Katie H. C. Wong

Smith and Mackie’s feature article addresses the worry that vaccine mandates—for example, requiring employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine—constitute coercive threats that undermine the voluntariness of informed consent.1 Drawing on Maximilian Kiener’s interpersonal account of voluntary medical consent, they propose that informed consent can be voluntary despite being motivated by third-party coercion, provided that the consent-receiver does not personally coerce or wrong the consent-giver in any way. In most cases, those who administer and obtain informed consent for vaccines play no role in coercing or otherwise wronging consent-givers; thus, it seems consent to mandatory vaccination can be voluntary. Smith and Mackie’s proposal is interesting, but in this commentary, I will caution against accepting it. My main worry is this: If we accept Smith and Mackie’s account of voluntary consent, we can no longer rely on the process of informed consent to help us fulfil our obligation to respect patient autonomy. Simply put, accepting their proposal has a very unfortunate consequence—namely, it undermines the close connection between the informed consent process and the medical profession’s commitment to respect and promote patient autonomy. From an ethical perspective, …

Patients who are diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN patients) characteristically refuse to receive medical treatment, including life‐saving treatment, for their illness. These refusals are generally not honored on the grounds that AN patients are incapable of making autonomous medical decisions regarding their illness. Despite being widely shared by medical and legal experts, the judgment that AN patients are incapable of medical decision‐making lacks a sound theoretical basis in the existing bioethics literature. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a novel explanation of AN patients' incapacity. AN patients, I propose, are subject to three sources of incapacity: deep internal conflict, compulsion, and irrationality. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of my proposal, including the challenge that it poses to the capacity model that is standardly used by clinicians in the United States.

This chapter offers an account of how slurs, understood as speech acts, help reinforce and strengthen pernicious ideologies. The act of using a slur, I propose, strengthens the pernicious ideology cued in virtue of the act’s status as a well-constituted move relative to the norms of that ideology. In developing this view, I start with the observation that actions are evaluable relative to norms. Call an action that accords with or is consistent with the prescriptive content of a norm well-constituted relative to that norm. Drawing on work from the philosophy of action, I suggest that performing well-constituted actions helps to uphold the norms relative to which they are well-constituted—and, insofar as these norms are constitutive of a larger practice, the actions also help uphold that larger practice. The act of slurring, then, strengthens the pernicious ideology cued in virtue of the act’s status as a well-constituted move relative to that ideology’s norms. My proposal has the virtue of being non-psychologistic—it explains how slurs can strengthen ideologies without producing particular psychological effects in either the speaker or the addressee. Furthermore, it does justice to the intuition that how we respond to slurs matters and offers a general framework for examining how any kind of action can contribute to reinforcing harmful ideologies.

This dissertation explores and defends the moral significance of love for other persons. In The Possibility of Altruism, Thomas Nagel (1970) suggests that the motivational foundation of morality depends on our recognition of the reality of other persons. Loving another person, I argue, commits us to the same kind of recognition: fully seeing that person’s—the beloved’s—independent reality. My account of this commitment challenges our tendency to think of love and morality as separate domains and shows that love is a promising place to look for novel answers to classic ethical questions. The first chapter, “Love and Unselfing,” examines an overlooked aspect of love for persons. It argues that love, like morality, demands a certain kind of impartial or disinterested vision from us. Unfortunately, our self-interested nature makes it very difficult to meet this demand—in fact, given what it is like to occupy a subjective standpoint, we might worry that it is impossible. This chapter unpacks and offers a solution to this difficulty. Drawing on Iris Murdoch’s work on love, I argue that we can come to appreciate our beloveds as we should through unselfing, a kind of self-forgetful, disinterested appreciation of an object outside the self. I conclude with the suggestion that the capacity for impartiality we develop in learning how to love others as we should plays an important role in moral relations too. The second chapter, “Reasons for Love and the Beloved’s Irreplaceability,” develops a novel account of reasons for love. While it is widely agreed that love is a state for which there can be normative reasons, there is little consensus on what these reasons are. The existing literature on this topic, I argue, is fundamentally misguided in its excessive focus on the lover’s standpoint and its failure to recognize the significance of love’s commitments. I develop and defend the view that love is justified by the beloved’s unique value as a person. On my view, love is justified insofar as it constitutes an appropriate response to the beloved’s unique value; and that is the case only insofar as one fully recognizes their reality. I show that my view can accommodate our intuitions about the beloved’s irreplaceability and love’s selectivity. The third chapter, “Sharing Points of View,” examines how reciprocal love alters a person’s normative situation. It is widely agreed that there is a sense in which lovers “merge” or “become one” (call this merging). I give an account of merging that highlights how love alters the structure of someone’s practical deliberation. Notably, these changes give rise to two distinctive threats to individual autonomy. I argue that for lovers to maintain individual autonomy in a merger, they must resolve conflicts across their perspectives by reasoning together from the moral standpoint. The upshot is that for our actions to truly be our own in love, we must recognize the moral standpoint as authoritative.

This paper examines an overlooked aspect of interpersonal love: Like morality, love demands a certain kind of impartial or disinterested vision from us. We cannot love another person well, I argue, without being capable of such impartiality. Unfortunately, our self-interested nature makes meeting love's demand for impartiality extremely difficult if not impossible. This paper unpacks and offers a solution to this difficulty. Drawing on Iris Murdoch's work on love, I suggest that we can come to appreciate our beloveds as we should through unselfing, a state of self-forgetful, disinterested appreciation of an object outside the self. When we unself, we are so deeply moved by an external object's value—e.g. a stunning sunset—that all our subjective cares and concerns disappear from view. In concluding, I suggest that the capacity for impartiality we must develop to love someone well is relevant to understanding what our moral relations demand of us.