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The Problematic “Existence” of Digital Twins: Human Intention and Moral DecisionAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (7): 45-47. 2024.Since surrogates are not good at predicting patient preferences, and since these decisions can cause surrogates distress, some have claimed we need an alternative way to make decisions for incapaci...
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16The main object of this thesis is to explain in a systematic fashion Francis Hutcheson's moral theory. Such an attempt will necessarily involve a discussion of the various philosophical problems which are inherent in his theory. For example, I discuss the issue of whether Hutcheson's theory of the moral sense is to be interpreted in an intuitionist or an emotivist fashion. It is argued that some aspects of his moral sense theory favour the former and some the latter interpretation, Hutcheson's t…Read more
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32Exploration of the Functional Properties of Interaction: Computer Models and Pointers for TheoryConstructivist Foundations 9 (1): 26-33. 2013.Context: Constructivist approaches to cognition have mostly been descriptive, and now face the challenge of specifying the mechanisms that may support the acquisition of knowledge. Departing from cognitivism, however, requires the development of a new functional framework that will support causal, powerful and goal-directed behavior in the context of the interaction between the organism and the environment. Problem: The properties affecting the computational power of this interaction are, howeve…Read more
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1Battlestar Galactica as Philosophy: Breaking the Biopolitical CycleIn David Kyle Johnson (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 93-112. 2022.The reimagined Battlestar Galactica series (2003–2009) and its prequel series Caprica (2009–2010) provoked viewers to consider anew perennial philosophical questions regarding, among others, the nature of personhood and the role of religion in culture and politics. While no single philosophical viewpoint encapsulates the creators’ vision as a whole, the theory of biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and others, is a fruitful lens through which various points of story a…Read more
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19Ritual and Power in Medicine: Questioning Honor Walks in Organ DonationHEC Forum 1-12. forthcoming.Honor walks are ceremonies that purportedly honor organ donors as they make their final journey from the ICU to the OR. In this paper, we draw on Ronald Grimes’ work in ritual studies to examine honor walks as ceremonial rituals that display medico-technological power in a symbolic social drama (Grimes, 1982). We argue that while honor walks claim to honor organ donors, ceremonies cannot primarily honor donors, but can only honor donation itself. Honor walks promote the quasi-religious idea of d…Read more
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11Biopolitics after neuroscience: morality and the economy of virtueBloomsbury Academic. 2022.This book offers a provocative analysis of the neuroscience of morality. Written by three leading scholars of science, medicine, and bioethics, it critiques contemporary neuroscientific claims about individual morality and notions of good and evil. Winner of a 2021 prize from the Expanded Reason Institute, it connects moral philosophy to neoliberal economics and successfully challenges the idea that we can locate morality in the brain. Instead of discovering the source of morality in the brain a…Read more
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14The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the DyingUniversity of Notre Dame Press. 2011.In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thoroug…Read more
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9Grogu's Little WayIn Jason T. Eberl & Kevin S. Decker (eds.), Star Wars and Philosophy Strikes Back, Wiley. 2023-01-09.This chapter explores the relations of different kinds of power, philosophically understood – sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower – and argues that the politics of the Star Wars galaxy is animated by an ontology, or metaphysical picture, centered on power. It further argues that The Mandalorian criticizes this power ontology with the introduction of the Child, Grogu, who generates a different kind of Force: a relational ontology of love. Grogu and the love he generates point to a d…Read more
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99. Science, Virtue, and the Birth of Modernity or, on the Techno-Theo-Logic of Modern NeuroscienceIn Peter Augustine Lawler & Marc D. Guerra (eds.), The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, Northern Illinois University Press. pp. 160-182. 2013.
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20The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View (review)Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23 (1): 105-107. 2014.
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7Doing Well or Doing Good in Ethics ConsultationIn Stuart G. Finder & Mark J. Bliton (eds.), Peer Review, Peer Education, and Modeling in the Practice of Clinical Ethics Consultation: The Zadeh Project, Springer Verlag. pp. 179-192. 2018.“The Zadeh Scenario,” when taken together with the subsequent layers of peer review and commentary on that peer review, highlights two crucial insights regarding peer review for clinical ethics. The first is one that most of Finder’s peer reviewers miss: peer-reviewers who would give attestation to quality need to be critically attentive to, and reflective about, the evidence supplied to them by candidates. The second is a more significant point: the kind of doing that is clinical ethics consult…Read more
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29Erratum to: Echo Calling Narcissus: What Exceeds the Gaze of Clinical Ethics Consultation?HEC Forum 22 (2): 171-171. 2010.
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10Nietzsche’s Power Ontology and Transhumanism: Or Why Christians Cannot Be TranshumanistsIn Steve Donaldson & Ron Cole-Turner (eds.), Christian Perspectives on Transhumanism and the Church: Chips in the Brain, Immortality, and the World of Tomorrow, Springer Verlag. pp. 117-135. 2018.Transhumanism traces its roots to Enlightenment humanism and claims to be the harbinger of the next phase of humanistic activity through designer evolution. In this essay, I briefly trace medicine’s relationship with transhumanist philosophy to the philosophy of medicine and show that each accepts a kind of ambiguity of the body at the heart of its metaphysical assumptions. I show that these metaphysical assumptions are committed to a power ontology, and that this power ontology is fundamentally…Read more
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11Guest Editor Introduction to Special Issue “(Ir)Religion in Clinical Ethics Consultation Methodology and Competencies”Christian Bioethics 28 (2): 95-98. 2022.The push by some bioethicists to excise religion from the clinical ethics consultative process has received institutional support from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities. Their certification program, Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified, is intended to identify and assess “a national standard for the professional practice of clinical healthcare ethics consulting” devoid of religious content. As Christian ethicists who wish to preserve the morally evaluative nature of healthc…Read more
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20Observation, Interaction, and Second-Person SharingInternational Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1): 65-82. 2022.A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient…Read more
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12Observation, Interaction, and Second-Person SharingInternational Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1): 65-82. 2022.A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient…Read more
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34Norming COVID‐19: The Urgency of a Non‐Humanist HolismHeythrop Journal 63 (3): 333-348. 2022.The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 333-348, May 2022.
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30Secular Dreams and Myths of Irreligion: On the Political Control of Religion in Public BioethicsJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (2): 219-237. 2021.Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps. 1) The irreligious, who advocate for suppressing religion, as do Timothy F. Murphy, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This irreligious camp assumes American Fundamentalist Protestantism is the real substance of all religions. 2) Religious bioethicists, who defend religion by e…Read more
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15Technics and LiturgicsChristian Bioethics 26 (1): 12-30. 2020.It is commonly held that Christian ethics generally and Christian bioethics particularly is the application of Christian moral systems to novel problems engaged by contemporary culture and created by contemporary technology. On this view, Christianity adds its moral vision to a technology, baptizing it for use. In this essay, I show that modern technology is a metaphysical moral worldview that enacts its own moral vision, shaping a moral imaginary, shaping our moral perception, creating moral su…Read more
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34Building Moral BrainsMaynooth Philosophical Papers 10 135-149. 2020.Technology is evolving at a rate faster than human evolution, especially human moral evolution. There are those who claim that we must morally bioenhance the human due to existential threats (such as climate change and the looming possibility of cognitive enhancement) and due to the fact that the human animal has a weak moral will. To address these existential threats, we must design human morality into human beings technologically. By moral bioenhancement, these authors mean that we must interv…Read more
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28When is somebody just some body? Ethics as first philosophy and the brain death debateTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (5): 419-436. 2019.I, along with others, have been critical of the social construction of brain death and the various social factors that led to redefining death from cardiopulmonary failure to irreversible loss of brain functioning, or brain death. Yet this does not mean that brain death is not the best threshold to permit organ harvesting—or, as people today prefer to call it, organ procurement. Here I defend whole-brain death as a morally legitimate line that, once crossed, is grounds for families to give permi…Read more
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28Of Minds and Brains and Cocreation: Psychopharmaceuticals and Modern Technological ImaginariesChristian Bioethics 24 (3): 224-245. 2018.Christians are not immune to psychological and psychiatric illness. Yet, Christians should also be careful not to permit popular cultural trends to shape the way that they think about the use of psychiatric treatment with medication. In this essay, I suggest that the tendencies for default usage of psychiatric medication can be problematic for Christians in contemporary culture where a technological imaginary exists. Modern scientific studies of psychiatric medication are partly constructive of …Read more
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30Ageing and the Technological Imaginary: Living and Dying in the Age of Perpetual InnovationStudies in Christian Ethics 32 (1): 20-35. 2019.Technology tends toward perpetual innovation. Technology, enabled by both political and economic structures, propels society forward in a kind of technological evolution. The moment a novel piece of technology is in place, immediately innovations are attempted in a process of unending betterment. Bernard Stiegler suggests that, contra Heidegger, it is not being-toward-death that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. Rather, it is technological innovation that shapes human pe…Read more
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35The Moral Imperative to Morally EnhanceJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (5): 485-489. 2018.What is morality? Is “morality” something that admits of technological enhancement? What could it possibly mean for a society to have a moral imperative to morally enhance? We are compelled to take up questions like these as we move into the future of moral bioenhancement. Each article in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy attempts to bring some clarity as to what is meant by morality, such that one could be morally obligated to morally enhance. These articles broaden the scope…Read more
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18False Gods and Facades of the Same: On the Distinctiveness of a Christian BioethicsChristian Bioethics 20 (2): 301-317. 2014.
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59Maturing the Minor, Marginalizing the Family: On the Social Construction of the Mature MinorJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (3): 300-314. 2013.The doctrine of the mature minor began as an emergency exception to the rule of parental consent. Over time, the doctrine crept into cases that were non-emergent. In this essay, we show how the doctrine also developed in the context of the latter part of the 20th century, at the same time that the sexual revolution, the pill, and sexual liberation came to be seen as important symbols of female liberation—liberation that required that female minors be granted the status of a mature minor. To do s…Read more
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Saint Louis UniversityDepartment of Philosophy
Center for Health Care Ethics
Department of Theological StudiesTenet Endowed Chair
St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Metaphysics |