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13Hegel's Implicit View on How to Solve the Problem of PovertyProceedings of the Hegel Society of America 15 185-205. 2001.
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575Hegel's Implicit View on How to Solve the Problem of PovertyIn Robert Williams (ed.), Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Essays on Hegel’s "Philosophy of Right", . pp. 185-205. 2001.Against those who argue that Hegel despaired of providing a solution to the problem of poverty, I argue, on the basis of key dialectical transitions in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, that he held at least the following: (1) that the chronic poverty endemic to industrial capitalism can be overcome only through changes that must include a transformation in practices of consumption, (2) that this transformation must lead to more *sittlich* and self-conscious practices of consumption, and (3) that the…Read more
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3Moral dilemmas: biblical perspectives on contemporary ethical issuesW Publishing Group. 1998.In this penetrating book J. Kerby Anderson asks just how much we modern Christians can embrace emrging scientific and technological discoveries and still be true to our Lord. Kerby frames biblical answers in the light of Christ's lordship.h.
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28Should Uplifting Music and Smart Phone Apps Count as Willpower Doping? The Extended Will and the Ethics of Enhanced MotivationAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 6 (1): 35-37. 2015.
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35Clinical Research in Context: Reexamining the Distinction between Research and PracticeJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 35 (1): 46-63. 2010.At least since the seminal work of the (US) National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in the 1970s, a fundamental distinction between research and practice has underwritten both conceptual work in research ethics and regulations governing research involving human subjects. Notwithstanding its undoubted historical importance, I believe the distinction is problematic because it misrepresents clinical inquiry. In this essay, I aim to clarify the …Read more
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4Anerkennung vs. negative FreiheitIn Ludwig Siep, Heikki Ikäheimo & Michael Quante (eds.), Handbuch Anerkennung, Springer. pp. 71-77. 2018.
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30Attention as Practice: Buddhist Ethics Responses to Persuasive TechnologiesGlobal Philosophy 33 (2): 1-16. 2023.The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates …Read more
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15The Passivity of Self-Satisfaction: A Critical Re-appraisal of Harry Frankfurt’s Normatively Thin Ontology of AutonomyIn James F. Childress & Michael Quante (eds.), Thick (Concepts of) Autonomy: Personal Autonomy in Ethics and Bioethics, Springer Verlag. pp. 17-31. 2021.This chapter attempts to “re-boot” the discussion of Harry Frankfurt’s approach to autonomy, in the service of a new diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of his satisfaction-based ontology of the will. Criticisms of Frankfurt’s work have tended to focus on a lack of normative foundations, often missing Frankfurt’s aim of shifting discussions of autonomy towards a focus on avoiding passivity in how one cares about what one cares about, while still acknowledging the central role of volitional…Read more
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2Disability and Universal Human Rights: Legal, Ethical, and Conceptual Implications of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.Netherlands Institute of Human Rights. 2012.The 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) provides a landmark articulation of the universality of human rights. It affirms in strong terms that all human beings have a claim to full inclusion and equal participation in society, something denied to many because of disability. The CRPD is an ambitious document with far-reaching and fundamental implications. This interdisciplinary collection of essays takes up pressing philosophical, legal, and practical issues raised…Read more
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23Starke Wertungen, Wünsche zweiter Ordnung und intersubjektive Kritik: Überlegungen zum Begriff ethischer AutonomieDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (1): 97-120. 1994.
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142Regimes of AutonomyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3): 355-368. 2014.Like being able to drive a car, being autonomous is a socially attributed, claimed, and contested status. Normative debates about criteria for autonomy (and what autonomy entitles one to) are best understood, not as debates about what autonomy, at core, really is, but rather as debates about the relative merits of various possible packages of thresholds, entitlements, regulations, values, and institutions. Within different “regimes” of autonomy, different criteria for (degrees of) autonomy becom…Read more
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84Autonomy and vulnerability entwinedIn Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers & Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Oup Usa. pp. 134. 2013.
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Autonomielücken als soziale Pathologie. Ideologiekritik jenseits des PaternalismusIn Axel Honneth & Rainer Forst (eds.), Sozialphilosophie Und Kritik, Suhrkamp. pp. 433--453. 2009.
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A Social Conception of Personal Autonomy: Volitional Identity, Strong Evaluation, and Intersubjective AccountabilityDissertation, Northwestern University. 1996.This dissertation develops an approach to personal autonomy, understood as the capacity to lead one's life in a way that is one's own. Through a critical engagement with the work of Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas, I argue that there are four intersubjective aspects of autonomy. ;First, since critical reflection on one's desires, commitments, values, etc. involves accessing them interpretively, it is subject to hermeneutic constraints of public intelligibility. To understand…Read more
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50Review of Larmore, 'The Morals of Modernity' (review)Philosophical Review 107 (2): 293-296. 1998.This collection of essays displays Charles Larmore’s exceptional ability to combine the best of analytic and Hegelian traditions of moral and political theory. This cross-pollination has produced a book that, as a whole, advances several important new proposals, especially regarding political liberalism and moral epistemology.
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1333Procrastination and the extended willIn Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White (eds.), The Thief of Time, Oxford University Press. pp. 233--253. 2010.What experimental game theorists may have demonstrated is not that people are systematically irrational but that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. Remove the scaffolding, and we do not do very well. People are able to get on because they “offload” an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment. As a result, when they are put in novel or unfamiliar environments, they perform very poorly, even on apparently simple tasks. This observation is supported by recent empirically …Read more
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28Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Thaler Richard H. and Sunstein Cass R.. Yale University Press, 2008. x + 293 pages. [Paperback edition, Penguin, 2009, 320 pages.] (review)Economics and Philosophy 26 (3): 369-376. 2010.
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3028Justice as a Family Value: How a Commitment to Fairness is Compatible with LoveHypatia 29 (2): 320-336. 2014.Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home within…Read more
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406Voting Advice Applications and Political Theory: Citizenship, Participation and RepresentationIn Garzia Diego & Marschall Stefan (eds.), Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates: Voting Advice Applications in Comparative Perspective, Ecpr Press. pp. 217-226. 2014.Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. In recent years, they have been widely adopted, but their design is the subject of ongoing and often heated criticism. Most of these debates focus on whether VAAs accurately measure the standpoints of political parties and the preferences of users and on whether they report valid results while avoiding political bias. It is generally assumed that if th…Read more
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126Disputing Autonomy: Second-Order Desires and the Dynamics of Ascribing AutonomySATS 9 (1): 7-26. 2008.In this paper, I examine two versions of the so-called “hierarchical” approach to personal autonomy, based on the notion of “second-order desires”. My primary concern will be with the question of whether these approaches provide an adequate basis for understanding the dynamics of autonomy-ascription. I begin by distinguishing two versions of the hierarchical approach, each representing a different response to the oft-discussed “regress” objection. I then argue that both “structural hierarchicali…Read more
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193Accurate Self-Assessment, Autonomous Ignorance, and the Appreciation of DisabilityPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (4): 309-312. 2004.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Accurate Self-Assessment, Autonomous Ignorance, and the Appreciation of DisabilityJoel Anderson (bio) and Warren Lux (bio)In their thoughtful commentaries on our essay, "Knowing your own strength: Accurate self-assessment as a requirement for personal autonomy," George Agich, Ruth Chadwick, and Dominic Murphy (2004) provide both criticisms and insights that give us a context in which to clarify further our claim that one's autonomy i…Read more
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177Autonomy and the authority of personal commitments: From internal coherence to social normativityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (2). 2003.It has been argued - most prominently in Harry Frankfurt's recent work - that the normative authority of personal commitments derives not from their intrinsic worth but from the way in which one's will is invested in what one cares about. In this essay, I argue that even if this approach is construed broadly and supplemented in various ways, its intrasubjective character leaves it ill-prepared to explain the normative grip of commitments in cases of purported self-betrayal. As an alternative, I …Read more
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312Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following to…Read more
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152Introduction: Free will, neuroscience, and the participant perspectivePhilosophical Explorations 10 (1). 2007.No abstract
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297Review of Jürgen Habermas, 'The Future of Human Nature' (review)Ethics 115 (4): 816-821. 2005.Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. The real ke…Read more
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145Sailing Alone: Teenage Autonomy and Regimes of ChildhoodLaw and Philosophy 31 (5): 495-522. 2012.Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental question of how to demarcate chil…Read more
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656Autonomy gaps as a social pathology: Ideologiekritik beyond paternalismIn Rainer Forst (ed.), Sozialphilosophie Und Kritik, Suhrkamp. forthcoming.From the outset, critical social theory has sought to diagnose people’s participation in their own oppression, by revealing the roots of irrational and self-undermining choices in the complex interplay between human nature, social structures, and cultural beliefs. As part of this project, Ideologiekritik has aimed to expose faulty conceptions of this interplay, so that the objectively pathological character of what people are “freely” choosing could come more clearly into view. The challenge, …Read more
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47What’s the Point of Voting Advice Applications? Competing Perspectives on Democracy and CitizenshipElectoral Studies 36 244-251. 2014.Voting advice applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. Current VAAs typically aim to do so by matching users’ policy-preferences with the positions of parties or candidates. But this ‘matching model’ depends crucially on implicit, contestable presuppositions about the proper functioning of the electoral process and about the forms of competence required for good citizenship—presuppositions associated with …Read more