between paternalism and people's rights? Perhaps the connection is definitional: part of what makes an action or policy paternalistic is that it violates a right. Or perhaps the connection is normative: paternalism is (always? often? only sometimes?) morally problematic because it violates people's rights (even if we don't define "paternalism" in terms of a rights violation). My main goal in this paper is to argue for the normative connection. Part of…Read more
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1143Is There a Role for ‘Human Nature’ in Debates About Human Enhancement?Philosophy 90 (4): 623-651. 2015.In discussions about the ethics of enhancement, it is often claimed that the concept of ‘human nature’ has no helpful role to play. There are two ideas behind this thought. The first is that nature, human nature included, is a mixed bag. Some parts of our nature are good for us and some are bad for us. The ‘mixed bag’ idea leads naturally to the second idea, namely that the fact that something is part of our nature is, by itself, normatively inert. The Inert View claims that nothing normative fo…Read more
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151Review of Jeffrey A. Schaler (ed.), Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics (review)Teaching Philosophy 33 (4): 418-421. 2010.
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368Moral Testimony: One of These Things Is Just Like the OthersAnalytic Philosophy 55 (1): 54-74. 2014.What, if anything, is wrong with acquiring moral beliefs on the basis of testimony? Most philosophers think that there is something wrong with it, and most point to a special problem that moral testimony is supposed to create for moral agency. Being a good moral agent involves more than bringing about the right outcomes. It also involves acting with "moral understanding" and one cannot have moral understanding of what one is doing via moral testimony. And so, adherents to this view claim, relyin…Read more
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34Review of James D. Wallace, Norms and Practices (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (9). 2009.
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137Medical Paternalism - Part 1Philosophy Compass 9 (3): 194-203. 2014.Medical clinicians – doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners etc. – are charged to act for the good of their patients. But not all ways of acting for a patient's good are on par: some are paternalistic; others are not. What does it mean to act paternalistically, both in general and specifically in a medical context? And when, if ever, is it permissible for a clinician to act paternalistically? This paper deals with the first question, with a special focus on paternalism in medicine. While it is eas…Read more
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6Authority Figures ReplyHastings Center Report 42 (3): 6-7. 2012.Letters in response to my article "What Healthcare Providers Know" and my response in turn.
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776What Health Care Providers Know: A Taxonomy of Clinical DisagreementsHastings Center Report 41 (5): 27-36. 2011.When, if ever, can healthcare provider's lay claim to knowing what is best for their patients? In this paper, I offer a taxonomy of clinical disagreements. The taxonomy, I argue, reveals that healthcare providers often can lay claim to knowing what is best for their patients, but that oftentimes, they cannot do so *as* healthcare providers.
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1777What You Don't Know Can Help You: The Ethics of Placebo TreatmentJournal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2): 188-202. 2011.abstract Is it permissible for a doctor or nurse to knowingly administer a placebo in a clinical setting? There is certainly something suspicious about it: placebos are typically said to be ‘sham’ treatments, with no ‘active’ properties and so giving a placebo is usually thought to involve tricking or deceiving the patient who expects a genuine treatment. Nonetheless, some physicians have recently suggested that placebo treatments are sometimes the best way to help their patients and can be admi…Read more
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167Medical Paternalism – Part 2Philosophy Compass 9 (3): 194-203. 2014.Medical clinicians – doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners etc. – are charged to act for the good of their patients. But not all ways of acting for a patient's good are on par: some are paternalistic; others are not. What does it mean to act paternalistically, both in general and specifically in a medical context? And when, if ever, is it permissible for a clinician to act paternalistically? In Medical Paternalism Part 1, I answered the first question. This paper answers the second. The place of …Read more
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59Four Models of Family InterestsPedatrics 134. 2014.In this article, I distinguish between 4 models for thinking about how to balance the interests of parents, families, and a sick child: (1) the oxygen mask model; (2) the wide interests model; (3) the family interests model; and (4) the direct model. The oxygen mask model – which takes its name from flight attendants' directives to parents to put on their own oxygen mask before putting on their child's – says that parents should consider their own interests only insofar as doing so is, ultimatel…Read more
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379Autonomy (The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism)In James E. Crimmins (ed.), The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2013.
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513Medicine & Well-BeingIn Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, Routledge. 2015.The connections between medicine and well-being are myriad. This paper focuses on the place of well-being in clinical medicine. It is here that different views of well-being, and their connection to concepts like “autonomy” and “authenticity”, both illuminate and are illuminated by looking closely at the kinds of interactions that routinely take place between clinicians, patients, and family members. In the first part of the paper, I explore the place of well-being in a paradigmatic clinical enc…Read more
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1503Paternalism, Respect and the WillEthics 122 (4): 692-720. 2012.In general, we think that when it comes to the good of another, we respect that person’s will by acting in accordance with what he wills because he wills it. I argue that this is not necessarily true. When it comes to the good of another person, it is possible to disrespect that person’s will while acting in accordance with what he wills because he wills it. Seeing how this is so, I argue, enables us to clarify the distinct roles that the wills of competent and incompetent people should play in …Read more
Northfield, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social Philosophy |