•  247
    Personal Identity Online
    Philosophy and Technology 25 (3): 309-328. 2012.
    Philosophers concerned with the question of personal identity have typically been asking the so-called re-identification question: what are the conditions under which a person at one point in time is properly re-identified at another point in time? This is a rather technical question. In our everyday interactions, however, we do raise a number of personal identity questions that are quite distinct from it. In order to explore the variety of ways in which the Internet may affect personal identity…Read more
  •  170
    Shame, guilt, and punishment
    Law and Philosophy 28 (5). 2009.
    The emotions of shame and guilt have recently appeared in debates concerning legal punishment, in particular in the context of so called shaming and guilting penalties. The bulk of the discussion, however, has focussed on the justification of such penalties. The focus of this article is broader than that. My aim is to offer an analysis of the concept of legal punishment that sheds light on the possible connections between punishing practices such as shaming and guilting penalties, on the one han…Read more
  •  150
    Is shame social? Is it superficial? Is it a morally problematic emotion? Researchers in disciplines as different as psychology, philosophy, and anthropology have thought so. But what is the nature of shame and why are claims regarding its social nature and moral standing interesting and important? Do they tell us anything worthwhile about the value of shame and its potential legal and political applications? In this book, Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni propose an original ph…Read more
  •  139
    Sentientism, wellbeing, and environmentalism
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 27 (1): 84-99. 2010.
    In this article, I wish to explore a plausible alternative to both sentientist ethics and holistic environmental ethics. In particular, I put forward the claim that creatures other than sentient ones have interests and, in virtue of that, moral standing. This thesis is in disagreement with sentientism insofar as it claims that sentience is not a prerequisite for moral consideration. Radical as it may sound, this view does not take us as far as the holism favoured by some environmentalists. In pa…Read more
  •  107
    On the Importance of Well-being
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2): 197-212. 2008.
    Many among philosophers and non-philosophers would claim that well-being is important in moral theory because it is important to the individual whose well-being it is. The exact meaning of this claim, however, is in need of clarification. Having provided that, I will present a charge against it. This charge can be found in the recent work of both Joseph Raz and Thomas Scanlon. According to the latter the concept of well-being plays an unimportant role in an agent’s deliberation. As I will show, …Read more
  •  92
    Guit, Anger, and Retribution
    Legal Theory 16 (1): 59-76. 2010.
    This article focuses primarily on the emotion of guilt as providing a justification for retributive legal punishment. In particular, I challenge the claim according to which guilt can function as part of our epistemic justification of positive retributivism, that is, the view that wrongdoing is both necessary and sufficient to justify punishment. I show that the argument to this conclusion rests on two premises: (1) to feel guilty typically involves the judgment that one deserves punishment; and…Read more
  •  76
    Social robots, fiction, and sentimentality
    Ethics and Information Technology 18 (4): 257-268. 2016.
    I examine the nature of human-robot pet relations that appear to involve genuine affective responses on behalf of humans towards entities, such as robot pets, that, on the face of it, do not seem to be deserving of these responses. Such relations have often been thought to involve a certain degree of sentimentality, the morality of which has in turn been the object of critical attention. In this paper, I dispel the claim that sentimentality is involved in this type of relations. My challenge dra…Read more
  •  68
    Life support and Euthanasia, a Perspective on Shaw’s New Perspective.
    Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (2): 81-83. 2011.
    It has recently been suggested by Shaw (2007) that the distinction between voluntary active euthanasia, such as giving a patient a lethal overdose with the intention of ending that patient's life, and voluntary passive euthanasia, such as removing a patient from a ventilator, is much less obvious than is commonly acknowledged in the literature. This is argued by suggesting a new perspective that more accurately reflects the moral features of end-of-life situations. The argument is simply that if…Read more
  •  49
  •  44
    ‘Autism and the good life’: a new approach to the study of well-being
    with Katrine Krause-Jensen and Richard E. Ashcroft
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (6): 401-408. 2016.
  •  36
    Happiness and Well-Being: Shifting the Focus of the Current Debate
    South African Journal of Philosophy 33 (4): 433-446. 2014.
    The point of departure of this paper is the recently emphasised distinction between psychological theories of happiness, on the one hand, and normative theories of well-being, on the other. With this distinction in mind, I examine three possible kinds of relation that might exist between (psychological) happiness and (normative) well-being; to wit, happiness may be understood as playing a central part in (1) a formal theory of well-being, (2) a substantive theory of well-being or (3) as an indic…Read more
  •  32
    The Self-Justifying Desire for Happiness
    South African Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 343-352. 2004.
    In Happiness, Tabensky equates the notion of happiness to Aristotelian eudaimonia. I shall claim that doing so amounts to equating two concepts that moderns cannot conceptually equate, namely, the good for a person and the good person or good life. In §2 I examine the way in which Tabensky deals with this issue and claim that his idea of happiness is as problematic for us moderns as is any translation of the notion of eudaimonia in terms of happiness. Naturally, if happiness understood as eudaim…Read more
  •  20
    The Moral Psychology of Shame (edited book)
    Moral Psychology of the Emotions. 2023.
    Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject--their shamelessness--is tantamount to a vicious moral insensitivity. As the twelve original chapters in this collection attest, however, shame scholars are e…Read more
  •  19
    Understanding Emotions and Their Significance through Social Robots, and Vice Versa
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 23 (3): 257-269. 2019.
  •  16
    Paper: Life support and euthanasia, a perspective on Shaw's new perspective
    Journal of Medical Ethics 37 (2): 81-83. 2011.
    It has recently been suggested by Shaw that the distinction between voluntary active euthanasia, such as giving a patient a lethal overdose with the intention of ending that patient's life, and voluntary passive euthanasia, such as removing a patient from a ventilator, is much less obvious than is commonly acknowledged in the literature. This is argued by suggesting a new perspective that more accurately reflects the moral features of end-of-life situations. The argument is simply that if we con…Read more
  •  13
    Integrative Social Robotics Hands-on
    with Kerstin Fischer, Johanna Seibt, Maike Kirkegård Rasmussen, Astrid Weiss, Leon Bodenhagen, William Kristian Juel, and Norbert Krüger
    Interaction Studies 21 (1): 145-185. 2020.
    In this paper, we discuss the development of robot use cases in an elderly care facility in the context of exploring the method of Integrative Social Robotics when used on top of a user-centered design approach. Integrative Social Robotics is a new proposal for how to generate responsible, i.e. culturally and ethically sustainable, social robotics applications. Starting point for the discussion are the five principles that characterize an ISR approach, which are discussed in application to the t…Read more
  •  12
    The role of well-being in ethics
    Dissertation, St. Andrews. 2003.
    In this thesis I assess the role of well-being in ethics. In order to do so I reply to a threefold charge against the importance of well-being in ethics. In What We Owe to Each Other Scanlon argues that the concept of well-being plays very little role in the thinking of an agent; that no unified theory of well-being can be found; that welfarism is false. In Part I, I argue that the concept of well-being does play an explanatorily and justificatorily important role in the thinking of a rational a…Read more
  •  7
    In this article I examine the notion of human dignity as it appears to ground fundamental human rights, both in the Universal Declaration of 1948 and in the Swiss Federal Constitution. I claim that it is hard to find good arguments in favour of the idea that human dignity should be understood as the intrinsic value of human beings qua human beings. Dignity in this sense is traditionally identified as something a human being cannot lose. I argue that this criterion should be put aside and that we…Read more
  •  6
    Shame and Guilt in Restorative Justice
    Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 14 (2): 142-176. 2008.
    In this article, I examine the relevance and desirability of shame and guilt to restorative justice conferences. I argue that a careful study of the psychology of shame and guilt reveals that both emotions possess traits that can be desirable and traits that can be undesirable for restoration. More in particular, having presented the aims of restorative justice, the importance of face-to-face conferences in reaching these aims, the emotional dynamics that take place within such conferences, and …Read more
  •  2
    Book Review: Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (3): 375-377. 2006.