James Taylor

_Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics_ offers a highly distinctive and original approach to the metaphysics of death and applies this approach to contemporary debates in bioethics that address end-of-life and post-mortem issues. Taylor defends the controversial Epicurean view that death is not a harm to the person who dies and the neo-Epicurean thesis that persons cannot be affected by events that occur after their deaths, and hence that posthumous harms (and benefits) are impossible. He then extends this argument by asserting that the dead cannot be wronged, finally presenting a defence of revisionary views concerning posthumous organ procurement.

In 2020 Guy McPherson published an academic satire, Academic Pursuits, that was strikingly similar to Richard Russo’s acclaimed 1997 novel Straight Man. It is widely believed by philosophers who study comedy that when two humorous works closely resemble each other there is prima facie reason to believe that the producer of the later work has done something wrong. But while this general view of the wrong of apparently derivative humour is widespread no argument has yet been offered for it. This paper will rectify this omission. After developing a novel account of why plagiarism is wrongful that explains the distinctive wrong of the plagiarism of humorous works it will draw on this account to explain why the production and publication of both derivative and apparently derivative works of humor is wrong.

_Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics_ offers a highly distinctive and original approach to the metaphysics of death and applies this approach to contemporary debates in bioethics that address end-of-life and post-mortem issues. Taylor defends the controversial Epicurean view that death is not a harm to the person who dies and the neo-Epicurean thesis that persons cannot be affected by events that occur after their deaths, and hence that posthumous harms (and benefits) are impossible. He then extends this argument by asserting that the dead cannot be wronged, finally presenting a defence of revisionary views concerning posthumous organ procurement.

It is widely believed that health policy should take care to ensure that persons are informed about the expected risks as well as the anticipated advantages of medical procedures. This is often justified by a concern for the moral value of personal autonomy, as it is widely believed that to the extent that a person makes decisions on the basis of false beliefs or ignorance her autonomy with respect to them is compromised. This essay argues against this widespread claim. A person’s autonomy with respect to her decisions will not be compromised by either ignorance or false beliefs. However, it does not follow that there is no reason to provide persons with the opportunity to have access to the available information relevant to their decisions concerning their medical treatment. The epistemic requirements for a person to give her consent to her treatment are more stringent than those that must be met for her to be autonomous with respect to her consent. Consent, not autonomy, can be undermined by ignorance or false belief. It is a concern for consent, not a concern for autonomy, that justifies providing people with information about their prospective medical procedures.

In Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics, I argue that we should endorse a trio of views that together constitute what I term full-blooded epicureanism: That death is not a harm to the person who dies, and that persons can neither be harmed nor wronged by events that occur after their deaths. After defending full-blooded epicureanism, I argue that it can be used to illuminate various contemporary bioethical debates, including those concerning posthumous organ procurement, assisted posthumous reproduction, medical research on the dead, and posthumous medical confidentiality.

It is widely held that to break a promise that one made to a person who is now dead would be to wrong her. This view undergirds many positions in bioethics, ranging from those that concern who may access a person’s medical records after she has died, to questions concerning organ procurement and posthumous procreation. Ashley Dressel has argued that there is no reason to believe that promissory obligations can be owed to people who are dead. Although her arguments are unsuccessful, others establish that neither of the promissory obligation accounts that she considers (the “Authority Account” and the “harm-based view”) can justify the standard view that directed posthumous promissory obligation is possible. However, this does not mean that the received view that we should keep our promises to the dead is mistaken. First, the theoretical commitments and argumentative strategies of those who endorse the possibility of posthumous promissory obligations preclude them from grounding such on either of these accounts of directed promissory obligation. They are thus already committed to justifying such obligations in other ways. Second, the obligation to keep promises to the dead could be justified on the grounds that not to do so would adversely affect the living.

The title of this paper is deliberately ambiguous. It could refer either to the central val­ue that philosophical counseling has for philosophy in general, or else it could refer to something (such as personal autonomy, or personal well-being) that philosophical counselors believe to be of value, and that they are able to help their clients pursue. In fact, this paper will be addressing both of these topics in order to demonstrate the links that hold between them, and, in so doing, will attempt to further elucidate the nature of philosophical counseling itself.

For almost the past three decades the model of autonomy which has dominated philosophical discussion of this concept has been the "hierarchical" model, which has been independently developed and defended by Harry Frankfurt, Gerald Dworkin and John Christman, and which is primarily concerned with what makes a person autonomous with respect to her first-order desires. It is argued that all versions of the hierarchical model of personal autonomy are based upon a theoretical mistake, and so should be rejected. This mistake is to focus upon the person's attitude towards the desire in question. Such attitude-based approaches will be mistaken because it is always possible to raise the question as to whether the person is autonomous with respect to this attitude itself. With this rejection of the hierarchical analyses of autonomy in hand it is argued that a person is autonomous with respect to her first-order desires to the extent that she has critically reflected upon the beliefs which lead her to have them. This belief-based approach to autonomy enjoys several advantages over its attitudebased rivals. It avoids all of the problems that are faced by the attitude-based models offered by Frankfurt et al., and it is also able to recognize a richer taxonomy of desire than they are. Moreover, this account of autonomy is not committed to either a Humean or an anti-Humean model of motivation. ;With the defense of the belief-based model of autonomy in hand, it is then applied to three distinct debates within applied ethics; social ethics , business ethics , and medical ethics' focus on the Principle of Respect for Autonomy. This part of the dissertation concludes by observing that in all three of these particular debates it is not autonomy that is of primary concern, but well-being, subjectively understood

In this article I respond to the constructive criticisms of my views in Markets with Limits that have been developed by Amy E. White, Roderick T. Long, and Julian Koplin. I also outline how Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski have surreptitiously altered their position in the second edition of their book Markets Without Limits—alterations that they appear to have made in response to my criticisms. First, they have changed the view that they attribute to those they identify as anti-commodification theorists in response to my claim that none of them hold the position that they attribute to them. Second, they have altered their definition of what constitutes a “semiotic” objection to markets. I argue that none of these changes successfully address my initial criticisms. By contrast, I believe that the revisions that I make to my views in response to the objections of White and Long address their concerns, and I concur with Koplin’s development of my views in the context of the use of AI.

This is the first volume in which an account of personal autonomy is developed that both captures the contours of this concept as it is used in social philosophy and bioethics, and is theoretically grounded in, and a part of, contemporary autonomy theory. James Stacey Taylor’s account is unique as it is explicitly a political one, recognizing that the attribution of autonomy to agents is dependent in part on their relationships with others and not merely upon their own mental states. The volume is distinctive in its examples, which touch on the ethics of using inducements to encourage persons to participate in medical research, the ethical issues associated with the use of antibiotics, and the ethical basis for both patient confidentiality and informed consent

Autonomy has recently become one of the central concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and has generated much debate over its nature and value. This 2005 volume brings together essays that address the theoretical foundations of the concept of autonomy, as well as essays that investigate the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility, freedom, political philosophy, and medical ethics. Written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in these areas, this book represents research on the nature and value of autonomy that will be essential reading for a broad swathe of philosophers as well as many psychologists.

Jacob Sparks has developed a semiotic critique of markets that is based on the fact that “market exchanges express preferences.” He argues that some market transactions will reveal that the purchaser of a market good inappropriately prefers it to a similar non-market good. This avoids Brennan and Jaworski’s criticism that semiotic objections to markets fail as the meaning of market transactions are contingent social facts. I argue that Sparks’ argument is both incomplete and doomed to fail. It can only show that some preferences are morally problematic, not that the transactions that they lead to are immoral.

For the past three decades philosophical discussions of both personal autonomy and what it is for a person to “identify” with her desires have been dominated by the “hierarchical” analyses of these concepts developed by Gerald Dworkin and Harry Frankfurt. The longevity of these analyses is owed, in part, to the intuitive appeal of their shared claim that the concepts of autonomy and identification are to be analyzed in terms of hierarchies of desires, such that it is a necessary condition for a person to be autonomous with respect to a desire that moves her to act, that she desires that this desire so move her. Despite the intuitive appeal of these analyses, however, Irving Thalberg has argued that they should be rejected. This is because, he argues, a person who is forced to perform an action by being subjected to duress of a certain degree of harshness will desire to be moved by her desire to submit. Thus, he continues, the proponents of hierarchical analyses of autonomy and identification will be forced to hold that such a person acted willingly, and did not suffer from any impairment in her autonomy. This, Thalberg concludes, is so counterintuitive as to justify rejecting hierarchical analyses

Normativism holds that there is a close conceptual link between disease and disvalue. We challenge normativism by advancing an argument against a popular normativist theory, Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account. Wakefield maintains that medical disorders are breakdowns in evolved mechanisms that cause significant harm to the organism. We argue that Wakefield’s account is not a promising way to distinguish between disease and health because being harmful is neither necessary nor sufficient for a dysfunction to be a disorder. Counterexamples to the harmful dysfunction account are considered, such as mild infections, perceptual deficits, and beneficial illnesses. Then we consider two ways of amending the harmful dysfunction account to address these cases and argue that the proposed amendments raise even more serious problems for this account. These problems apply generally to any normativist theory and raise doubts about the entire normative approach to the philosophy of health and disease.