•  8
    Prenatal parental designing of children and the problem of acceptance
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 21 (4): 529-535. 2018.
    Seemingly ever improving medical technology and techniques portend the possibility of prenatally enhancing otherwise healthy, normal children—seamlessly enhancing or adding to a child’s natural abilities and characteristics. Though parents normally engage in enhancing children, i.e., child rearing, these technologies present radically new possibilities. This sort of enhancement, I argue, is morally problematic for the parent: the expectations of the enhancing parent necessarily conflict with att…Read more
  •  34
    Human reproductive cloning and reasons for deprivation
    Journal of Medical Ethics 34 (8): 619-623. 2008.
    Human reproductive cloning provides the possibility of genetically related children for persons for whom present technologies are ineffective. I argue that the desire for genetically related children is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to engage in human reproductive cloning. I show this by arguing that the value underlying the desire for genetically related children implies a tension between the parent and the future child. This tension stems from an instance of a deprivation and violates a …Read more
  •  21
    Representing the agent through second-order states
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (1). 2013.
    Some recent views of action have claimed that a correct conceptual account of action must include second-order motivational states. This follows from the fact that first-order motivational states such as desires account for action or mere behavior in which the agent's participation is lacking; thus, first-order motivational states cannot by themselves account for action in which the agent participates, so-called full-blooded action. I argue that representing the agent's participation by means of…Read more
  •  86
    Birth, meaningful viability and abortion
    Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (6): 460-463. 2015.
    What role does birth play in the debate about elective abortion? Does the wrongness of infanticide imply the wrongness of late-term abortion? In this paper, I argue that the same or similar factors that make birth morally significant with regard to abortion make meaningful viability morally significant due to the relatively arbitrary time of birth. I do this by considering the positions of Mary Anne Warren and José Luis Bermúdez who argue that birth is significant enough that the wrongness of in…Read more
  •  49
    A Kantian argument against comparatively advantageous genetic modification
    Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (8): 479-482. 2011.
    The genetic modification of children is becoming a more likely possibility given our rapid progress in medical technologies. I argue, from a broadly Kantian point of view, that at least one kind of such modification—modification by a parent for the sake of a child's comparative advantage—is not rationally justified. To argue this, I first characterize a necessary condition on reasons and rational justification: what is a reason for an agent to do an action in one set of circumstances must be a r…Read more
  •  140
    Abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and waste
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 29 (1): 27-41. 2008.
    Can one consistently deny the permissibility of abortion while endorsing the killing of human embryos for the sake of stem cell research? The question is not trivial; for even if one accepts that abortion is prima facie wrong in all cases, there are significant differences with many of the embryos used for stem cell research from those involved in abortion—most prominently, many have been abandoned in vitro, and appear to have no reasonably likely meaningful future. On these grounds one might th…Read more
  •  23
    Kant and a Problem of Motivation
    Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (1): 83-96. 2012.