•  5
    Promoting inequality? Self-monitoring applications and the problem of social justice
    with Katrin Paldan and Hanno Sauer
    AI and Society 38 (6): 2597-2607. 2023.
    When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring …Read more
  •  300
    Personal Identity, Possible Worlds, and Medical Ethics
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy: A European Journal (3): 429-437. 2022.
    Thought experiments that concoct bizarre possible world modalities are standard fare in debates on personal identity. Appealing to intuitions raised by such evocations is often taken to settle differences between conflicting theoretical views that, albeit, have practical implications for ethical controversies of personal identity in health care. Employing thought experiments that way is inadequate, I argue, since personhood is intrinsically linked to constraining facts about the actual world. I …Read more
  •  16
    Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 111-112, February 2022.
  •  21
    Mapping the Other Side of Agency
    with Nikolai Münch and Norbert W. Paul
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 12 (2-3): 198-200. 2021.
  •  59
    Standard views of personal identity over time often hover uneasily between the subjective, first-person dimension (e. g. psychological continuity), and the objective, third-person dimension (e. g. biological continuity) of a person’s life. Since both dimensions capture something integral to personal identity, we show that neither can successfully be discarded in favor of the other. The apparent need to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity, however, presents standard views with problems both in…Read more
  •  25
    Habits and Narrative Agency
    Topoi 40 (3): 677-686. 2020.
    Some habits are vital to who we are in that they shape both our self-perception and how we are seen by others. This is so, I argue, because there is a constitutive link between what I shall call ‘identity-shaping habits’ and narrative agency. Identity-shaping habits are paradigmatically acquired and performed by persons. The ontology of personhood involves both synchronic and diachronic dimensions which are structurally analogous to the synchronic acquisition and the diachronic performance of ha…Read more
  •  106
    Against Cognitivism About Personhood
    Erkenntnis 84 (3): 657-686. 2019.
    The present paper unravels ontological and normative conditions of personhood for the purpose of critiquing ‘Cognitivist Views’. Such views have attracted much attention and affirmation by presenting the ontology of personhood in terms of higher-order cognition on the basis of which normative practices are explained and justified. However, these normative conditions are invoked to establish the alleged ontology in the first place. When we want to know what kind of entity has full moral status, i…Read more
  •  37
    Mobile health devices pose novel questions at the intersection of philosophy and technology. Many such applications not only collect sensitive data, but also aim at persuading users to change their lifestyle for the better. A major concern is that persuasion is paternalistic as it intentionally aims at changing the agent’s actions, chipping away at their autonomy. This worry roots in the philosophical conviction that perhaps the most salient feature of living autonomous lives is displayed via ag…Read more
  •  49
    When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring …Read more
  •  49
  •  2126
    Personal Identity and Brain Identity
    with Georg Northoff
    In L. Syd M. Johnson & Karen Rommelfanger (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, Routledge. pp. 335-351. 2017.
  •  18
    Is the Sense of Agency in Schizophrenia Influenced by Resting-State Variation in Self-Referential Regions of the Brain?
    with Jeffrey Robinson and Georg Northoff
    Schizophrenia Bulletin 42 (2): 270-276. 2016.
    Schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self, of which the attribution of agency is a major component. In this article, we review current theories of the Sense of Agency, their relevance to schizophrenia, and propose a novel framework for future research. We explore some of the models of agency, in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are implicated in the genesis of agency. We further this line of inquiry by suggesting that ongoing neurological activity (the brain’s resting state) in self-…Read more
  •  79
    In philosophy, the criteria for personhood (PH) at a specific point in time (synchronic), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity (PI) over time (diachronic) are traditionally separated. Hence, the transition between both timescales of a person's life remains largely unclear. Personal habits reflect a decision-making (DM) process that binds together synchronic and diachronic timescales. Despite the fact that the actualization of habits takes place synchronically, they pr…Read more
  •  51
    The Ethics of Neuroenhancement: Smart Drugs, Competition and Society
    with Jeffrey Robinson and Christine Wiebking
    International Journal of Technoethics 6 (1): 1-20. 2015.
    According to several recent studies, a big chunk of college students in North America and Europe uses so called ‘smart drugs' to enhance their cognitive capacities aiming at improving their academic performance. With these practices, there comes a certain moral unease. This unease is shared by many, yet it is difficult to pinpoint and in need of justification. Other than simply pointing to the medical risks coming along with using non-prescribed medication, the salient moral question is whether …Read more
  •  592
    Letting go of one's life story
    Think 17 (50): 91-100. 2018.
    Persons are widely believed to be rational, planning agents that are both author and main character of their life stories. A major goal is to keep these narratives coherent as they unfold, and part of a fulfilled life allegedly stems from this coherence. My aim is to challenge these convictions by considering two related claims about persons and their lives. Contrary to the widespread theoretical conviction in philosophy of mind and action, persons are fundamentally emotional and affective rathe…Read more
  •  66
    Ethical questions have traditionally been approached through conceptual analysis. Inspired by the rapid advance of modern brain imaging techniques, however, some ethical questions appear in a new light. For example, hotly debated trolley dilemmas have recently been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists alike, arguing that their findings can support or debunk moral intuitions that underlie those dilemmas. Resulting from the wedding of philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics has emerged as…Read more
  •  32
    Brain transplants and possible worlds: A response to Beck
    South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (2): 141-144. 2016.
    I am very grateful to Simon Beck for his thoughtful response to my paper “Transplanting Brains?” (2016). Needless to say, he raises more issues than I can hope to answer in a brief response. While Beck seemingly feels that the deck has been stacked against him, I think that the majority of his criticisms result from misconceptions and misunderstandings that I intend to straighten out in what follows. Before proceeding, I would like to draw attention to a worry that is lurking in the shadows. Per…Read more
  •  40
    Was bedeutet es, über die Dauer des Lebens als individuelle Person fortzubestehen? Wagner entwickelt eine Theorie, die Personen als psycho-physische Akteure auffasst, deren Identität durch die kontingenten faktischen Normen und Strukturen der Handlungswelt bestimmt wird. Personenidentität wird als graduierbare Relation verstanden, die unsere Existenz auf einem Kontinuum zwischen Menschsein und Personsein lokalisiert.
  •  26
    In this article we critically review the neural mechanisms of moral cognition that have recently been studied via electroencephalography (EEG). Such studies promise to shed new light on traditional moral questions by helping us to understand how effective moral cognition is embodied in the brain. It has been argued that conflicting normative ethical theories require different cognitive features and can, accordingly, in a broadly conceived naturalistic attempt, be associated with different brain …Read more
  •  32
    Experiencing Subjects and the Limits of Objectivity
    with Luca Lavagnino
    Existenz 10 (1): 1-7. 2015.
    Psychiatry as a discipline oscillates between the language of emotions and that of biology; ranging from the immersion into the subjective experience of another person to the objective approach of biomedical science. The tension between these different approaches may seem irreconcilable and confusing to some. This was not the case for Karl Jaspers who pioneered a systematic reflection on the concepts underlying psychiatric theory and practice. In this essay, we engage with Jaspers' thinking and …Read more
  •  36
    Transplanting brains?
    South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (1): 18-27. 2016.
    Brain transplant thought experiments figure prominently in the debate on personal identity. Such hypotheticals are usually taken to provide support for psychological continuity theories. This standard interpretation has recently been challenged by Marya Schechtman. Simon Beck argues that Schechtman's critique rests upon ‘two costly mistakes’—claiming that (1) when evaluating these cases, philosophers mistakenly try to figure out the intuitions that they think people inhabiting such a possible wo…Read more