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343Willpower as a metaphorIn David Shoemaker, Santiago Amaya & Manuel Vargas (eds.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 8: Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2024.Willpower is a metaphor that is widespread in both common usage and expert literature across disciplines. This paper looks into willpower as a ‘metaphor we live by’, analyzing and exploring the consequences of the tacit information content of the willpower metaphor for agentive self-understanding and efficacy. In addition to contributing to stigma associated with self-control failures, the metaphor causally contributes to self-control failures by obscuring available self-control strategies and i…Read more
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17Toward Informed User Decisions About Pharmacological Cognitive EnhancementCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (4): 545-556. 2022.Pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) refers to the use of pharmaceuticals to improve cognitive function when that use is not intended to prevent or treat disease. Those who favour a liberal approach to PCE trust users to make informed decisions about whether enhancing is in their best interest. The author argues that making informed decisions about PCE requires a nuanced risk-benefit analysis that is not accessible to many users. Presently, the PCE use of prescription medications such as …Read more
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20Self-control modulates information salienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Bermúdez suggests that agents use framing to succeed in self-control. This commentary suggests that frames are effective in steering behavior because they modulate information salience. This analysis extends to self-control strategies beyond framing, raising the question whether there remains an explanatory role for dual process theories for self-control.
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424Demarcation, instantiation, and individual traits: Realist social ontology for mental disordersPhilosophical Psychology 35 (6): 793-813. 2021.Realists about mental disorder have been hasty about dismissing social explanations of how mental disorder is constituted. However, many social ontologies are realist ontologies. In order to create a meaningful distinction between realism and social metaphysics about mental disorder, I propose that realism about mental disorder is best understood as Individual Trait Realism (ITR) about them. For ITR, mental disorders exist in virtue of traits. I defend the view that ITR is compatible with social…Read more
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99Accessing Self-ControlErkenntnis 88 (8): 3239-3258. 2023.Self-control is that which is enacted to align our behaviour with intentions, motives, or better judgment in the face of conflicting impulses of motives. In this paper, I ask, what explains interpersonal differences in self-control? After defending a functionalist conception of self-control, I argue that differences in self-control are analogous to differences in mobility: they are modulated by inherent traits and environmental supports and constraints in interaction. This joint effect of indivi…Read more
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488The Ethics of Climate Nudges: Central Issues for Applying Choice Architecture Interventions to Climate PolicyEuropean Journal of Risk Regulation. 2021.While nudging has garnered plenty of interdisciplinary attention, the ethics of applying it to climate policy has been little discussed. However, not all ethical considerations surrounding nudging are straightforward to apply to climate nudges. In this article, we overview the state of the debate on the ethics of nudging and highlight themes that are either specific to or particularly important for climate nudges. These include: the justification of nudges that are not self-regarding; how to acc…Read more
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80Born which Way? ADHD, Situational Self-Control, and ResponsibilityNeuroethics 14 (2): 205-218. 2021.Debates concerning whether Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder mitigates responsibility often involve recourse to its genetic and neurodevelopmental etiology. For such arguments, individuals with ADHD have diminished self-control, and hence do not fully satisfy the control condition for responsibility, when there is a genetic or neurodevelopmental etiology for this diminished capacity. In this article, I argue that the role of genetic and neurobiological explanations has been overstated in …Read more
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423Genetics on the neurodiversity spectrum: Genetic, phenotypic and endophenotypic continua in autism and ADHDStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89 (October 2021). 2021.How we ought to diagnose, categorise and respond to spectrum disabilities such as autism and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a topic of lively debate. The heterogeneity associated with ADHD and autism is described as falling on various continua of behavioural, neural, and genetic difference. These continua are varyingly described either as extending into the general population, or as being continua within a given disorder demarcation. Moreover, the interrelationships of these …Read more
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24Behaving: what’s genetic, what’s not, and why should we care? (review)Philosophical Psychology 33 (1): 151-154. 2020..
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56Self-Control in Responsibility Enhancement and Criminal RehabilitationCriminal Law and Philosophy 12 (2): 227-244. 2018.Ethicists have for the past 20 years debated the possibility of using neurointerventions to improve intelligence and even moral capacities, and thereby create a safer society. Contributing to a recent debate concerning neurointerventions in criminal rehabilitation, Nicole Vincent and Elizabeth Shaw have separately discussed the possibility of responsibility enhancement. In their ethical analyses, enhancing a convict’s capacity responsibility may be permissible. Both Vincent and Shaw consider sel…Read more
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