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18Justification for Coercion in a Public Health Crisis: Not Just a Matter of Individual HarmMonash Bioethics Review. forthcoming.The COVID pandemic was an exceptional public health situation – which brought with it unprecedented restrictions across the global populace. But what was it about this pandemic which caused us to implement such drastic restrictions on liberty? Much of the ethical debate on restrictive measures such as lockdowns and vaccine requirements focused on the potential harm that individuals cause to other individuals by the risk of infection. I will suggest that this may come from a reliance on J.S. Mill…Read more
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134When is Lockdown Justified?Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1): 1-22. 2022.How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrain…Read more
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131The Epistemic Duties of Philosophers: An AddendumKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (4): 447-451. 2021.We were slightly concerned, upon having read Eric Winsberg, Jason Brennan and Chris Surprenant’s reply to our paper “Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and Evidence”, that they may have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of our argument, so we issue the following clarification, along with a comment on our motivations for writing such a piece, for the interested reader.
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114Can One Both Contribute to and Benefit from Herd Immunity?Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 14 (2). 2021.In a recent article, Ethan Bradley and Mark Navin (2021) argue that vaccine refusal is not akin to free riding. Here, I defend one connection between vaccine refusal and free riding and suggest that, when viewed in conjunction with their other arguments, this might constitute a reason to mandate Covid-19 vaccination.
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170Three Ways in Which Pandemic Models May Perform a PandemicErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 14 (1): 110-127. 2021.Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific…Read more
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88Mit Kontaktdaten gegen die Pandemie: Zur Ethik von Corona Warn-AppsEthik in der Medizin 33 (3): 387-400. 2021.Zu Beginn der Pandemie im Frühjahr 2020, und nach einem weitreichenden Lockdown, ruhten große Erwartungen auf Corona-Warn-Apps, um einen erneuten Lockdown zu verhindern. Diese Erwartungen haben sich nicht erfüllt; stattdessen wurden in Deutschland als Reaktion auf erneute Wellen von COVID-19 weitere Kontaktbeschränkungen verordnet. Wie hätte die digitale Kontaktverfolgung wirksamer gestaltet werden können? Wir argumentieren, dass es ein Spannungsfeld zwischen der Datensparsamkeit und einer wirks…Read more
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122Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact TracingScience and Engineering Ethics 27 (2): 1-13. 2021.At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of…Read more
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109Without a Trace: Why did Corona Apps Fail?Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12): 1-4. 2021.At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infectio…Read more
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244Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and EvidenceKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (4): 405-428. 2021.Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis” (Winsberg et al. 2020). In their paper, Winsberg et al. argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose l…Read more
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73As many Western countries emerged from initial periods of lockdown in spring 2020, they had brought COVID-19 infection rates down significantly. This was followed, however, with more drastic second and third waves of viral spread, which many of these same countries are struggling to bring under control, even with the implementation of further periods of lockdown. Could this have been prevented by policymakers? We revisit two strategies that were focus of much discussion during the early stages o…Read more
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366Personal Identity and Self-Regarding Choice in Medical EthicsIn Michael Kühler & Veselin L. Mitrović (eds.), Theories of the Self and Autonomy in Medical Ethics, Springer. pp. 31-47. 2020.When talking about personal identity in the context of medical ethics, ethicists tend to borrow haphazardly from different philosophical notions of personal identity, or to abjure these abstract metaphysical concerns as having nothing to do with practical questions in medical ethics. In fact, however, part of the moral authority for respecting a patient’s self-regarding decisions can only be made sense of if we make certain assumptions that are central to a particular, psychological picture of p…Read more
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106How to Overcome Lockdown: Selective Isolation versus Contact TracingJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (11): 724-725. 2020.At this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, two policy aims are imperative: avoiding the need for a general lockdown of the population, with all its economic, social and health costs, and preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by the unchecked spread of infection. Achieving these two aims requires the consideration of unpalatable measures. Julian Savulescu and James Cameron argue that mandatory isolation of the elderly is justified under these circumstances, as they are at increased…Read more
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10Ethical Arguments Concerning Human-Animal Chimera Research: A Systematic ReviewBMC Medical Ethics 21 1-14. 2020.The burgeoning field of biomedical research involving the mixture of human and animal materials has attracted significant ethical controversy. Due to the many dimensions of potential ethical conflict involved in this type of research, and the wide variety of research projects under discussion, it is difficult to obtain an overview of the ethical debate. This paper attempts to remedy this by providing a systematic review of ethical reasons in academic publications on human-animal chimera research…Read more
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Ethische Aspekte von Crash Algorithmen für autonome Fahrzeuge: Rechte, Ansprüche und die Konstitutivität von VerkehrsregelnIn Bernd Oppermann & Jutta Stender-Vorwachs (eds.), Autonomes Fahren (2nd ed.), C.h. Beck. pp. 61-74. 2020.
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111A Neglected Ethical Issue in Citizen Science and DIY BiologyAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (8): 46-48. 2019.Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks’ article (2019) presents us with a welcome overview of the neglected, novel ethical issues raised by the advent of citizen science in health and biomedical contexts. This contribution takes a rather different approach, focusing on a very specific (yet also overlooked) problem in this context - the ethical implications of self-administered genetic testing. This problem, however, is particularly illustrative of the “ethics gap” between traditional medical settings …Read more
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84How Do We Conduct Fruitful Ethical Analysis of Speculative Neurotechnologies?American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 10 (1): 1-4. 2019.Gerben Meynen (2019) invites us to consider the potential ethical implications of what he refers to as “thought apprehension” technology for psychiatric practice, that is, technologies that involve recording brain activity, and using this to infer what people are thinking (or intending, desiring, feeling, etc.). His article is wide-ranging, covering several different ethical principles, various situations psychiatrists might encounter in therapeutic, legal and correctional contexts, and a range …Read more
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457Crash Algorithms for Autonomous Cars: How the Trolley Problem Can Move Us Beyond Harm MinimisationEthical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3): 685-698. 2018.The prospective introduction of autonomous cars into public traffic raises the question of how such systems should behave when an accident is inevitable. Due to concerns with self-interest and liberal legitimacy that have become paramount in the emerging debate, a contractarian framework seems to provide a particularly attractive means of approaching this problem. We examine one such attempt, which derives a harm minimisation rule from the assumptions of rational self-interest and ignorance of o…Read more
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100Personal Identity and Patient-Centered Medical Decision MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (3): 194-195. 2017.Nancy Jecker and Andrew Ko (2017) wish to present an account of personal identity which captures what matters to the patient and places the patient at the center of medical decisions. They focus particularly on medical interventions in the brain that can cause drastic changes in personality; under what circumstances should we say the patient has 'survived' these changes? More specifically, how can we best understand the notion of survival in a way that captures what is of concern to the patient?…Read more
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205The Need for Authenticity-Based Autonomy in Medical EthicsHEC Forum 30 (3): 191-209. 2018.The notion of respect for autonomy dominates bioethical discussion, though what qualifies precisely as autonomous action is notoriously elusive. In recent decades, the notion of autonomy in medical contexts has often been defined in opposition to the notion of autonomy favoured by theoretical philosophers. Where many contemporary theoretical accounts of autonomy place emphasis on a condition of “authenticity”, the special relation a desire must have to the self, bioethicists often regard such a …Read more
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11Constructing a Coherent Philosophical Basis for Research EthicsDissertation, Australian National University. 2017.The purpose of this dissertation is to identify some of the most pressing problems in the dominant contemporary approach to research ethics, and to devise an alternative approach that avoids these problems. I contend that the fundamental ethical values invoked in human research are often appealed to in contradictory or ambiguous ways, or in ways that do not adequately capture or do not show an adequate understanding of the specific ethical concerns of human research. One significant problem in t…Read more
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224How Autonomy Can Legitimate Beneficial CoercionIn Jakov Gather, Tanja Henking, Alexa Nossek & Jochen Vollmann (eds.), Beneficial Coercion in Psychiatry?: Foundations and Challenges, Mentis. pp. 85-99. 2017.Respect for autonomy and beneficence are frequently regarded as the two essential principles of medical ethics, and the potential for these two principles to come into conflict is often emphasised as a fundamental problem. On the one hand, we have the value of beneficence, the driving force of medicine, which demands that medical professionals act to protect or promote the wellbeing of patients or research subjects. On the other, we have a principle of respect for autonomy, which demands that we…Read more
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554Understanding the Relationship Between Autonomy and Informed Consent: A Response to TaylorJournal of Value Inquiry 47 (4): 483-491. 2013.Medical ethicists conventionally assume that the requirement to employ informed consent procedures is grounded in autonomy. It seems intuitively plausible that providing information to an agent promotes his autonomy by better allowing him to steer his life. However, James Taylor questions this view, arguing that any notion of autonomy that grounds a requirement to inform agents turns out to be unrealistic and self-defeating. Taylor thus contends that we are mistaken about the real theoretical gr…Read more
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209Neurosurgery for Psychopaths? An Ethical AnalysisAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 7 (3): 140-149. 2016.Recent developments in neuroscience have inspired proposals to perform deep brain stimulation on psychopathic detainees. We contend that these proposals cannot meet important ethical requirements that hold for both medical research and therapy. After providing a rough overview of key aspects of psychopathy and the prospects of tackling this condition via deep brain stimulation, we proceed to an ethical assessment of such measures, referring closely to the distinctive features of psychopathic per…Read more
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97Does Remuneration for Plasma Compromise Autonomy?HEC Forum 27 (4): 387-400. 2015.In accordance with a recent statement released by the World Health Organization, the Canadian province of Ontario is moving to ban payment for plasma donation. This is partially based on contentions that remuneration for blood and blood products undermines autonomy and personal dignity. This paper is dedicated to evaluating this claim. I suggest that traditional autonomy-based arguments against commodification of human body parts and substances are less compelling in the context of plasma donati…Read more
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647Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide and the Professional Obligations of PhysiciansEmergent Australasian Philosophers 3 1-15. 2010.Euthanasia and assisted suicide have proved to be very contentious topics in medical ethics. Some ethicists are particularly concerned that allowing physicians to carry out these procedures will undermine their professional obligations and threaten the very goals of medicine. However, I maintain that the fundamental goals of medicine not only do not preclude the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide by physicians, but can in fact be seen to support these practices in some instances. I look…Read more
Utrecht, UT, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Autonomy |
Biomedical Ethics |
Technology Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Theories of Personal Identity |
Normative Ethics |
General Philosophy of Science |