•  89
    Persons, Person Stages, Adaptive Preferences, and Historical Wrongs
    Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 9 (2): 35-49. 2023.
    Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Pe…Read more
  •  8
    Public Stem Cell Banks
    with Hilary Bok Mueller Agnew, Danw Brock, Aravinda Chakravarti, Xiao-Jiang Gao, John A. Hansen, Patricia A. King, Stephen J. O'brien, David H. Sachs, and Kathryn E. Schill
    Hastings Center Report 33 (6): 13-27. 2003.
  •  65
    Consenting to uncertainty: Challenges for informed consent to disease screening—a case study
    with Suzanne M. Smith
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 29 (6): 371-386. 2008.
    This paper uses chronic beryllium disease as a case study to explore some of the challenges for decision-making and some of the problems for obtaining meaningful informed consent when the interpretation of screening results is complicated by their probabilistic nature and is clouded by empirical uncertainty. Although avoidance of further beryllium exposure might seem prudent for any individual whose test results suggest heightened disease risk, we will argue that such a clinical precautionary ap…Read more
  •  68
    Suppose that Depletion will reduce the well-being of future people. Many of us would like to say that Depletion is wrong because of the harm to future people. However, it can easily be made to seem that Depletion is actually harmless – this is the non-identity problem. I discuss a particularly ingenious attempt by Melinda Roberts to attribute a harm to Depletion. I will argue that the magnitude of Roberts's harm is off target by many orders of magnitude: it is just too tiny to explain the intuit…Read more
  •  57
    Moral Issues of Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting
    with Kathryn Schill, Shoji Takahashi, Alison Bateman-House, Tom Beauchamp, Hilary Bok, Dorothy Cheney, Joseph Coyle, Terrence Deacon, Daniel Dennett, Peter Donovan, Owen Flanagan, Steven Goldman, Henry Greely, Lee Martin, and Earl Miller
    Science 309 (5733): 385-386. 2005.
    The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.
  •  91
    Public Stem Cell Banks: Considerations of Justice in Stem Cell Research and Therapy
    with Ruth R. Faden, Liza Dawson, Alison S. Bateman-House, Dawn Mueller Agnew, Hilary Bok, Dan W. Brock, Aravinda Chakravarti, Xiao-Jiang Gao, John A. Hansen, Patricia A. King, Stephen J. O'Brien, David H. Sachs, Kathryn E. Schill, Andrew Siegel, Davor Solter, Sonia M. Suter, Catherine M. Verfaillie, LeRoy B. Walters, and John D. Gearhart
    Hastings Center Report 33 (6): 13-27. 2003.
    If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.
  •  44
    Safety Issues In Cell-Based Intervention Trials
    with Liza Dawson, Alison S. Bateman-House, Dawn Mueller Agnew, Hilary Bok, Dan W. Brock, Aravinda Chakravarti, Patricia King, Stephen J. O'Brien, David H. Sachs, Kathryn E. Schill, Andrew Siegel, and Davor Solter
    Fertility and Sterility 80 (5): 1077-1085. 2003.
    We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of …Read more
  •  109
    Saving a life but losing the patient
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 34 (6): 479-498. 2013.
    Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic bug. The creature’s inchoate flailing leads Gregor’s sister to conclude that Gregor is no more, having been replaced by a brute beast lacking any vestige of human understanding. Sadly, real cases of brain injury and disease can lead to psychological metamorphoses so profound that we cannot easily think that the survivor is the person we knew. I argue that there can be cases in which statements like, “It’s just not Gregor anymore,” a…Read more
  •  28
    New Dog: Old Tricks
    Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 5 (3): 239-242. 2002.
    A comment on the code of ethical practice of Genetic Savings & Clone, a companion animal cloning service.
  •  164
    'Chocolate' and other kind terms: Implications for semantic externalism
    Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243): 270-292. 2011.
    How do people manage to refer to chocolate, despite knowing so little about it? Traditional semantic externalism gives a two-part answer, a negative claim that meanings are not determined inside speakers' heads, and a positive claim that meanings are fixed by external factors. This gets the semantics of ‘chocolate’ half right: the negative claim is correct, but the positive claim is not. There is nothing special about ‘chocolate’, and scientifically respectable natural-kind terms also fail to li…Read more
  •  17
    Choosing Future People: Reproductive Technologies and Identity
    In Vardit Ravitsky, Autumn Fiester & Arthur L. Caplan (eds.), The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics, Springer Publishing Company. pp. 307-317. 2009.
    Reproductive technologies do not allow us to choose future people, but they do change who will exist. Confusion arises because of the different senses in which ”identity’ is used in ethical debate. I distinguish qualitative, cultural, and numerical identity. Reproductive choices do impact the qualitative features of children in ways that affect wellbeing, both directly and indirectly via cultural identification. I explain how the nonidentity problem makes it difficult to say what, if anything, i…Read more
  •  70
    The Indeterminacy of Loss
    Ethics 118 (4): 633-658. 2008.
    Abstract: This paper argues that continua of both genetic and environmental manipulation give rise to cases in which it is indeterminate whether the non-identity problem arises. In clear non-identity cases, impersonal principles can underwrite intuitions of wrongdoing. In clear cases of ordinary personal harm, ordinary ethical thinking about personal compensation augments or supersedes impersonal considerations. Indeterminate cases raise a special problem because it is indeterminate whether pers…Read more
  •  2
    On the Origin of Species Notions and Their Ethical Limitations
    In Beauchamp Tom & Frey R. G. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics,, Oxford University Press. pp. 577-602. 2011.
    I argue that defenders of general duties of species preservation are faced with an impossible task. I distinguish derivative from non-derivative value and argue that the derivative value of species can yield only limited and contingent duties of preservation. There can be no general duty of species preservation unless all species have non-derivative value. Ongoing controversy over the ’species’ notion has not deterred some from claiming settled authority for whatever notion appears most conduciv…Read more
  • Ethics and Modality
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 2002.
    Ethics and Modality calls for a reevaluation of standard views of modality. I argue that, instead of understanding de re modal talk as tracking the modal properties of things in themselves, we must recognize the importance of prior conceptual priorities and interests in shaping our de re modal judgments. A consequence of this reevaluation is that de re modal claims are indeterminate in that there can be disagreement over a claim without either side having made any factual, definitional or logica…Read more
  •  191
    Everworse: What's Wrong with Selecting for Disability?
    with Steven Augello
    Public Affairs Quarterly 25 (2): 131-140. 2011.
    In this paper we challenge the moral consensus against selection for disability. Our discussion will concern only those disabilities that are compatible with a life worth living from the point of view of the disabled individual. We will argue that an influential, impersonal argument against selection for disability falls to a counterexample. We will then show how the reach of the counterexample can be broadened to make trouble for anyone who objects to selection for disability. If we are right a…Read more
  •  30
    Stem cell therapies should be available to people of all ethnicities. However, most cells used in the clinic will probably come from lines of cells stored in stem cell banks, which may end up benefiting the majority group most. The solution is to seek additional funding, earmarked for lines that will benefit minorities and offered as a public expression of apology for past discrimination
  •  592
    In February 1994, Stephen Mobley was convicted of the murder of John Collins. Mobley's lawyers attempted to introduce genetic evidence in an attempt to have Mobley's sentence reduced from death to life imprisonment. I examine the prospects for appeal to genetic determinism as a criminal defense. Guided by existing standards for insanity defenses, I argue that a genetic defense might be allowable in exceptional cases but will not be generally available as some have worried