•  15
    Refusals and Requests: In Defense of Consistency
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 1-11. forthcoming.
    Physicians place significant weight on the distinction between acts and omissions. Most believe that autonomous refusals for procedures, such as blood transfusions and resuscitation, ought to be respected, but they feel no similar obligation to accede to requests for treatment that will, in the physician’s opinion, harm the patient (e.g., assisted death). Thus, there is an asymmetry. In this paper, we challenge the strength of this distinction by arguing that the ordering of values should be the…Read more
  •  743
    Five Ethical Challenges for Data-Driven Policing
    with Duncan Purves, Juan Gilbert, and Schuyler Sturm
    AI and Ethics 2 185-198. 2022.
    This paper synthesizes scholarship from several academic disciplines to identify and analyze five major ethical challenges facing data-driven policing. Because the term “data-driven policing” emcompasses a broad swath of technologies, we first outline several data-driven policing initiatives currently in use in the United States. We then lay out the five ethical challenges. Certain of these challenges have received considerable attention already, while others have been largely overlooked. In man…Read more
  •  402
    Should Algorithms that Predict Recidivism Have Access to Race?
    American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2): 205-220. 2023.
    Recent studies have shown that recidivism scoring algorithms like COMPAS have significant racial bias: Black defendants are roughly twice as likely as white defendants to be mistakenly classified as medium- or high-risk. This has led some to call for abolishing COMPAS. But many others have argued that algorithms should instead be given access to a defendant's race, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is likely to improve outcomes. This approach can involve either establishing race-sensitive risk …Read more
  •  16
    Severed Minds (Review of Severance)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 97 112-115. 2022.
  •  389
    The COVID-19 global pandemic has shone a light on several important ethical questions, ranging from fairness in resource allocation to the ethical justification of government mandates. In addition to these institutional issues, there are also several ethical questions that arise at the interpersonal level. This essay focuses on several of these issues. In particular, I argue that, despite the insistence in public health messaging that avoiding infecting others constitutes ‘saving lives’, virus t…Read more
  • The Ethics of Cyber-Sabotage
    In Michael Skerker & David Whetham (eds.), Cyber Warfare Ethics, Howgate Publishing. pp. 74-91. 2021.
  •  722
    A common criticism of the use of algorithms in criminal justice is that algorithms and their determinations are in some sense ‘opaque’—that is, difficult or impossible to understand, whether because of their complexity or because of intellectual property protections. Scholars have noted some key problems with opacity, including that opacity can mask unfair treatment and threaten public accountability. In this paper, we explore a different but related concern with algorithmic opacity, which cente…Read more
  •  385
    Scope Restrictions, National Partiality, and War
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20 (2). 2021.
    Most of us believe that partiality applies in a broad range of relationships. One relationship on which there is much disagreement is co-nationality. Some writers argue that co-national partiality is not justified in certain cases, like killing in war, since killing in defense of co-nationals is intuitively impermissible in other contexts. I argue that this approach overlooks an important structural feature of partiality—namely, that its scope is sometimes restricted. In this essay, I show how s…Read more
  •  517
    Value promotion as a goal of medicine
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (7): 494-501. 2021.
    In this paper, we argue that promoting patient values is a legitimate goal of medicine. Our view offers a justification for certain current practices, including birth control and living organ donation, that are widely accepted but do not fit neatly within the most common extant accounts of the goals of medicine. Moreover, we argue that recognising value promotion as a goal of medicine will expand the scope of medical practice by including some procedures that are sometimes rejected as being outs…Read more
  •  26
    Boycotts, Expressive Acts, and Withdrawal of Support
    Business Ethics Journal Review 8 (3): 14-19. 2020.
    Alan Tomhave and Mark Vopat have argued that organized boycotts against the expressive acts of companies and their leaders are pro tanto morally wrong because they constitute an attempt to silence voices in the marketplace of ideas. I argue that such boycotts are not best viewed as attempts to silence, but rather as a morally permissible form of withdrawal of support of certain expressive acts.
  •  663
    Toward a Collectivist National Defense
    Philosophia 48 (4): 1333-1354. 2020.
    Most philosophers writing on the ethics of war endorse “reductivist individualism,” a view that holds both that killing in war is subject to the very same principles of ordinary morality ; and that morality concerns individuals and their rights, and does not treat collectives as having any special status. I argue that this commitment to individualism poses problems for this view in the case of national defense. More specifically, I argue that the main strategies for defending individualist appro…Read more
  •  1001
    The Case for an Autonomy-Centred View of Physician-Assisted Death
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3): 345-356. 2020.
    Most people who defend physician-assisted death (PAD) endorse the Joint View, which holds that two conditions—autonomy and welfare—must be satisfied for PAD to be justified. In this paper, we defend an Autonomy Only view. We argue that the welfare condition is either otiose on the most plausible account of the autonomy condition, or else is implausibly restrictive, particularly once we account for the broad range of reasons patients cite for desiring PAD, such as “tired of life” cases. Moreover,…Read more
  •  947
    Is There a Right to the Death of the Foetus?
    Bioethics 31 (4): 313-320. 2017.
    At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there …Read more