•  1746
    Reasons, reflection, and repugnance
    In Steve Clarke, Julian Savulescu, C. A. J. Coady, Alberto Giubilini & Sagar Sanyal (eds.), The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate. 2016.
    In this chapter we draw comparisons between Kass’ views on the normative authority of repugnance and social intuitionist accounts of moral judgement which are similarly sceptical about the role of reasoned reflection in moral judgement. We survey the empirical claims made in support of giving moral primacy to intuitions generated by emotions such as repugnance, as well as some common objections. We then examine accounts which integrate intuition and reflection, and argue that plausible accounts …Read more
  •  1194
    In this chapter we focus on the structure of close personal relations and diagnose how these relationships are disrupted by addiction. We draw upon Peter Strawson’s landmark paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (2008, first published 1962) to argue that loved ones of those with addiction veer between, (1) reactive attitudes of blame and resentment generated by disappointed expectations of goodwill and reciprocity, and (2) the detached objective stance from which the addicted person is seen as less bla…Read more
  •  1128
    Friendship and Moral Danger
    with Dean Cocking
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (5): 278. 2000.
    We focus here on some familiar kinds of cases of conflict between friendship and morality, and, on the basis of our account of the nature of friendship, argue for the following two claims: first, that in some cases where we are led morally astray by virtue of a relationship that makes its own demands on us, the relationship in question is properly called a friendship; second, that relationships of this kind are valuable in their own right.
  •  830
    Friendship and the self
    with Dean Cocking
    Ethics 108 (3): 502-527. 1998.
    We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close or companion friendship…Read more
  •  703
    Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what we call moral security is a crit…Read more
  •  699
    Autism, empathy and moral agency
    Philosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 340-357. 2002.
    Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath's amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath's amoralism. How is emp…Read more
  •  649
    Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency
    Mind 119 (475): 585-614. 2010.
    Metaethics has recently been confronted by evidence from cognitive neuroscience that tacit emotional processes play an essential causal role in moral judgement. Most neuroscientists, and some metaethicists, take this evidence to vindicate a version of metaethical sentimentalism. In this paper we argue that the ‘dual process’ model of cognition that frames the discussion within and without philosophy does not do justice to an important constraint on any theory of deliberation and judgement. Namel…Read more
  •  605
    A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to…Read more
  •  518
    Truthfulness and Sense-Making: Two Modes of Respect for Agency
    Journal of Philosophy 121 (2): 61-88. 2024.
    According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making is somethin…Read more
  •  427
    Do psychopaths really threaten moral rationalism?
    Philosophical Explorations 9 (1). 2006.
    It is often claimed that the existence of psychopaths undermines moral rationalism. I examine a recent empirically based argument for this claim and conclude that rationalist accounts of moral judgement and moral reasoning are perfectly compatible with the evidence cited.
  •  422
    The Impact of Dementia on the Self: Do We Consider Ourselves the Same as Others?
    with Sophia A. Harris, Amee Baird, Steve Matthews, Rebecca Gelding, and Celia B. Harris
    Neuroethics 14 (3): 281-294. 2021.
    The decline in autobiographical memory function in people with Alzheimer’s dementia has been argued to cause a loss of self-identity. Prior research suggests that people perceive changes in moral traits and loss of memories with a “social-moral core” as most impactful to the maintenance of identity. However, such research has so far asked people to rate from a third-person perspective, considering the extent to which hypothetical others maintain their identity in the face of various impairments.…Read more
  •  405
    Intimate relations: friends and lovers
    In E. Kroeker and K. Schaubroek (ed.), Love, Reason and Morality, Routledge. 2017.
    In this paper we look at two kinds of relations that give rise to reasons for action of a distinctive sort: friendship and erotic love. We argue that what is common to these different relations of affection is that the people in them exhibit dispositions toward mutual direction by one another and interpretation of one another (in a sense that we describe in detail below). This mutual responsiveness is, in part, a matter of responding to reasons that arise from the relation of love or friendship.…Read more
  •  404
    Will the Real Moral Judgment Please Stand Up?
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (1): 77-96. 2009.
    The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgment…Read more
  •  330
    Frog and Toad lose control
    Analysis 56 (2): 63-73. 1996.
    It seems to be a truism that whenever we do something - and so, given the omnipresence of trying (Hornsby 1980), whenever we try to do something - we want to do that thing more than we want to do anything else we can do (Davidson 1970). However, according to Frog, when we have will power we are able to try not to do something that we ‘really want to do’. In context the idea is clearly meant to be that what we really want to do and what we most want to do are one and the same. But how is this mea…Read more
  •  309
    Truthfulness in dementia care
    with Philippa Byers and Steve Matthews
    Bioethics 35 (9): 839-841. 2021.
  •  285
    Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the pers…Read more
  •  271
    Respecting Agency in Dementia Care: When Should Truthfulness Give Way?
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1): 117-131. 2021.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  248
    Delusion, dissociation and identity
    Philosophical Explorations 6 (1): 31-49. 2003.
    The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders. We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically ext…Read more
  •  240
    Mental Disorder, Moral Agency, and the Self
    In Bonnie Steinbock (ed.), The Oxford handbook of bioethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 90-113. 2007.
    A person suffering a mental illness or disorder may differ dramatically from his or her previous well self. Family and close friends who knew the person before the onset of illness tend to regard the illness as obscuring their loved one's true self and see the goal of treatment as the restoration of that self. ‘He is not really like this,’ they will say with increasing desperation. Treatment teams and others, who have no acquaintance with the person when well, respond to what they see in front o…Read more
  •  212
    If you just can't decide what to wear, this enlightening guide will lead you through the diverse and sometimes contradictory aspects of fashion in a series of lively, entertaining and thoughtful essays from prominent philosophers and writers. A unique and enlightening insight into the underlying philosophy behind the power of fashion Contributions address issues in fashion from a variety of viewpoints, including aesthetics, the nature of fashion and fashionability, ethics, gender and identity po…Read more
  •  178
    We have argued here that to attribute criminal responsibility to psychopathic individuals is to ignore substantial and growing evidence that psychopathic individuals are significantly impaired in moral understanding. They do not appear to know why moral transgressions are wrong in the full sense required by the law. As morally blameless offenders, punishment as a basis for detention cannot be justified. Moreover, as there are currently no successful treatment programs for psychopathy, nor can de…Read more
  •  163
    The unity and disunity of agency
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (4): 308-312. 2003.
    Effective agency, according to contemporary Kantians, requires a unity of purpose both at a time, in order that we may eliminate conflict among our motives, and over time, because many of the things we do form part of longer-term projects and make sense only in the light of these projects and life plans. Call this the unity of agency thesis. This thesis can be regarded as a normative constraint on accounts of personal identity and indeed on accounts of what it is to have the life of a person in …Read more
  •  148
    Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness…Read more
  •  137
  •  134
    Mental time travel, agency and responsibility
    In Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    We have argued elsewhere that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this chapter we explore the importance of mental time travel - our ordinary ability to mentally travel to temporal locations outside the present, involving both memory of our personal past and the ability to imagine ourselves in the future - to our agential capacities for planning and control. We suggest that in many individuals with…Read more
  •  123
    In this chapter I argue that there is a normative aspect to self-control that is not captured by the purely procedural account to be drawn from dual process theories of cognition – which we only uncover when we consider what self-control is for and why it is valuable. For at least a significant sub-group of addicts their loss of control over their drug use may not be due to a lack or depletion of cognitive resources. Rather it may be that they have little confidence in their ability to exert con…Read more
  •  122
    Imagining Reasons
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1): 181-192. 2011.
    In this article, I explore the implications of Karsten Stueber's account of imaginative resistance, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding described by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues. I suggest that Stueber's account allows us to redescribe the phenomenon as a failure of the folk psychological project of interpretation and so to challenge Haidt's metaethical conclusions. I close by considering some implications for moral deliberation and judgment in those, such as auti…Read more