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5Impairment Arguments, Interests, and CircularityJournal of Medicine and Philosophy. forthcoming.A common justification for abortion rights is that the death of the fetus does not violate any of the fetus’s time-relative interests. The time-relative interest account (TRIA) of harm and wrongdoing tells us that a necessary condition for harming someone is that his or her time-relative interests are frustrated. Regarding the justification for abortion, this account falls prey to impairment arguments. Impairment arguments entertain cases of prenatal injury, such as the mother using illicit drug…Read more
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5When Should We Not Respect a Patient’s Wish?Journal of Clinical Ethics 25 (3): 196-206. 2014.The prevailing orthodoxy for competency assessment is to test for the presence of certain abilities. This article argues that the presence of certain abilities is not enough when a patient refuses a life-sustaining/lifesaving measure that promises to work and does not present obviously onerous burdens. In such cases, we need to know whether the patient has rendered a competent refusal of such measures. Whereas the former refers us to test for certain abilities, the latter refers us to assess the…Read more
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45Book reviews (review)Sophia 42 (1): 125-126. 2003.Book Review. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/00048402.2014.929720
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7Direct Benefit, Equipoise, and Research on the Non-consentingIn Tomas Zima & David N. Weisstub (eds.), Medical Research Ethics: Challenges in the 21st Century, Springer Verlag. pp. 195-213. 2022.Research on human subjects aims to obtain knowledge of vital importance for human health and functioning. Neuroscientific research specifically is understood as oriented towards three goals: the maintenance of neurological health, the treatment of neurological diseases or syndromes, and the enhancement of neurological functioning. Most guidelines or regulations for pediatric research (whether in the U.S. or elsewhere) require that if a research intervention exposes subjects to more than minimal …Read more
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21The Dead Donor Rule Is Not Morally SufficientAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (2): 57-59. 2023.Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) argue that controlled donation after cardiac death (cDCD) protocols prescribe the extraction of organs that do not violate the dead donor rule. I argue here that e...
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32Moral Enhancement Is IrrationalActa Analytica 38 (4): 653-665. 2023.Debates on moral enhancement focus legitimate attention on the questions of whether it is possible and/or what could count as a moral enhancement given deep ethical disagreement. I argue here that moral enhancements might not even be rational to consider—from the perspective of the agent. At issue is the assessment of whether the enhancement is truly reliable. Since we assess reliable belief forming processes by their outputs, whether they are true, an agent who is entertaining a putative moral …Read more
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6Uncertain bioethics: human dignity and moral riskTaylor & Francis. 2020.Bioethics is a field of inquiry and as such is fundamentally an epistemic discipline. Knowing how we make moral judgments can bring into relief why certain arguments on various bioethical issues appear plausible to one side and obviously false to the other. Uncertain Bioethicsmakes a significant and distinctive contribution to the bioethics literature by culling the insights from contemporary moral psychology to highlight the epistemic pitfalls and distorting influences on our apprehension of va…Read more
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9The Fallacy of Relevance and Moral RisksAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (8): 80-82. 2022.Paltrow and colleagues focus on the deleterious consequences that could occur if Roe were overturned, including food and housing insecurity, loss of employment, bankruptcy, unjustified arres...
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24Deontic Fallacies and the Arguments against Conscientious ObjectionsChristian Bioethics 27 (2): 140-157. 2021.The respect for one’s conscience is rooted in a broader respect for the human person. The conscience represents a person’s ability to identify the values and goods that inform her moral identity. Ignoring or overriding a person’s conscience can lead to significant moral and emotional distress. Refusals to respect a person’s conscientious objection to cases of killing are a source of incisive distress, since judgments that it is impermissible to kill so-and-so are typically held very strongly and…Read more
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29Vulnerable EmbryosAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4): 781-810. 2010.Contemporary philosophical discussion on human embryonic stem cell research has focused primarily on the metaphysical and meta-ethical issues suchresearch raises. Though these discussions are interesting, largely ignored are arguments rooted in the secular research ethics tradition already informing humansubject research. This tradition countenances the notion of vulnerability and that vulnerable human subjects (of which human embryos are likely members)ought to be protected from research-relate…Read more
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4The Perspective of the Acting Person: Essays in the Renewal of Thomistic Moral Philosophy by Martin RhonheimerThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9 (4): 802-805. 2009.
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30Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research edited by William R. LaFleur, Gernot Böhme, and Susumu ShimazonoThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 8 (4): 804-807. 2008.
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21Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics by Neil C. Manson and Onora O’NeillThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9 (3): 610-613. 2009.
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24Is rowe committed to an expanded version of theism?Sophia 41 (2): 31-40. 2002.I argue in this paper two theses. First, I argue that the internal consistency of the argument from evil demands that it take into account some form of EST. Thus, there is no ground for the atheist to chide the theist when the theist appeals to an expanded version of theism. Second, I show that it isprima facie probable that RST does in fact ential EST. I show this by capitalizing on the distinction between what is contained in a concept and what is entailed by a concept. What a term or concept …Read more
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261Persons, Moral Worth, and Embryos: A Critical Analysis of Pro-Choice Arguments (edited book)Springer. 2011.Given the issues discussed and that the arguments in critical focus are fairly new, the collection provides a novel, comprehensive, and rigorous analysis of contemporary pro-choice arguments.”.
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50A Regulatory Argument Against Human Embryonic Stem Cell ResearchJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (5): 496-508. 2009.This article explores the plausibility of an argument against embryonic stem cell research based on what the regulations already say about research on pregnant women and fetuses. The center of the argument is the notion of vulnerability and whether such a concept is applicable to human embryos. It is argued that such an argument can be made plausible. The article concludes by responding to several important objections.
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12St. Ambrose, Euthanasia, and Antisenescence ArgumentsLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 17 (2): 39-57. 2014.
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37Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Research with Human Subjects, edited by James F. Childress, Eric M. Meslin, and Harold T. Shapiro (review)The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 7 (4): 838-841. 2007.
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44Twinning, Identity, and Moral StatusAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (1): 42-43. 2013.No abstract
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33Out of the Frying Pan and Into the FireAmerican Journal of Bioethics 11 (8): 60-61. 2011.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 60-61, August 2011.
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41The Dead Donor Rule and Means-End ReasoningCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 21 (1): 134-140. 2012.
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87Challenging research on human subjects: justice and uncompensated harmsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 34 (1): 29-51. 2013.Ethical challenges to certain aspects of research on human subjects are not uncommon; examples include challenges to first-in-human trials (Chapman in J Clin Res Bioethics 2(4):1–8, 2011), certain placebo controlled trials (Anderson in J Med Philos 31:65–81, 2006; Anderson and Kimmelman in Kennedy Inst Ethics J 20(1):75–98, 2010) and “sham” surgery (Macklin in N Engl J Med 341:992–996, 1999). To date, however, there are few challenges to research when the subjects are competent and the research …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Applied Ethics |