•  2
    Ethical Challenges of Advances in Vaccine Delivery Technologies
    with Arthur L. Caplan and Anne Williamson
    Hastings Center Report 54 (1): 13-15. 2024.
    Strategies to address misinformation and hesitancy about vaccines, including the fear of needles, and to overcome obstacles to access, such as the refrigeration that some vaccines demand, strongly suggest the need to develop new vaccine delivery technologies. But, given widespread distrust surrounding vaccination, these new technologies must be introduced to the public with the utmost transparency, care, and community involvement. Two emerging technologies, one a skin‐patch vaccine and the other…Read more
  • In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which stre…Read more
  •  17
    Who commits the unnaturalistic fallacy?
    Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (6): 382-383. 2022.
    According to G E Moore,1 we commit the naturalistic fallacy when we infer ‘x is good’ from non-evaluative premises involving x such as ‘ x is pleasant’ or ‘ x is desired’. On Moore’s view, the mistake is to think that we can reduce moral goodness to anything else or explain it in any other terms. We cannot analyse ‘good’, Moore thought, because goodness is simple, non-natural and sui generis. If Moore were alive today, and if he were to ask contemporary bioethicists the right questions, he would…Read more
  •  388
    Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 1, Page 63-70, January 2022.
  •  272
    The controversy around the accommodation of conscientious objections in medicine persists, especially for such contentious services as abortions. COs are typically considered in their negativ...
  •  268
    Phantom premise and a shape-shifting ism: reply to Hassoun
    with Arthur Caplan
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (11). 2021.
    In ‘Against vaccine nationalism’, Nicole Hassoun misrepresents our argument, distorts our position and ignores crucial distinctions we present in our article, ‘Love thy neighbor? Allocating vaccines in a world of competing obligations’. She has created a strawman that does not resemble our position. In this reply, we address two features of ‘Against vaccine nationalism’. First, we address a phantom premise. Hassoun misattributes to us a thesis, according to which citizen-directed duties are stro…Read more
  •  314
    The Health Reframing of Climate Change and the Poverty of Narrow Bioethics
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 48 (4): 705-717. 2020.
    We must resist thoroughly reframing climate change as a health issue. For human health–centric ethical frameworks omit dimensions of value that we must duly consider. We need a new, an environmental, research ethic, one that we can use to more completely and impartially evaluate proposed research on mitigation and adaptation strategies.
  •  286
    Although a safe, effective, and licensed coronavirus vaccine does not yet exist, there is already controversy over how it ought to be allocated. Justice is clearly at stake, but it is unclear what justice requires in the international distribution of a scarce vaccine during a pandemic. Many are condemning ‘vaccine nationalism’ as an obstacle to equitable global distribution. We argue that limited national partiality in allocating vaccines will be a component of justice rather than an obstacle to…Read more
  •  519
    Institutional Approaches to Research Integrity in Ghana
    with Amos K. Laar, Barbara K. Redman, and Arthur Caplan
    Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (6): 3037-3052. 2020.
    Research misconduct remains an important problem in health research despite decades of local, national, regional, and international efforts to eliminate it. The ultimate goal of every health research project, irrespective of setting, is to produce trustworthy findings to address local as well as global health issues. To be able to lead or participate meaningfully in international research collaborations, individual and institutional capacities for research integrity are paramount. Accordingly, t…Read more
  •  113
    It’s Not Easy Bein’ Fair
    American Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 160-162. 2020.
    Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 160-162.
  •  100
    Metaethical Intentionalism and the Intersubjectivity of Morals
    Dissertation, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. 2020.
    I defend a thesis called metaethical intentionalism, according to which deontic moral judgments (“ought” judgments) are intersubjective intentions or verbal expressions of intersubjective intentions. They have the form, “We shall any of us do A in C,” or are derivable from such practical commitments. They are universalizable by virtue of their content (“… any of us …”) and sharable by virtue of their form (“We …”). My account of the moral “ought” is inspired by the moral writings of Wilfrid Sell…Read more
  •  14
    A Model for the Assessment of Medical Students' Competency in Medical Ethics
    with Amanda Favia, Lily Frank, Nada Gligorov, Steven Birnbaum, Paul Cummins, Robert Fallar, Katherine Mendis, Erica Friedman, and Rosamond Rhodes
    AJOB Primary Research 4 (4): 68-83. 2013.
  •  1
    Butler: Naturalism and Mortality (review)
    Philosophical Forum 42 (3): 304-305. 2011.
  •  171
    A fun piece discussing the challenges to and prospects of building machines that are able to produce and understand natural language.