•  415
    Thought Experiments and Experimental Ethics
    with Thomas Pölzler
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Experimental ethicists investigate traditional ethical questions with non-traditional means, namely with the methods of the empirical sciences. Studies in this area have made heavy use of philosophical thought experiments such as the well-known trolley cases. Yet, the specific function of these thought experiments within experimental ethics has received little consideration. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap. We begin by describing the function of ethical thought experiments, and show th…Read more
  •  54
    How (not) to Argue For Moral Enhancement: Reflections on a Decade of Debate
    with Jan Christoph Bublitz
    Topoi 38 (1): 95-109. 2019.
    The controversy over moral bioenhancement has fallen into a stalemate between advocates and critics. We wish to overcome this stalemate by addressing some of the key challenges any moral enhancement project has to meet. In particular, we shall argue that current proposals are unpersuasive as they, first, fail to diagnose the often complex causes of contemporary moral maladies and, second, are premised on methodological individualism. Focusing on brains and minds neglects social and environmental…Read more
  •  30
    What should we do if climate change or global injustice require radical policy changes not supported by the majority of citizens? And what if science shows that the lacking support is largely due to shortcomings in citizens’ individual psychology such as cognitive biases that lead to temporal and geographical parochialism? Could then a plausible case for enhancing the morality of the electorate—even against their will –be made? But can a democratic government manipulate the will of the people wi…Read more
  •  57
    New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care (edited book)
    Springer Verlag. 2015.
    Decision-making capacity or mental competence is one of the most intensively discussed concepts in contemporary bioethics and medical ethics. In this paper I argue that anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder primarily afflicting adolescent girls and young women, seriously challenges what I label the traditional account of decision-making capacity. In light of these results, it may in addition be necessary to rethink a certain popular type of paternalistic argumentation that grounds the justificati…Read more
  •  55
    This paper scrutinizes the tension between individuals’ rights and paternalism. I will argue that no normative account that includes rights of individuals can justify hard paternalism since the infringement of a right can only be justified with the right or interest of another person, which is never the case in hard paternalism. Justifications of hard paternalistic actions generally include a deviation from the very idea of having rights. The paper first introduces Tom Beauchamp as the most famo…Read more
  •  72
    Casuistry as common law morality
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36 (6): 373-389. 2015.
    This article elaborates on the relation between ethical casuistry and common law reasoning. Despite the frequent talk of casuistry as common law morality, remarks on this issue largely remain at the purely metaphorical level. The article outlines and scrutinizes Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin’s version of casuistry and its basic elements. Drawing lessons for casuistry from common law reasoning, it is argued that one generally has to be faithful to ethical paradigms. There are, however, limita…Read more
  •  35
    The law serves functions that are not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely feasibility and practicability. A consequence of feasibility is that most laws do not meet the demands of ideal ethical theory. A consequence of practicability is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. These two consequences form the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in a…Read more
  •  38
    What should we do if climate change or global injustice require radical policy changes not supported by the majority of citizens? And what if science shows that the lacking support is largely due to shortcomings in citizens’ individual psychology such as cognitive biases that lead to temporal and geographical parochialism? Could then a plausible case for enhancing the morality of the electorate—even against their will –be made? But can a democratic government manipulate the will of the people wi…Read more
  •  17
    Specifying Specification
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (1): 1-28. 2016.
    As late as 1984, five years after the first edition of the seminal Principles of Biomedical Ethics appeared, Tom Beauchamp lamented that applied ethics is not taken seriously as a distinct field of philosophy. In order to change that attitude he argued for effacing the distinction between applied and classical ethics. After all, philosophers of applied ethics do the same as all other philosophers: they analyze concepts, use certain strategies to test or justify beliefs, and explicate hidden prem…Read more