• Introduction
    In The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.
    The book’s introduction points out that many international declarations claim that children have a right to be loved, but that philosophically speaking, there are a number of reasons to question whether there is in fact such a right. The introduction then lays out a plan to show that children have a right to be loved by answering questions such as whether children can have rights, what grounds the right to be loved, whether love is an appropriate object of a right, who has the corresponding duty…Read more
  • Can Children Have Rights?
    In The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.
    To a lay audience, it might seem surprising that it has to be shown that children are rightholders, since, for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” which would seem to include children as rightholders. However, the claim that all human beings are rightholders is in fact surprisingly difficult to defend. When philosophers try to explain how all human beings are rightholders, they end up adoptin…Read more
  • The Possibility of a Duty to Love
    In The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.
    This chapter addresses a number of objections against the possibility of a duty to love. Some people believe that a duty to love is an absurdity because duty requires that one can command the action required by the duty, but love is an emotion and is therefore not commandable. This chapter argues that in fact love is commandable even if it is an emotion. This chapter also responds to the concern that really to love a person, we must be motivated to do so for the person’s sake, but to have a duty…Read more
  • Regulating Biological Parenting
    In The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.
    This chapter explores the topic of whether we should institute some kind of parental licensing scheme, that is, require biological parents to demonstrate certain competence and character before they are permitted to parent their biological children. Existing concerns regarding parental licensing tend to be practical concerns such as whether there can be a reliable way of determining who is a competent parent and whether the parental licensing scheme can be enforced. These practical concerns leav…Read more
  • That children need to be loved is a claim that many people would find intuitive and obvious. However, some people have questioned this claimed. Psychologists have long theorized about the importance of early relationships for all aspects of children’s later development. Drawing on their theories, this chapter offers some theoretical explanations of why being loved is a fundamental condition for children to pursue a good life—that is, why children need to be loved. In addition, there is a vast ar…Read more
  • Conclusion
    In The Right to Be Loved, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.
    This chapter first considers how the right to be loved should be prioritized. It argues that even if children’s being loved is not as urgent as, for instance, being fed, it is still very urgent; that governments do not give absolute priority to whatever is most necessary for action; and that to develop institutional arrangements that can adequately provide for children’s various fundamental conditions, it is important to take into account all of their fundamental conditions, including their need…Read more
  • This chapter argues that there is a duty to adopt many of the children without adequate parents, and that we can derive this duty straightforwardly from the right of children to be loved. It first considers and rejects the Easy Rescue view, according to which those who want to have children have a duty to adopt rather than have biological children, because, among other things, the cost of adoption will not be much more than the cost of having a biological child. It then defends the Human Right v…Read more
  •  12
    Current Controversies in Bioethics (edited book)
    Routledge. 2016.
    Bioethics is the study of ethical issues arising out of advances in the life sciences and medicine. Historically, bioethics has been associated with issues in research ethics and clinical ethics as a result of research scandals such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and public debates about the definition of death, medical paternalism, health care rationing, and abortion. As biomedical technologies have advanced, challenging new questions have arisen for bioethics and new sub-disciplines such as ne…Read more
  • Human rights as fundamental conditions for a good life
    In Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao & Massimo Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
  •  32
    The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights: An Overview
    In Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao & Massimo Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 1-44. 2015.
    The introduction introduces the history of the concept of human rights and its philosophical genealogy. It raises questions of the nature of human rights, the grounds of human rights, difference between proposed and actual human rights, and scepticism surrounding the very idea of human rights. In the course of this discussion, it concludes that the diversity of positions on human rights is a sign of the intellectual, cultural, and political fertility of the notion of human rights. The chapter co…Read more
  • Scanlon’s book aims to offer us a moral theory of right and wrong and of our obligations to one another. The theory is called contractualism and its central claim is that an act is right or wrong if and only if it could or could not be justified to others on grounds that they could not reasonably reject (p. 4). Scanlon recognizes that so stated, his contractualism might seem empty in the sense that one might think that the aim of offering grounds that others could not reasonably reject is an aim…Read more
  •  30
    Limited Aggregation is the view that when there are competing moral claims that demand our attention, we should sometimes satisfy the largest aggregate of claims, depending on the strength of the claims in question. In recent years, philosophers such as Patrick Tomlin and Alastair Norcross have argued that Limited Aggregation violates a number of rational choice principles such as Transitivity, Separability, and Contraction Consistency. Current versions of Limited Aggregation are what may be cal…Read more
  •  29
    Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    "Featuring seventeen original essays on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence by some of the most prominent AI scientists and academic philosophers today, this volume represents the state-of-the-art thinking in this fast-growing field and highlights some of the central themes in AI and morality such as how to build ethics into AI, how to address mass unemployment as a result of automation, how to avoiding designing AI systems that perpetuate existing biases, and how to determine whether an AI is…Read more
  •  7
    Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (edited book)
    Oxford University Press USA. 2016.
    In the last fifteen years, there has been significant interest in studying the brain structures involved in moral judgments using novel techniques from neuroscience such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. Many people, including a number of philosophers, believe that results from neuroscience have the potential to settle seemingly intractable debates concerning the nature, practice, and reliability of moral judgments. This has led to a flurry of scientific and philosophical activities, res…Read more
  •  32
    The Right to Be Loved
    Oxford University Press USA. 2015.
    S. Matthew Liao argues here that children have a right to be loved. To do so he investigates questions such as whether children are rightholders; what grounds a child's right to beloved; whether love is an appropriate object of a right; and other philosophical and practical issues. His proposal is that all human beings have rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life; therefore, as human beings, children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. …Read more
  •  50
    A Right Response to Anti-Natalism
    Res Philosophica 100 (4): 449-471. 2023.
    Most people think that, other things being equal, you are at liberty to decide for yourself whether to have children. However, there are some people, aptly called anti-natalists, who believe that it is always morally wrong to have children. Anti-natalists are attracted to at least two types of arguments. According to the Positives Are Irrelevant Argument, unless a life contains no negative things at all, it is irrelevant that life also contains positive things. According to the Positives Are Ins…Read more
  •  9
    Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (edited book)
    Oxford University Press UK. 2015.
    What makes something a human right? What is the relationship between the moral foundations of human rights and human rights law? What are the difficulties of appealing to human rights? This book offers the first comprehensive survey of current thinking on the philosophical foundations of human rights. Divided into four parts, this book focuses firstly on the moral grounds of human rights, for example in our dignity, agency, interests or needs. Secondly, it looks at the implications that differen…Read more
  •  7
    Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems (edited book)
    with Immaculada de Melo Martin, Valentina Urbanek, David Frank, William Kabasenche, Nicholas Agar, Anders Sandberg, Rebecca Roache, Allen Thompson, Stephen Jackson, Donald S. Maier, Nicole Hassoun, Benjamin Hale, Sune Holm, and Scott Simmons
    Lexington Books. 2013.
    Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology
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    The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today
    with Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Sean Aas, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, Alex London, Wayne Sumner, and Julian Savulescu
    American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12): 10-21. 2021.
    In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and make the …Read more
  •  8
    After Prozac
    with Rebecca Roache
    In Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen & Guy Kahane (eds.), Enhancing Human Capacities, Blackwell. 2011.
    Prozac's introduction in the late 1980s, caused a furor and focused debate on the acceptability of a drug that could do more than merely cure illness, pharmacological mood enhancement – that is, the use of drugs to improve mood beyond a level that is merely normal or healthy. As the possibilities and demand for mood enhancement increase, existing legislation will prove inadequate, designed as it is to regulate pharmaceuticals mainly for therapeutic use. This chapter explains why mood enhancement…Read more
  •  15
    Issues in the pharmacological induction of emotions
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 25 (3): 178-192. 2008.
    abstract   In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that the…Read more
  •  20
    Ethics review of big data research: What should stay and what should be reformed?
    with Effy Vayena, Minerva Rivas Velarde, Mahsa Shabani, Gabrielle Samuel, Camille Nebeker, Peter Kleist, Walter Karlen, Jeff Kahn, Phoebe Friesen, Bobbie Farsides, Edward S. Dove, Alessandro Blasimme, Mark Sheehan, Marcello Ienca, and Agata Ferretti
    BMC Medical Ethics 22 (1): 1-13. 2021.
    BackgroundEthics review is the process of assessing the ethics of research involving humans. The Ethics Review Committee (ERC) is the key oversight mechanism designated to ensure ethics review. Whether or not this governance mechanism is still fit for purpose in the data-driven research context remains a debated issue among research ethics experts.Main textIn this article, we seek to address this issue in a twofold manner. First, we review the strengths and weaknesses of ERCs in ensuring ethical…Read more
  •  18
    Experiments have suggested that umbilical cord blood stem cells can be used to prevent diseases such as atherosclerosis. This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding such usage such as the uncertainty that individuals at risk of a disease will actually get the disease; issues related to research with children; safety issues; from where these stem cells would be obtained; and whether these usages should be considered as therapies or as physical enhancements.
  •  14
    The Ethics of Enhancement
    with Julian Savulescu and David Wasserman
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 25 (3): 159-161. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  45
    The ethics of using genetic engineering for sex selection
    Journal of Medical Ethics 31 (2): 116-118. 2005.
    It is quite likely that parents will soon be able to use genetic engineering to select the sex of their child by directly manipulating the sex of an embryo. Some might think that this method would be a more ethical method of sex selection than present technologies such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) because, unlike PGD, it does not need to create and destroy “wrong gendered” embryos. This paper argues that those who object to present technologies on the grounds that the embryo is a p…Read more
  •  33
    Who Is Afraid of Numbers?
    Utilitas 20 (4): 447-461. 2008.
    In recent years, many non-consequentialists such as Frances Kamm and Thomas Scanlon have been puzzling over what has come to be known as the Number Problem, which is how to show that the greater number in a rescue situation should be saved without aggregating the claims of the many, a typical kind of consequentialist move that seems to violate the separateness of persons. In this article, I argue that these non-consequentialists may be making the task more difficult than necessary, because allow…Read more
  •  36
    The right of children to be loved
    Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (4). 2006.
    A number of international organizations have claimed that children have a right to be loved, but there is a worry that this claim may just be an empty rhetoric. In this paper, I seek to show that there could be such a right by providing a justification for this right in terms of human rights, by demonstrating that love can be an appropriate object of a duty, and by proposing that biological parents should normally be made the primary bearers of this duty, while all other able persons in appropri…Read more
  •  30
    The organism view defended
    The Monist 89 (3): 334-350. 2006.
    What are you and I essentially? When do you and I come into and go out of existence? A common response is that we are essentially organisms, that is, we come into existence as organisms and go out of existence when we cease to be organisms. Jeff McMahan has put forward two arguments against the Organism View: the case of dicephalus and a special case of hemispheric commissurotomy. In this paper, I defend the Organism View against these two cases. Because it is possible to devise more McMahanian-…Read more
  •  8
    The Organism View Defended
    The Monist 89 (3): 334-350. 2006.