•  3864
    Trolleys and Double Effect in Experimental Ethics
    In Christoph Lütge, Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl (eds.), Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2014.
    I analyse the relationship between the Doctrine of Double Effect and the Trolley Problem: the former offers a solution for the latter only on the premise that killing the one in Bystander at the Switch is permissible. Here I offer both empirical and theoretical arguments against the permissibility of killing the one: firstly, I present data from my own empirical studies according to which the intuition that killing the one is permissible is neither widespread nor stable; secondly, I defend a nor…Read more
  •  3814
    Addiction, Compulsion, and Agency
    Neuroethics 7 (1): 105-107. 2014.
    I show that Pickard’s argument against the irresistibility of addiction fails because her proposed dilemma, according to which either drug-seeking does not count as action or addiction is resistible, is flawed; and that is the case whether or not one endorses Pickard’s controversial definition of action. Briefly, we can easily imagine cases in which drug-seeking meets Pickard’s conditions for agency without thereby implying that the addiction was not irresistible, as when the drug addict may tak…Read more
  •  3642
    Priming Effects and Free Will
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (5): 725-734. 2012.
    I argue that the empirical literature on priming effects does not warrant nor suggest the conclusion, drawn by prominent psychologists such as J. A. Bargh, that we have no free will or less free will than we might think. I focus on a particular experiment by Bargh – the ‘elderly’ stereotype case in which subjects that have been primed with words that remind them of the stereotype of the elderly walk on average slower out of the experiment’s room than control subjects – and I show that we cannot …Read more
  •  2844
    Self-Sacrifice and the Trolley Problem
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (5): 662-672. 2013.
    Judith Jarvis Thomson has recently proposed a new argument for the thesis that killing the one in the Trolley Problem is not permissible. Her argument relies on the introduction of a new scenario, in which the bystander may also sacrifice herself to save the five. Thomson argues that those not willing to sacrifice themselves if they could may not kill the one to save the five. Bryce Huebner and Marc Hauser have recently put Thomson's argument to empirical test by asking people what they should d…Read more
  •  2624
    Aristotle and Double Effect
    Journal of Ancient Philosophy 8 (1): 20. 2014.
    There are some interesting similarities between Aristotle’s ‘mixed actions’ in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics and the actions often thought to be justifiable with the Doctrine of Double Effect. Here I analyse these similarities by comparing Aristotle’s examples of mixed actions with standard cases from the literature on double effect such as, amongst others, strategic bombing, the trolley problem, and craniotomy. I find that, despite some common features such as the dilemmatic structure and …Read more
  •  2516
    Sexual Rights and Disability
    Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (3): 158-161. 2011.
    I argue against Appel's recent proposal – in this JOURNAL – that there is a fundamental human right to sexual pleasure, and that therefore the sexual pleasure of severely disabled people should be publicly funded – by thereby partially legalizing prostitution. I propose an alternative that does not need to pose a new positive human right; does not need public funding; does not need the legalization of prostitution; and that would offer a better experience to the severely disabled: charitable non…Read more
  •  2335
    Fathers and Abortion
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (4): 444-458. 2014.
    I argue that it is possible for prospective mothers to wrong prospective fathers by bearing their child; and that lifting paternal liability for child support does not correct the wrong inflicted to fathers. It is therefore sometimes wrong for prospective mothers to bear a child, or so I argue here. I show that my argument for considering the legitimate interests of prospective fathers is not a unique exception to an obvious right to procreate. It is, rather, part of a growing consensus that pro…Read more
  •  2330
    Embryo loss and double effect
    Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (8): 537-540. 2013.
    I defend the argument that if embryo loss in stem cell research is morally problematic, then embryo loss in in vivo conception is similarly morally problematic. According to a recent challenge to this argument, we can distinguish between in vivo embryo loss and the in vitro embryo loss of stem cell research by appealing to the doctrine of double effect. I argue that this challenge fails to show that in vivo embryo loss is a mere unintended side effect while in vitro embryo loss is an intended me…Read more
  •  2152
    I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber which dominates this debate is underdetermined in three crucial respects: (1) the non-psychological worlds of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; (2) the psychologies of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; and (3) the structure of the thought-experiment, especially in relation to its sim…Read more
  •  1585
    I offer eight arguments against the Doctrine of Double Effect, a normative principle according to which in pursuing the good it is sometimes morally permissible to bring about some evil as a side-effect or merely foreseen consequence: the same evil would not be morally justified as an intended means or end.
  •  1582
    Action, Deviance, and Guidance
    Abstracta (2): 41-59. 2013.
    I argue that we should give up the fight to rescue causal theories of action from fundamental challenges such as the problem of deviant causal chains; and that we should rather pursue an account of action based on the basic intuition that control identifies agency. In Section 1 I introduce causalism about action explanation. In Section 2 I present an alternative, Frankfurt’s idea of guidance. In Section 3 I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains challenges causalism in two important res…Read more
  •  1386
    Habits, Nudges, and Consent
    American Journal of Bioethics 13 (6). 2013.
    I distinguish between 'hard nudges' and 'soft nudges', arguing that it is possible to show that the latter can be compatible with informed consent - as Cohen has recently suggested; but that the real challenge is the compatibility of the former. Hard nudges are the more effective nudges because they work on less than conscious mechanisms such as those underlying our habits: whether those influences - which are often beyond the subject's awareness - can be reconciled with informed consent in heal…Read more
  •  1302
    Killing fetuses and killing newborns
    Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (5): 19-20. 2013.
    The argument for the moral permissibility of killing newborns is a challenge to liberal positions on abortion because it can be considered a reductio of their defence of abortion. Here I defend the liberal stance on abortion by arguing that the argument for the moral permissibility of killing newborns on ground of the social, psychological and economic burden on the parents recently put forward by Giubilini and Minerva is not valid; this is because they fail to show that newborns cannot be harme…Read more
  •  1261
    Frankfurt versus Frankfurt: a new anti-causalist dawn
    Philosophical Explorations 14 (1): 117-131. 2011.
    In this paper I argue that there is an important anomaly to the causalist/compatibilist paradigm in the philosophy of action and free will. This anomaly, which to my knowledge has gone unnoticed so far, can be found in the philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Two of his most important contributions to the field – his influential counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities and his ‘guidance’ view of action – are incompatible. The importance of this inconsistency goes far beyond the issue…Read more
  •  1051
    Sexual Rights, Disability and Sex Robots
    In John Danaher & Neil McArthur (eds.), Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, Mit Press. 2017.
    I argue that the right to sexual satisfaction of severely physically and mentally disabled people and elderly people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases can be fulfilled by deploying sex robots; this would enable us to satisfy the sexual needs of many who cannot provide for their own sexual satisfaction; without at the same time violating anybody’s right to sexual self-determination. I don’t offer a full-blown moral justification of deploying sex robots in such cases, as not all morally r…Read more
  •  1041
    Broadening the future of value account of the wrongness of killing
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (4): 587-590. 2015.
    On Don Marquis’s future of value account of the wrongness of killing, ‘what makes it wrong to kill those individuals we all believe it is wrong to kill, is that killing them deprives them of their future of value’. Marquis has recently argued for a narrow interpretation of his future of value account of the wrongness of killing and against the broad interpretation that I had put forward in response to Carson Strong. In this article I argue that the narrow view is problematic because it violates …Read more
  •  993
    Mindlessness
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2013.
    Thinking is overrated: golfers perform best when distracted and under pressure; firefighters make the right calls without a clue as to why; and you are yourself ill advised to look at your steps as you go down the stairs, or to try and remember your pin number before typing it in. Just do it, mindlessly. Both empirical psychologists and the common man have long worked out that thinking is often a bad idea, but philosophers still hang on to an intellectualist picture of human action. This book ch…Read more
  •  889
    Withdrawing artificial nutrition and patients' interests
    Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (9): 555-556. 2013.
    I argue that the arguments brought by Counsel for M to the English Court of Protection are morally problematic in prioritising subjective interests that are the result of ‘consistent autonomous thought’ over subjective interests that are the result of a more limited cognitive perspective
  •  870
    IVF, same-sex couples and the value of biological ties
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (12): 784-787. 2016.
    Ought parents, in general, to value being biologically tied to their children? Is it important, in particular, that both parents be biologically tied to their children? I will address these fundamental questions by looking at a fairly new practice within IVF treatments, so-called IVF-with-ROPA ( Reception of Oocytes from Partner ), which allows lesbian couples to „share motherhood‟ with one partner providing the eggs while the other becomes pregnant. I believe that IVF-with-ROPA is, just like o…Read more
  •  842
    Besser ist besser? Enhancement der Moral aus einer handlungstheoretischen Perspektive
    In Raphael van Riel, Ezio Di Nucci & Jan Schildmann (eds.), Enhancement der Moral, Mentis. 2015.
    Enhancement ist eine tolle Sache: dieser Begriff ist notwendigerweise positiv (ein bisschen wie der traditionelle Gottbegriff), so dass wenn eine Änderung keine richtige Verbesserung hervorbringt, es auch kein richtiges Enhancement gewesen ist: sehr praktisch. Wie könnte man unter diesen Umständen überhaupt gegen Enhancement sein? Beim Enhancement geht es nicht mal um das plausible aber nicht unumstrittene „mehr ist besser“; vielmehr geht es um das tautologische „besser ist besser“.
  •  815
    Avoiding and Alternate Possibilities
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (5): 1001-1007. 2014.
    Greg Janzen has recently criticised my defence of Frankfurt’s counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by arguing that Jones avoids killing Smith in the counterfactual scenario. Janzen’s argument consists in introducing a new thought-experiment which is supposed to be analogous to Frankfurt’s and where the agent is supposed to avoid A-ing. Here I argue that Janzen’s argument fails on two counts, because his new scenario is not analogous to Frankfurt’s and because the agent in h…Read more
  •  780
    Who’s Afraid of Robots? Fear of Automation and the Ideal of Direct Control
    with Filippo Santoni de Sio
    In Fiorella Battaglia & Nathalie Weidenfeld (eds.), Roboethics in Film, Pisa University Press. 2014.
    We argue that lack of direct and conscious control is not, in principle, a reason to be afraid of machines in general and robots in particular: in order to articulate the ethical and political risks of increasing automation one must, therefore, tackle the difficult task of precisely delineating the theoretical and practical limits of sustainable delegation to robots.
  •  674
    Consent ain’t anything: dissent, access and the conditions for consent
    Monash Bioethics Review 34 (1): 3-22. 2016.
    I argue against various versions of the ‘attitude’ view of consent and of the ‘action’ view of consent: I show that neither an attitude nor an action is either necessary or sufficient for consent. I then put forward a different view of consent based on the idea that, given a legitimate epistemic context, absence of dissent is sufficient for consent: what is crucial is having access to dissent. In the latter part of the paper I illustrate my view of consent by applying it to the case of consentin…Read more
  •  601
    I argue that, if drones make waging war easier, the reason why they do so may not be the one commonly assumed within the philosophical debate – namely the promised reduction in casualties on either side – but a more complicated one which has little to do with concern for one’s own soldiers or, for that matter, the enemy; and a lot more to do with the political intricacies of international relations and domestic politics; I use the example of the Obama Administration’s drone policies to illustrat…Read more
  •  593
    Is the wish to be biologically related to your children legitimate? Here, I respond to an argument in support of a negative answer to this question according to which a preference towards having children one is biologically related to is analogous to a preference towards associating with members of one’s own race. I reject this analogy, mainly on the grounds that only the latter constitutes discrimination; still, I conclude that indeed a preference towards children one is biologically related to…Read more
  •  408
    Does ectogestation have oppressive potential?
    Journal of Social Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In the future, full ectogestation – in which artificial placenta technology would be used to carry out the entirety of gestation – could be an alternative to human pregnancy. This article analyzes some underexplored objections to ectogestation which relate to the possibility for new and continuing forms of social oppression. In particular, we examine whether ectogestation could be linked to an unwarranted de-valuing of certain aspects of female reproductive embodiment, or exacerbate objectionabl…Read more
  •  333
    Should we be afraid of medical AI?
    Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (8): 556-558. 2019.
    I analyse an argument according to which medical artificial intelligence represents a threat to patient autonomy—recently put forward by Rosalind McDougall in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The argument takes the case of IBM Watson for Oncology to argue that such technologies risk disregarding the individual values and wishes of patients. I find three problems with this argument: it confuses AI with machine learning; it misses machine learning’s potential for personalised medicine through big da…Read more
  •  278
    Should involuntarily childless people have the sameopportunities to access parenthood as those who are not involuntarily childless? In the context of assisted reproductive technologies, affirmative answers to this question are often cashed out in terms of positive rights, including rights to third-party reproduction. In this paper, wecritically explore the scope and extent to which any such right would hold up morally. Ultimately, we argue for a departure away…Read more