•  72
    Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (2): 343-357. 2016.
    Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we…Read more
  •  59
    The Alliance of Virtue and Vanity in Hume's Moral Theory
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (4): 595-614. 2012.
    In this article I argue that vanity, the desire for and delight in the favorable opinion of others, plays a fundamental role in Hume's account of moral motivation. Hume says that vanity and virtue are inseparable, though he does not explicitly say how or why this should be. I argue that Hume's account of sympathy can explain this alliance. In resting moral sentiment on sympathy, Hume gives a fundamental role to vanity as it becomes either a mediating motive to virtue or else strengthens the othe…Read more
  •  57
    Pleasing People
    Philosophia Christi 18 (1): 79-96. 2016.
    This paper examines and evaluates from a Christian perspective the common Christian presumption against pleasing people, which is roughly the idea that Christians should not be motivated by or delight in the favorable opinion of others. I argue that several ways of saving the idea that Christians can blamelessly care what others think about them are misguided or insufficient. I contend that the most important way to save this idea is by drawing attention to concern for the opinions of others in …Read more
  •  51
    Next SectionIt is commonly proposed that artifacts cannot be understood without reference to human intentions. This fact, I contend, has relevance to the use of artifacts in intentional action. I argue that because artifacts have intentions embedded into them antecedently, when we use artifacts we are sometimes compelled to intend descriptions of our actions that we might, for various reasons, be inclined to believe that we do not intend. I focus this argument to a specific set of artifacts, nam…Read more
  •  51
    The Danger of Double Effect
    Christian Bioethics 18 (3): 287-300. 2012.
    In this paper, I argue that the doctrine of double effect is disposed toward abuse. I try to identify two distinct sources of abuse of double effect: the conditions associated with standard formulations of double effect and the difficulty of fully understanding one’s own intentions in action. Both of these sources of abuse are exacerbated in complex circumstances, where double effect is most often employed. I raise this concern about abuse not as a criticism of double effect but rather as a prob…Read more
  •  50
    Hume on the Cultivation of Moral Character
    Philosophia 45 (1): 299-315. 2017.
    This paper attempts to give a complete and coherent account of how Hume’s moral psychology can explain the cultivation of moral character. I argue that the outcome of a fully formed moral character is an agent who strengthens her calm moral sentiments into settled principles of action. I then take up the question of how the process of strengthening moral sentiments might occur, rejecting the possibilities of sympathy, “reflection,” and “resolution” because either they are too weak or else they m…Read more
  •  36
    How Not to Defend the Unborn
    with David Hershenov
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (4): 414-430. 2021.
    It is sometimes proposed that killing or harming abortion providers is the only logically consistent position available to opponents of abortion. Since lethal violence against morally responsible attackers is normally viewed as justified in order to defend innocent parties, pro-lifers should also think so in the case of the abortion doctor and so they should act to defend the unborn. In our paper, we defend the mainstream pro-life view against killing abortion doctors. We argue that the pro-life…Read more
  •  36
    Recent work at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of psychology has dealt mostly with Aristotelian virtue ethics. The dearth of scholarship that engages with Hume’s moral philosophy, however, is both noticeable and peculiar. Hume's Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology demonstrates how Hume’s moral philosophy comports with recent work from the empirical sciences and moral psychology. It shows how contemporary work in virtue ethics has much stronger similarities to the…Read more
  •  32
    Is “aid in dying” suicide?
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (2): 123-139. 2019.
    The practice whereby terminally ill patients choose to end their own lives painlessly by ingesting a drug prescribed by a physician has commonly been referred to as physician-assisted suicide. There is, however, a strong trend forming that seeks to deny that this act should properly be termed suicide. The purpose of this paper is to examine and reject the view that the term suicide should be abandoned in reference to what has been called physician-assisted suicide. I argue that there are no good…Read more
  •  29
    Hume on sympathy and agreeable qualities
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (6): 1136-1156. 2016.
    Hume says that sympathy is the source of our moral feeling of approval for useful qualities. But does Hume give the same psychological explanation of our approval of immediately agreeable qualities as he does to our approval of useful qualities? Does he trace our moral approbation of immediately agreeable qualities to sympathy? Some commentators, including Rachel Cohon and Don Garrett, argue that he does not. Let us call this view the ‘narrow view’ of sympathy in contrast to the ‘wide view’ of s…Read more
  •  28
    Physicians, Assisted Suicide, and Christian Virtues
    Christian Bioethics 27 (1): 50-68. 2021.
    The debate about physician-assisted suicide has long been entwined with the nature of the doctor–patient relationship. Opponents of physician-assisted suicide insist that the traditional goals of medicine do not and should not include intentionally bringing about or hastening a patient’s death, whereas proponents of physician-assisted suicide argue that this practice is an appropriate tool for doctors to relieve a patient’s suffering. In this article, I discuss these issues in light of the relev…Read more
  •  26
    Motivating Hume’s natural virtues
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (S1): 134-147. 2012.
    Many commentators propose that Hume thinks that we are not or should not be motivated to perform naturally virtuous actions from moral sentiments if we want our actions to be genuinely virtuous. It is this proposal with which I take issue in this article, arguing that Hume fully incorporates the moral sentiments into his understanding of how human beings act when it comes to the natural virtues and that he does not see the moral sentiments as a problematic kind of motivation that threatens or we…Read more
  •  22
    How to Gerrymander Intention
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 441-460. 2015.
    Essential to the doctrine of double effect is the idea that agents are prohibited from intending evil as a means to a good end. I argue in this paper that some recent accounts of intention from proponents of double effect cannot sustain this prohibition on harmful means. I outline two ways to gerrymander intention that mark these accounts. First, intention is construed in such a way that an agent intends only those states of affairs that she cares about or finds motivating for their own sake. Se…Read more
  •  19
    Against Recategorizing Physician-Assisted Suicide
    Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (1): 50-71. 2020.
    There is a growing trend among some physicians, psychiatrists, bioethicists, and other mental health professionals not to treat physician-assisted suicide (PAS) as suicide. The grounds for doing so are that PAS fundamentally differs from other suicides. Perhaps most notably, in 2017 the American Association of Suicidology argued that PAS is distinct from the behavior that their organization seeks to prevent. This paper compares and contrasts suicide and PAS in order to see how much overlap there…Read more
  •  18
    Character, written by Jay R. Elliott
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (3): 383-385. 2019.
  •  17
    Discrimination against the dying
    Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (2): 108-114. 2024.
    The purpose of this paper is to identify a kind of discrimination that has hitherto gone unrecognised. ‘Terminalism’ is discrimination against the dying, or treating the terminally ill worse than they would expect to be treated if they were not dying. I provide four examples from healthcare settings of this kind of discrimination: hospice eligibility requirements, allocation protocols for scarce medical resources, right to try laws and right to die laws. I conclude by offering some reflections o…Read more
  •  16
    Expressivism at the beginning and end of life
    Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (8): 538-544. 2020.
    Some disability rights advocates criticise prenatal testing and selective abortion on the grounds that these practices express negative attitudes towards existing persons with disabilities. Disability rights advocates also commonly criticise and oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia on the same grounds. Despite the structural and motivational similarity of these two kinds of arguments, there is no literature comparing and contrasting their relative merits and the merits of respo…Read more
  •  12
    Opioids, Double Effect, and the Prospects of Hastening Death
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (5): 505-515. 2021.
    The relevance of double effect for end-of-life decision-making has been challenged recently by a number of scholars. The principal reason is that opioids such as morphine do not usually hasten death when administered to relieve pain at the end of life; therefore, no secondary “double” effect is brought about. In my article, I argue against this view, showing how the doctrine of double effect is relevant to the administration of opioids at the end of life. I contend that the prevailing view suffe…Read more
  •  8
    Readers of this journal know that Hume regarded an Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals as his finest work. It was, Hume said, "incomparably the best." Yet, most of the scholarly work on Hume's moral philosophy in recent decades focuses on the Treatise, which Hume wrote some three decades prior to the Enquiry.There are good reasons to focus on the older work. It is much longer, so there is more to sink our scholarly teeth into. Many discussions and discursions appear in the Treatise that …Read more
  •  7
    Terminalism and assisted suicide
    Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (2): 124-125. 2024.
    Four of the commentaries criticised my claim that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is discriminatory. 1 They were united in this judgement roughly because they insisted that assisted suicide is in fact a benefit and not a harm. I concede that if it is a benefit, then there is no way in which the terminally ill can be disadvantaged by it and hence no way it can be an instance of discrimination. I pointed out in the article that this issue is controversial and could not be settled in my art…Read more
  •  7
    Response to commentaries on ‘Expressivism at the beginning and end of life’
    Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (8): 553-553. 2020.
    I appreciate all of the commentaries for their careful and thoughtful engagement with my article. Because of limited space, I can only focus on some criticisms and cannot develop my responses as fully as I would like. This is probably best for the reader anyway. John Keown worries about the ‘dualism’ of the third objection against expressivism. By this I think he means that critics of the expressivist argument at the beginning of life view a certain class of human beings as ‘non-persons’ and the…Read more
  •  6
    Fostering Medical Students’ Commitment to Beneficence in Ethics Education
    with Joseph Caruana
    Voices in Bioethics 10. 2024.
    PHOTO ID 121339257© Designer491| Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT When physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be apparent conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters future physicians’ commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. We use an ethical dilemma that was presented to a g…Read more
  •  5
    What's Wrong with Monkish Virtues? Hume on the Standard of Virtue
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 29 (1). 2012.
    How does Hume determine what qualities of the mind count as virtues and what qualities count as vices? By what standard, for example, does Hume dismiss the so-called “monkish virtues”? Hume’s commentators have proposed various possibilities for the standard of virtue, among them the general point of view and the usefulness/agreeableness of qualities. I consider the case for these standards and argue that Hume contends ultimately that consensus decides controversial questions about the status of …Read more