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3309Talking Sense about Political CorrectnessJournal of Australian Studies 73 119-133. 2002.In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one which itself is used mainly to silence dissenting po…Read more
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1361Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and EugenicsGenomics, Society and Policy 3 (3): 43-59. 2007.The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible. Savulescu offers a prima facie implausible account of parental obligation, as even the best parents ty…Read more
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960Why machines cannot be moralAI and Society (3): 685-693. 2021.The fact that real-world decisions made by artificial intelligences (AI) are often ethically loaded has led a number of authorities to advocate the development of “moral machines”. I argue that the project of building “ethics” “into” machines presupposes a flawed understanding of the nature of ethics. Drawing on the work of the Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, I argue that ethical dilemmas are problems for particular people and not (just) problems for everyone who faces a similar situation…Read more
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821Implants and Ethnocide: learning from the Cochlear implant controversyDisability and Society 25 (4): 455-466. 2010.This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in debates about genetic testing are themselves dese…Read more
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720Killer robotsJournal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1). 2007.The United States Army’s Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a “robot army” to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of a decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved in an atrocity of the sort that would normally be de…Read more
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687The March of the robot dogsEthics and Information Technology 4 (4): 305-318. 2002.Following the success of Sony Corporation’s “AIBO”, robot cats and dogs are multiplying rapidly. “Robot pets” employing sophisticated artificial intelligence and animatronic technologies are now being marketed as toys and companions by a number of large consumer electronics corporations. It is often suggested in popular writing about these devices that they could play a worthwhile role in serving the needs of an increasingly aging and socially isolated population. Robot companions, shaped li…Read more
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595Better than men?: Sex and the therapy/enhancement distinctionKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 20 (2). 2010.The normative significance of the distinction between therapy and enhancement has come under sustained philosophical attack in recent discussions of the ethics of shaping future persons by means of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and other advanced genetic technologies. In this paper, I argue that giving up the idea that the answer to the question as to whether a condition is “normal” should play a crucial role in assessing the ethics of genetic interventions has unrecognized and strongly coun…Read more
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591The promise and perils of AI in medicineInternational Journal of Chinese and Comparative Philosophy of Medicine 17 (2): 79-109. 2019.What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to contribute to health care? And what should we be looking out for if we are worried about its risks? In this paper we offer a survey, and initial evaluation, of hopes and fears about the applications of artificial intelligence in medicine. AI clearly has enormous potential as a research tool, in genomics and public health especially, as well as a diagnostic aid. It’s also highly likely to impact on the or…Read more
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552Better off DeafRes Publica (Misc) 11 (1). 2002.Should parents try to give their children the best lives possible? Yes. Do parents have an obligation to give their children the widest possible set of opportunities in the future? No. Understanding how both of these things can be true will allow us to go a long way towards understanding why a Deaf couple might wish their child to be born Deaf and why we might have reason to respect this desire.
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515The virtues of interpretable medical artificial intelligenceCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 1-10. forthcoming.Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are 'black boxes'. The initial response in the literature was a demand for 'explainable AI'. However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or 'interpretable' is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritising interpretability in medical AI may constitute a 'lethal prejudi…Read more
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497Egalitarianism and Moral BioenhancementAmerican Journal of Bioethics 14 (4): 20-28. 2014.A number of philosophers working in applied ethics and bioethics are now earnestly debating the ethics of what they term “moral bioenhancement.” I argue that the society-wide program of biological manipulations required to achieve the purported goals of moral bioenhancement would necessarily implicate the state in a controversial moral perfectionism. Moreover, the prospect of being able to reliably identify some people as, by biological constitution, significantly and consistently more moral tha…Read more
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450High hopes for “Deep Medicine”? AI, economics, and the future of careHastings Center Report 50 (1): 14-17. 2020.In Deep Medicine, Eric Topol argues that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare will lead to a dramatic shift in the culture and practice of medicine. Topol claims that, rather than replacing physicians, AI could function alongside of them in order to allow them to devote more of their time to face-to-face patient care. Unfortunately, these high hopes for AI-enhanced medicine fail to appreciate a number of factors that, we believe, suggest a radically different picture f…Read more
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419War without virtue?In Bradley Jay Strawser (ed.), Killing By Remote Control, Oxford University Press. pp. 84-105. 2013.A number of recent and influential accounts of military ethics have argued that there exists a distinctive “role morality” for members of the armed services—a “warrior code.” A “good warrior” is a person who cultivates and exercises the “martial” or “warrior” virtues. By transforming combat into a “desk job” that can be conducted from the safety of the home territory of advanced industrial powers without need for physical strength or martial valour, long-range robotic weapons, such as the “Preda…Read more
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387Defending deaf culture: The case of cochlear implantsJournal of Political Philosophy 13 (2). 2005.The cochlear implant controversy involves questions about the nature of disability and the definition of “normal” bodies; it also raises arguments about the nature and significance of culture and the rights of minority cultures. I defend the claim that there might be such a thing as “Deaf culture” and then examine how two different understandings of the role of culture in the lives of individuals can lead to different conclusions about the rights of Deaf parents in relation to their children, a…Read more
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360Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems: The Downside of InvulnerabilityIn Bert Gordijn & Anthony Mark Cutter (eds.), In Pursuit of Nanoethics, Springer. pp. 89-103. 2014.In this paper we examine the ethical implications of emerging Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems (or 'NECS'). Through a combination of materials innovation and biotechnology, NECS are aimed at making combatants much less vulnerable to munitions that pose a lethal threat to soldiers protected by conventional armor. We argue that increasing technological disparities between forces armed with NECS and those without will exacerbate the ethical problems of asymmetric warfare. This will place…Read more
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326In the hands of machines? The future of aged careMinds and Machines 16 (2): 141-161. 2006.It is remarkable how much robotics research is promoted by appealing to the idea that the only way to deal with a looming demographic crisis is to develop robots to look after older persons. This paper surveys and assesses the claims made on behalf of robots in relation to their capacity to meet the needs of older persons. We consider each of the roles that has been suggested for robots in aged care and attempt to evaluate how successful robots might be in these roles. We do so from the perspect…Read more
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316Can machines be people? Reflections on the Turing triage testIn Patrick Lin, Keith Abney & George Bekey (eds.), Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics, Mit Press. pp. 301-315. 2012.In, “The Turing Triage Test”, published in Ethics and Information Technology, I described a hypothetical scenario, modelled on the famous Turing Test for machine intelligence, which might serve as means of testing whether or not machines had achieved the moral standing of people. In this paper, I: (1) explain why the Turing Triage Test is of vital interest in the context of contemporary debates about the ethics of AI; (2) address some issues that complexify the application of this test; and, (3)…Read more
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291Drones, courage, and military cultureIn George R. Jr Lucas (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics, Routledge. pp. 380-394. 2015.In so far as long-range tele-operated weapons, such as the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, allow their operators to fight wars in what appears to be complete safety, thousands of kilometres removed from those whom they target and kill, it is unclear whether drone operators either require courage or have the opportunity to develop or exercise it. This chapter investigates the implications of the development of tele-operated warfare for the extent to which courage will remain central t…Read more
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263Diachronic and synchronic variation in the performance of adaptive machine learning systems: the ethical challengesJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association 30 (2): 361-366. 2023.Objectives: Machine learning (ML) has the potential to facilitate “continual learning” in medicine, in which an ML system continues to evolve in response to exposure to new data over time, even after being deployed in a clinical setting. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the range of ethical issues raised by the use of such “adaptive” ML systems in medicine that have, thus far, been neglected in the literature. Target audience: The target audiences for this tutorial are the developers of…Read more
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252Genes, identity, and the expressivist critiqueIn Loane Skene and Janna Thompson (ed.), The Sorting Society, Cambridge University Press. 2008.In this paper, I explore the “expressivist critique” of the use of prenatal testing to select against the birth of persons with impairments. I begin by setting out the expressivist critique and then highlighting, through an investigation of an influential objection to this critique, the ways in which both critics and proponents of the use of technologies of genetic selection negotiate a difficult set of dilemmas surrounding the relationship between genes and identity. I suggest that we may be …Read more
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252The ethics of terraformingEnvironmental Ethics 21 (3): 227-245. 1999.I apply an agent-based virtue ethics to issues in environmental philosophy regarding our treatment of complex inorganic systems. I consider the ethics of terraforming: hypothetical planetary engineering on a vast scale which is aimed at producing habitable environments on otherwise “hostile” planets. I argue that the undertaking of such a project demonstrates at least two serious defects of moral character: an aesthetic insensitivity and the sin of hubris. Trying to change whole planets to suit …Read more
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248Predators or Ploughshares? Arms Control of Robotic WeaponsIEEE Technology and Society 28 (1): 25-29. 2009.This paper makes the case for arms control regimes to govern the development and deployment of autonomous weapon systems and long range uninhabited aerial vehicles.
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234Censorship and Freedom of SpeechIn Justin Healy (ed.), Censorship and Free Speech, The Spinney Press. pp. 1-4. 2004.
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225Robots and Respect: Assessing the Case Against Autonomous Weapon SystemsEthics and International Affairs 30 (1): 93-116. 2016.There is increasing speculation within military and policy circles that the future of armed conflict is likely to include extensive deployment of robots designed to identify targets and destroy them without the direct oversight of a human operator. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I will argue that the ethical case for allowing autonomous targeting, at least in specific restricted domains, is stronger than critics have acknowledged. Second, I will attempt to uncover, explicate, and defend…Read more
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221Talkin' 'bout a (nanotechnological) revolutionIEEE Technology and Society 27 (2): 37-43. 2008.It is often claimed that the development of nanotechnology will constitute a “technological revolution” with profound social, economic, and political consequences. The full implications of this claim can best be understood by imagining a scenario in which a political revolutionary made all the same claims that are commonly made by enthusiasts for nanotechnology. I argue that most people would be outraged to learn that the members of an unelected group were planning to radically reshape society i…Read more
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219Technology ethics assessment: Politicising the ‘Socratic approach’Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility (2): 454-466. 2023.That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The ‘responsible innovation’ literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a methodology known as the ‘Socratic approach’. However, …Read more
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207Yesterday’s Child: How Gene Editing for Enhancement Will Produce Obsolescence—and Why It MattersAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (7): 6-15. 2019.Despite the advent of CRISPR, safe and effective gene editing for human enhancement remains well beyond our current technological capabilities. For the discussion about enhancing human beings to be worth having, then, we must assume that gene-editing technology will improve rapidly. However, rapid progress in the development and application of any technology comes at a price: obsolescence. If the genetic enhancements we can provide children get better and better each year, then the enhancements …Read more
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206Terraforming, vandalism and virtue ethicsIn Jai Galliott (ed.), Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, Ashgate. pp. 161-178. 2015.‘Terraforming’ is hypothetical climatic and geo-physical engineering of other planets on a grand scale, with the aim of turning the so-called ‘barren’ planets in our (or for that matter another) solar system into habitable earth-like eco-systems. Although terraforming sounds like an idea from science fiction (where it indeed has appeared), it has been seriously proposed as a future project for the human race. With such a technology we could colonise the solar system and perhaps eventually others…Read more
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191Robots, rape, and representationInternational Journal of Social Robotics 9 (4): 465-477. 2017.Sex robots are likely to play an important role in shaping public understandings of sex and of relations between the sexes in the future. This paper contributes to the larger project of understanding how they will do so by examining the ethics of the “rape” of robots. I argue that the design of realistic female robots that could explicitly refuse consent to sex in order to facilitate rape fantasy would be unethical because sex with robots in these circumstances is a representation of the rape of…Read more
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190(Im)Moral technology? Thought experiments and the future of `mind control'In Akira Akayabashi (ed.), The Future of Bioethics: International Dialogues, Oxford University Press. pp. 113-119. 2014.In their paper, “Autonomy and the ethics of biological behaviour modification”, Savulescu, Douglas, and Persson discuss the ethics of a technology for improving moral motivation and behaviour that does not yet exist and will most likely never exist. At the heart of their argument sits the imagined case of a “moral technology” that magically prevents people from developing intentions to commit seriously immoral actions. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to characterise their paper as a thoug…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |