•  11
    From moral rights to legal rights? Lessons from healthcare contexts
    Developing World Bioethics 24 (1): 21-30. 2024.
    Many believe the existence of a moral right to some good should lead to recognition of a corresponding legal right to that good. If, for instance, there is a moral right to healthcare, it is natural to believe countries should recognize a legal right to healthcare. This article demonstrates that justifying legal rights to healthcare is more difficult than many assume. The existence of a moral right is insufficient to justify recognition of a corresponding justiciable constitutional right. Furthe…Read more
  •  11
    Developing World Bioethics, EarlyView.
  •  5
    Paediatric Physician–Researchers: Coping With Tensions in Dual Accountability
    with Katherine Boydell, Randi Zlotnik Shaul, Lori D'Agincourt–Canning, Christy Simpson, Christine D. Czoli, Natalie Rashkovan, Celine C. Kim, Alex V. Levin, and Rayfel Schneider
    Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 2 (3): 213-221. 2012.
    Potential conflicts between the roles of physicians and researchers have been described at the theoretical level in the bioethics literature (Czoli, et al., 2011). Physicians and researchers are generally in mutually distinct roles, responsible for patients and participants respectively. With increasing emphasis on integration of research into clinical settings, however, the role divide is sometimes unclear. Consequently, physician–researchers must consider and negotiate salient ethical differen…Read more
  •  10
    Federalism as an institutional doctrine
    Journal of Social Philosophy 55 (1): 81-105. 2023.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  3
    Subsidiarity and the Allocation of Governmental Powers
    Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 36 (1): 83-111. 2023.
    Every country must allocate final decision-making authority over different issues/subjects within its boundaries. Historically, many scholars working on this topic implicitly assumed that identifying the features providing entities with justified claims for authority and the entities possessing those features would also identify which groups should have which powers (or vice versa). However, many candidate allocative principles select multiple entities as candidates for some sub-state authority …Read more
  •  7
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.
  •  20
    Autonomous Artificial Intelligence and Liability: a Comment on List
    Philosophy and Technology 35 (2): 1-6. 2022.
    Christian List argues that responsibility gaps created by viewing artificial intelligence as intentional agents are problematic enough that regulators should only permit the use of autonomous AI in high-stakes settings where AI is designed to be moral or a liability transfer agreement will fill any gaps. This work challenges List’s proposed condition. A requirement for “moral” AI is too onerous given technical challenges and other ways to check AI quality. Moreover, transfer agreements only plau…Read more
  •  28
    Explainability, Public Reason, and Medical Artificial Intelligence
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (5): 743-762. 2023.
    The contention that medical artificial intelligence (AI) should be ‘explainable’ is widespread in contemporary philosophy and in legal and best practice documents. Yet critics argue that ‘explainability’ is not a stable concept; non-explainable AI is often more accurate; mechanisms intended to improve explainability do not improve understanding and introduce new epistemic concerns; and explainability requirements are ad hoc where human medical decision-making is often opaque. A recent ‘political…Read more
  •  26
    Federalism: Contemporary political philosophy issues
    Philosophy Compass 17 (4). 2022.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.
  •  23
    Individual rights to healthcare (RTHCs) are increasingly common in law. Yet even plausible theoretical defences thereof raise a classic problem in the philosophy of rights: How do individual rights relate to ‘collective’ rights within the same domain? Collective rights are common in international law and in the domestic laws of states that recognize RTHCs. These collective rights often include health‐related components. There are at least prima facie plausible reasons to think that such collecti…Read more
  •  17
    Developing a Capped Model for Combining Ideals
    Philosophia 47 (1): 59-73. 2019.
    This work motivates the Combined Model for Combining Ideals, which Larry Temkin introduces in “sketch” form in Rethinking the Good, and goes on to begin filling in the details of the sketch. It argues that the Combined Model for Combining Ideals is most plausible when there are upper and lower caps on the extent to which an ideal can add to or subtract from the overall goodness of an outcome, but the caps for different values can and should differ.
  •  16
    Nicole Hassoun: Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines, 2020 (review)
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1): 419-421. 2021.
  •  17
    ABSTRACTErnest Weinrib claims that the purpose of private law is to correct injustices between private parties and the use of private laws for consequentialist ends is a distortion. Weinrib’s primary argument highlights the distinctiveness of corrective justice and distributive justice. Weinrib claims to have an Aristotelian proof for their distinctiveness, but formalisation of and commentary on this aspect of his argument are lacking. This piece fills that gap in the literature. It provides pur…Read more
  •  79
    Accountability and pediatric physician-researchers: are theoretical models compatible with Canadian lived experience?
    with Christine Czoli, Randi Zlotnik Shaul, Lori D'Agincourt-Canning, Christy Simpson, Katherine Boydell, Natalie Rashkovan, and Sharon Vanin
    Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6 15. 2011.
    Physician-researchers are bound by professional obligations stemming from both the role of the physician and the role of the researcher. Currently, the dominant models for understanding the relationship between physician-researchers' clinical duties and research duties fit into three categories: the similarity position, the difference position and the middle ground. The law may be said to offer a fourth
  •  19
    The Traces Left Behind
    Social Theory and Practice 47 (1): 63-89. 2021.
    Fulfilling one’s all-things-considered duty sometimes requires violating pro tanto duties. According to W. D. Ross and Robert Nozick, the pro tanto-duty-violating, wrong-making features of acts in these cases can leave ‘traces’ of wrongfulness that require specific responses: feeling compunction for the wrongfulness and/or providing compensation to the negatively affected person. Failure to respond in the appropriate way to lingering wrong-making features can itself be wrongful. Unfortunately, c…Read more
  •  12
    The Potential Value of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in Pediatric Bioethics Settings
    with Cheryl D. Lew, Laura Lundy, Kellie R. Lang, Irene Melamed, and Randi Zlotnik Shaul
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 58 (3): 290-305. 2015.
    In this article, we examine how the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child can be useful in pediatric bioethics. Adopted in 1989, the CRC reflects norms that have been deliberated upon for a long period of time and endorsed by most nations. The United States is now the only country that has not ratified the CRC.1 International human rights law shares many key moral concepts with clinical pediatric bioethics, and the CRC provides a considered language common to many jurisdictions that can ass…Read more
  •  11
    Public Reason and the Need to Identify State-Relevant Desert
    Criminal Justice Ethics 33 (2): 129-154. 2014.
    Plausible retributivist justifications for punishment assert that the commission of a moral wrong creates a pro tanto reason to punish the person who committed it. Yet there are good case-based and theoretical reasons to believe that not all moral wrongs are the proper subjects of criminal law or that they are within the proper domain of the state. This article provides these reasons, which suggest that a plausible retributivist justification for punishment must make distinctions between state-r…Read more
  •  6
    No Title available: Dialogue
    Dialogue 51 (3): 531-534. 2012.
    Book Reviews MICHAEL DA SILVA, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article
  • The provocation defence, which militates against full legal responsibility for unjustified killings in several common law jurisdictions, has been the subject of considerable controversy during recent decades. Much of the criticism focused on substantive legal issues. This article examines the philosophical bases for the defence in hopes of establishing a theoretical groundwork for future debate on the legal defence. The defence originated on desert bases and continues to be understood on those g…Read more
  •  11
  •  49
    Offsetting the harms of extinction
    Law, Ethics and Philosophy 3 8-29. 2015.
    Many people assume that the extinction of humanity would be a bad thing. This article scrutinizes this apparent badness and demonstrates that on most plausible consequentialist frameworks, the extinction of humanity is not necessarily bad. The best accounts of the badness of the extinction of humanity focus on the loss of potential utility, but this loss can be offset if it is the result of sufficiently large gains by the present generation. Plausible means of calculating the goodness of outcome…Read more
  •  20
    The Complex Structure of Health Rights
    Public Health Ethics 13 (1): 99-110. 2020.
    Research on how to understand legally recognized socio-economic rights produced many insights into the nature of rights. Legally recognized rights to health and, by extension, health care could contribute to health justice. Yet a tension remains between widespread international and transnational constitutional recognition of rights to health and health care and compelling normative conditions for rights recognition from both philosophers seeking to identify the scope and structure of the rights …Read more
  •  17
    Book Reviews MICHAEL DA SILVA, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article
  •  20
    COVID-19 and Health-Related Authority Allocation Puzzles
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (1): 25-36. 2021.
    COVID-19-related controversies concerning the allocation of scarce resources, travel restrictions, and physical distancing norms each raise a foundational question: How should authority, and thus responsibility, over healthcare and public health law and policy be allocated? Each controversy raises principles that support claims by traditional wielders of authority in “federal” countries, like federal and state governments, and less traditional entities, like cities and sub-state nations. No exis…Read more
  •  18
    Dual-Role Research and Consent by Unique Specialists
    with Randi Zlotnik Shaul, Christy Simpson, and Katherine Boydell
    American Journal of Bioethics 19 (4): 46-48. 2019.