•  8
    Medically Assisted Death and the Ends of Medicine
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 1-11. forthcoming.
    This paper aims to refute a common line of argument that it is immoral for physicians to engage in medical assistance in death (MAiD), i.e., the practices of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The argument in question is based on the notion that participating in MAiD is contrary to the professional-role obligations of physicians, due to MAiD’s putative inconsistency with the ends of medicine. The paper describes several major flaws from which that argument suffers.
  •  547
    Autonomy and the Moral Authority of Advance Directives
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (5): 500-520. 2016.
    Although advance directives are widely believed to be a key way to safeguard the autonomy of incompetent medical patients, significant questions exist about their moral authority. The main philosophical concern involves cases in which an incompetent patient no longer possesses the desires on which her advance directive was based. The question is, does that entail that prior expressions of medical choices are no longer morally binding? I believe that the answer is “yes.” I argue that a patient’s …Read more
  •  17
    Equity and COVID‐19 treatment allocation: A questionable criterion
    with Guha Krishnamurthi
    Bioethics 37 (3): 226-238. 2023.
    Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a controversial criterion for allocating scarce medical treatment has been defended and incorporated into policy: the criterion of equity. Equity-included allocation schemes prioritize, to some degree, patients from marginalized or historically disadvantaged racial/ethnic groups, or patients with low socioeconomic status, for scarce treatment. The use of such criteria has been most prominently defended in two ways: (1) as reflecting a risk factor for sev…Read more
  •  50
    Matthew Tedesco has argued that Alvin Plantinga’s argument that belief in naturalistic evolution is self-defeating entails, according to a parallel argument, that theistic belief is self-defeating for the same reasons. I defend Plantinga against this charge by arguing that the parallel argument is unsound.
  •  12
    This paper proposes and employs a framework for determining whether life-saving treatment at birth is in the best interests of extremely preterm infants, given uncertainty about the outcome of such a choice. It argues that given relevant data and plausible assumptions about the well-being of babies with various outcomes, it is typically in the best interests of even the youngest preterm infants—those born at 22 weeks gestational age—to receive life-saving treatment at birth.
  •  13
    Normative nursing ethics: A literature review and tentative recommendations
    with Alison Colbert
    Nursing Ethics 096973301983614. forthcoming.
  •  162
    Morality, reasons, and sentiments
    Philosophical Studies 155 (3): 421-432. 2011.
    Morality is commonly thought to be normative in a robust and important way. This is commonly cashed out in terms of normative reasons. It is also commonly thought that morality is necessarily and universally normative, i.e., that moral reasons are reasons for any possible moral agent. Taking these commonplaces for granted, I argue for a novel view of moral normativity. I challenge the standard view that moral reasons are reasons to act. I suggest that moral reasons are reasons for having sentime…Read more
  •  40
    The Nature and Value of Bioethics Expertise
    Bioethics 29 (5): 324-333. 2014.
    In this article, I address the extent to which experts in bioethics can contribute to healthcare delivery by way of aid in clinical decision-making and policy-formation. I argue that experts in bioethics are moral experts, in that their substantive moral views are more likely to be correct than those of non-bioethicists, all else being equal, but that such expertise is of use in a relatively limited class of cases. In so doing, I respond to two recent arguments against the view that bioethicists…Read more
  •  71
    Competence and Ability
    Bioethics 28 (5): 235-244. 2012.
    It is nearly universally thought that the kind of decision-making competence that gives one a strong prima facie right to make one's own medical decisions essentially involves having an ability (or abilities) of some sort, or having a certain level or degree of ability (or abilities). When put under philosophical scrutiny, however, this kind of theory does not hold up. I will argue that being competent does not essentially involve abilities, and I will propose and defend a theory of decision-mak…Read more
  •  27
    In this article, I argue that professional healthcare organizations such as the AMA and ANA ought not to take controversial stances on professional ethics. I address the best putative arguments in favor of taking such stances, and argue that none are convincing. I then argue that the sort of stance-taking at issue has pernicious consequences: it stands to curb critical thought in social, political, and legal debates, increase moral distress among clinicians, and alienate clinicians from their pr…Read more
  •  5
    Deciding for the Incompetent
    In John K. Davis (ed.), Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, Routledge. pp. 108-125. 2016.
    This chapter discusses the moral framework for surrogate decision-making for incompetent medical patients. The chapter focuses on the question of how we can respect the autonomy of those who are no longer competent to make such decisions. The standard counterfactual account of how to respect the autonomy of the incompetent is evaluated, along with accounts that ground respect for autonomy on the patient’s most recent desires and values (regardless of whether the patient still possesses those des…Read more
  •  132
    Metaphysics and the Future-Like-Ours Argument Against Abortion
    The Journal of Ethics 20 (4): 419-434. 2016.
    Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours” argument against the moral permissibility of abortion is widely considered the strongest anti-abortion argument in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address the issue of whether the argument relies upon controversial metaphysical premises. It is widely thought that future-like-ours argument indeed relies upon controversial metaphysics, in that it must reject the psychological theory of personal identity. I argue that that thought is mistaken—the futu…Read more
  •  80
    Religious pluralism and justified Christian belief: A reply to silver
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 55 (3): 187-192. 2004.
  •  129
    Moral normativity
    Philosophical Studies 165 (3): 1083-1095. 2013.
    It is a platitude that morality is normative, but a substantive and interesting question whether morality is normative in a robust and important way; and although it is often assumed that morality is indeed robustly normative, that view is by no means uncontroversial, and a compelling argument for it is conspicuously lacking. In this paper, I provide such an argument. I argue, based on plausible claims about the relationship between moral wrongs and moral criticizability, and the relationship be…Read more
  •  186
    Subjective Reasons
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2): 239-257. 2012.
    In recent years, the notion of a reason has come to occupy a central place in both metaethics and normative theory more broadly. Indeed, many philosophers have come to view reasons as providing the basis of normativity itself . The common conception is that reasons are facts that count in favor of some act or attitude. More recently, philosophers have begun to appreciate a distinction between objective and subjective reasons, where (roughly) objective reasons are determined by the facts, while s…Read more
  •  107
    A new moral sentimentalism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3): 346-368. 2016.
    This paper argues for a novel sentimentalist realist metaethical theory, according to which moral wrongness is analyzed in terms of the sentiments one has most reason to have. As opposed to standard sentimentalist views, the theory does not employ sentiments that are had in response to morally wrong action, but rather sentiments that antecedently dispose people to refrain from immoral behavior, specifically the sentiments of compassion and respect.