Marie Kerguelen Feldblyum Le Blevennec

In this paper, I defend two claims about best practices for genetic counselors advising patients in the reproductive context. The first claim is that defenders of non-directiveness about selection against disability traits should support directiveness in favor of testing for disability traits. The second claim is that genetic counselors can be non-directive about selection against disability traits yet directive about testing for those traits—there is no tension between these two positions. So, it is open to defenders of non-directiveness about selection to be in favor of directiveness about testing, and in fact they should shift to the nuanced position I show is available to them, rather than adopting a monolithic approach advocating non-directiveness with respect to both testing and selection.

Machine-learning algorithms are transforming healthcare diagnostics and prognostics. However, they sometimes underperform for groups underrepresented in their training data. Vandersluis and Savulescu have suggested selectively deploying these algorithms for populations well represented in the training data, while excluding underrepresented groups until improvements are made to the algorithms. In this paper, I explore one long-term risk of such selective deployment for certain small underrepresented groups, such as those with rare diseases. The risk in question is the potential long-term decline in the human expertise critical for such small groups, which, because they are excluded from effective care by the algorithm, would still rely on non-algorithmic, human expertise even in the long run. I then discuss how to best preserve human expertise and maintain long-term access to quality care for excluded groups and contend that such expertise preservation is essential for ethical deployment of algorithmic processes in healthcare.

In this paper, I show that Gerard Vong’s account of diachronic lotteries is vulnerable to John Broome’s objection that lottery winners have a justified complaint if their winning is ignored in a subsequent lottery for a specific benefit. Against Broome, Vong maintains that lottery winners do not have a justified complaint if their winning is ignored in a subsequent lottery. However, Vong’s argument is unconvincing because the counterexample at its core ignores crucial differences between various reasons to complain. An agent can have legitimate claim-based reasons to complain, yet not actually complain because those claim-based reasons are outweighed by other kinds of reasons. This means that to remain plausible, accounts of diachronic lotteries must take Broome’s objection more seriously than Vong does. I conclude by proposing a modification to Vong’s Dual Structure account of lotteries that can accommodate the intuition animating Broome’s objection, while remaining diachronic.

Nietzsche's readers are often tempted to look for his critique of morality in On the Genealogy of Morality. However, I will argue that the Genealogy does not contain Nietzsche's critique of morality, nor was it intended by Nietzsche to contain his critique. Rather, the Genealogy is Nietzsche's attempt to develop crucial parts of what he calls a natural history or typology of morals, which he considers to be a descriptive project meant to serve as preparation for a critique of values. More precisely, the Genealogy serves as preparation for a critique of moral values in three ways: it (1) traces the historical development of Judeo-Christian moral values in a way that (2) enables diagnosis of their psychological effects on various types of people, and of the physiological traits and states of which those values are symptoms. In turn, this vital factual information is needed by Nietzsche so that he can (3) compare Judeo-Christian values to other values. 1–3 are purely descriptive, and they make possible a further, evaluative project Nietzsche does not undertake in the Genealogy itself, namely, his critique of those values by determining their place in a new rank ordering of values (i.e., Umwertung or revaluation of values).

In her recent book _A Duty to Resist_ (2018), Candice Delmas contends that both beneficiaries and victims of injustices have a duty to resist unjust laws and to try to change them, and proposes several ways of grounding this duty. One of these proposed groundings appeals to considerations of fairness. Delmas holds that anyone who refuses to participate in resisting some injustice, including victims of that injustice, can be accused of free-riding and thus of unfair conduct that violates the duty of fair play, which means that they have a fairness-based duty to resist. In this paper, I critique this attempt to ascribe a duty to resist grounded in considerations of fairness specifically to victims of injustice. Against Delmas, I argue that victims of injustice do not have this fairness-based duty to resist because, unlike the beneficiaries of an injustice, they cannot be considered free-riders when they do not participate in resistance to the injustice. I then discuss additional problematic implications of Delmas’s view, focusing on the issue of victim-blaming, and show how these problems can be avoided. In this way, I hope to contribute to the urgent project of determining who has a duty to resist injustice.

In this paper, I investigate Nietzsche’s views about realism in art, and use the resulting textual evidence to explain the connection between realism, health and life-affirmation. First, I show that Nietzsche’s contrasting claims about artists like Flaubert and Stendhal reflect a distinction between two types of realism: the unhealthy realism of Flaubert, and the healthy realism of Stendhal. I then use this understanding of healthy realism in art to argue that for Nietzsche, healthy realism is vital for life-affirmation. Finally, I apply this evidence to a debate between Daniel Came and Bernard Reginster concerning whether Nietzsche thinks life-affirmation requires falsifying reality using illusions, especially artistic illusions, for the purpose of masking life’s terrible truths. Against Came, I argue that Nietzsche’s remarks about realism in art support Bernard Reginster’s claim that Nietzsche abandons his emphasis on illusion in The Birth of Tragedy in favor of tough-minded realism about life’s terrible truths.