-
10. Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue in Plato Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue in Plato (pp. 796-800)In John Hawthorne (ed.), Ethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2004.
-
This book brings together a set of papers, many which grow out of presentations at a conference in Oxford in 2009 on addiction and self-control, by a set of thinkers who are united in believing that understanding agency and failures of agency requires engagement with the best science. The papers it collects attempts to illuminate the mechanisms involved in addiction and thereby to understand to what degree and in what ways actions driven by addiction are controlled by the agent, express his or h…Read more
-
22There is more to belief than Van Leeuwen believesMind and Language. forthcoming.Neil Van Leeuwen argues that many religious people do not act and infer as we would expect believers to act and infer, and on this basis argues that they are not genuine believers. They take some other, nondoxastic, attitude to the claims they profess to believe. In this short commentary, I argue that in many (but far from all) such cases, the content, and not the attitude, explains the departures from the inferential and behavioral stereotype we associate with belief.
-
2The presumption against direct manipulationNeuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. forthcoming.
-
Nomy Arpaly, Merit, Meaning and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free WillPhilosophy in Review 27 (2): 89. 2007.
-
Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About MoralityPhilosophy in Review 27 (1): 76. 2007.
-
28Respecting rights … to deathJournal of Medical Ethics 32 (10): 608-611. 2006.Ravelingien et al1 argue that, given the restrictions that must be imposed on recipients of xenotransplanted organs, we should conduct clinical trials of xenotransplantation only on patients in a persistent vegetative state. I argue that there is no ethical barrier to using terminally ill patients instead. Such patients can choose to waive their rights to the liberties that xenotransplantation would probably restrict; it is surely rational to prefer to waive your rights rather than to die, and p…Read more
-
86Deafness, culture, and choiceJournal of Medical Ethics 28 (5): 284-285. 2002.We should react to deaf parents who choose to have a deaf child with compassion not condemnationThere has been a great deal of discussion during the past few years of the potential biotechnology offers to us to choose to have only perfect babies, and of the implications that might have, for instance for the disabled. What few people foresaw is that these same technologies could be deliberately used to ensure that children would be born with disabilities. That this is a real possibility, and not …Read more
-
57No Trespassing! Abandoning the Novice/Expert ProblemErkenntnis 1-18. forthcoming.The novice/expert problem is the problem of knowing which apparent expert to trust. Following Alvin Goldman’s lead, a number of philosophers have developed criteria that novices can use to distinguish more from less trustworthy experts. While the criteria the philosophers have identified are indeed useful in guiding expert choice, I argue, they can’t do the work that Goldman and his successors want from them: avoid a kind of testimonial scepticism. We can’t deploy them in the way needed to avoid…Read more
-
55Does Moral Ignorance Excuse?Think 23 (66): 17-19. 2024.There's heated debate around whether people who did terrible things in the past, at a time when there was widespread acceptance of such actions, are appropriately blamed by us, on the grounds they weren't really morally ignorant, or their ignorance was itself culpable. I point to puzzles that arise if we blame them. We need to explain how they could act so badly if they weren't fully ignorant. I argue that plausible answers to that question entail that they're not blameworthy, or that we lack st…Read more
-
56Conspiracy Theories as Serious PlayPhilosophical Topics 50 (2): 1-19. 2022.Why do people endorse conspiracy theories? There is no single explanation: different people have different attitudes to the theories they say they believe. In this paper, I argue that for many, conspiracy theories are serious play. They’re attracted to conspiracy theories because these theories are engaging: it’s fun to entertain them (witness the enormous number of conspiracy narratives in film and TV). Just as the person who watches a conspiratorial film suspends disbelief for its duration, so…Read more
-
61Responsibility and Healthcare (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2024.A volume with 14 chapters on various aspects of the relationship between responsibility and healthcare, plus a substantial introduction that offers a comprehensive overview of the relevant debates and how they relate to one another. Questions of responsibility arise at all levels of health care. Most prominent has been the issue of patient responsibility. Some health conditions that risk death or serious harm are partly the result of lifestyle behaviours such as smoking, lack of exercise, or ext…Read more
-
72Moral Relativism: A Short IntroductionOneworld. 2002.This enlightening new introduction examines the history and development of moral relativism, considering the arguments for and against, and also covering such key topics as terrorism, and the rights of women in oppressive cultures.
-
7Nicholas H. Smith, Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity, London, Routledge, 1997, pp. x 197, 14.99Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (1): 136-138. 2001.This Article does not have an abstract
-
6Love is a central preoccupation of art and literature, of popular culture and autobiography. This book is an attempt to understand its central themes, to discover why love is so important to most of us, why we seek it, and why we so frequently fail to hold on to it. John Armstrong is a philosopher whose primary interest is aesthetics. Accordingly, his meditations on love often proceed by way of reflection upon works of art and literature.
-
38Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral ResponsibilityPhilosophical Quarterly 64 (257): 661-664. 2014.
-
31Downshifting and Meaning in LifeRatio 18 (2): 176-189. 2005.So‐called downshifters seek more meaningful lives by decreasing the amount of time they devote to work, leaving more time for the valuable goods of friendship, family and personal development. But though these are indeed meaning‐conferring activities, they do not have the right structure to count as superlatively meaningful. Only in work – of a certain kind – can superlative meaning be found. It is by active engagements in projects, which are activities of the right structure, dedicated to the a…Read more
-
47Why Frankfurt examples don't Beg the question: A reply to WoodwardJournal of Social Philosophy 35 (2). 2004.
-
190Frankfurt-style cases are widely taken to show that agents do not need alternative possibilities to be morally responsible for their actions. Many philosophers take these cases to constitute a powerful argument for compatibilism: if we do not need alternative possibilities for moral responsibility, it is hard to see what the attraction of indeterminism might be. I defend the claim that even though Frankfurt-style cases establish that agents can be responsible for their actions despite lacking al…Read more
-
1680We're All Folk: An Interview with Neil Levy about Experimental Philosophy and Conceptual AnalysisAnnals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 19 87-98. 2011.The following is a transcript of the interview I (Yasuko Kitano) conducted with Neil Levy (The Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, CAPPE) on the 23rd in July 2009, while he was in Tokyo to give a series of lectures on neuroethics at The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy. I edited his words for publication with his approval.
-
50The sweetness of surrender: Glucose enhances self-control by signaling environmental richnessPhilosophical Psychology 29 (6): 813-825. 2016.According to the ego-depletion account of loss of self-control, self-control is, or depends on, a depletable resource. Advocates of this account have argued that what is depleted is actually glucose. However, there is experimental evidence that indicates that glucose replenishment is not necessary for regaining self-control, as well as theoretical reasons for thinking that it is not depleted by exercises of self-control. I suggest that glucose restores self-control not because it is a resource o…Read more
-
100The social: A missing term in the debate over addiction and voluntary controlAmerican Journal of Bioethics 7 (1). 2007.The author comments on the article “The Neurobiology of Addiction: Implications for Voluntary Control of Behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman’s article suggests that addicted individuals have impairments in cognitive control of behavior. The author agrees with Hyman’s view that addiction weakens the addict’s ability to align his actions with his judgments. The author states that neuroethics may focus on brains and highlight key aspects of behavior but we still risk missing explanatory elements. Acce…Read more
-
1091The responsibility of the psychopath revisitedPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 14 (2). 2007.The question of the psychopath's responsibility for his or her wrongdoing has received considerable attention. Much of this attention has been directed toward whether psychopaths are a counterexample to motivational internalism (MI): Do they possess normal moral beliefs, which fail to motivate them? In this paper, I argue that this is a question that remains conceptually and empirically intractable, and that we ought to settle the psychopath's responsibility in some other way. I argue that recen…Read more
-
367The Powers that bind : doxastic voluntarism and epistemic obligationIn Rico Vitz & Jonathan Matheson (eds.), The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, Oxford University Press. pp. 12-33. 2014.In this chapter, we argue for three theses: (1) we lack the power to form beliefs at will (i.e., directly); at very least, we lack the power to form at will beliefs of the kind that proponents of doxastic voluntarism have in mind; but (2) we possess a propensity to form beliefs for non-epistemic reasons; and (3) these propensities—once we come to know we have them—entail that we have obligations similar to those we would have were doxastic voluntarism true. Specifically, we will argue that w…Read more
-
56The moral significance of being bornJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (5): 326-329. 2013.This paper is a response to Giubilini and Minerva's defence of infanticide. I argue that any account of moral worth or moral rights that depends on the intrinsic properties of individuals alone is committed to agreeing with Giubilini and Minerva that birth cannot by itself make a moral difference to the moral worth of the infant. However, I argue that moral worth need not depend on intrinsic properties alone. It might also depend on relational and social properties. I claim that the in principle…Read more