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10Mental Timetravel, Agency and ResponsibilityIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.We have argued elsewhere (2002) that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this paper we explore the importance of mental time travel – our ordinary ability to mentally travel to temporal locations outside the present, involving both memory of our personal past and the ability to imagine ourselves in the future – to our agential capacities for planning and control. We suggest that in many individuals…Read more
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36Truthfulness and Sense-Making: Two Modes of Respect for AgencyJournal of Philosophy 121 (2): 61-88. 2024.According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making is somethin…Read more
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292The Relational Care Framework: Promoting Continuity or Maintenance of Selfhood in Person-Centered CareJournal of Medicine and Philosophy (1): 85-101. 2023.We argue that contemporary conceptualizations of “persons” have failed to achieve the moral goals of “person-centred care” (PCC, a model of dementia care developed by Tom Kitwood) and that they are detrimental to those receiving care, their families, and practitioners of care. We draw a distinction between personhood and selfhood, pointing out that continuity or maintenance of the latter is what is really at stake in dementia care. We then demonstrate how our conceptualization, which is one that…Read more
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2Sailing, Flow, and FulfillmentIn Patrick Goold & Fritz Allhoff (eds.), Sailing – Philosophy for Everyone, Blackwell. 2012-07-01.This chapter contains sections titled: The Key: Losing Oneself Windsurfing Performance, Psychology, and Embedded Cognition Windsurfing and Flow.
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31A Hybrid Theory of EnvironmentalismEssays in Philosophy 3 (1): 22-37. 2002.The destruction and pollution of the natural environment poses two problems for philosophers. The first is political and pragmatic: which theory of the environment is best equipped to impact policymakers heading as we are toward a series of potential ecocatastrophes? The second is more central: On the environment philosophers tend to fall either side of an irreconcilable divide. Either our moral concerns are grounded directly in nature, or the appeal is made via an anthropocentric set of interes…Read more
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5Dignity and exclusionJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (12): 974-974. 2022.Soofi1 aims to develop an account of dignity in dementia care based on Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. He does this by drawing on the Kitwood and Bredin2 list of well-being indicators, in order to fill out her account of human flourishing to cover aspects such as practical reasoning that appear beyond the reach of those with relatively severe dementia. As Soofi points out, Nussbaum’s claim that such lost abilities can be compensated through guardianship measures is implausible. He asserts in r…Read more
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25Respecting Agency in Dementia Care: When Should Truthfulness Give Way?Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1): 117-131. 2021.Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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25The Impact of Dementia on the Self: Do We Consider Ourselves the Same as Others?Neuroethics 14 (3): 281-294. 2021.The decline in autobiographical memory function in people with Alzheimer’s dementia has been argued to cause a loss of self-identity. Prior research suggests that people perceive changes in moral traits and loss of memories with a “social-moral core” as most impactful to the maintenance of identity. However, such research has so far asked people to rate from a third-person perspective, considering the extent to which hypothetical others maintain their identity in the face of various impairments.…Read more
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478Why should HCWs receive priority access to vaccines in a pandemic?BMC Medical Ethics 22 (1): 1-9. 2021.BackgroundViral pandemics present a range of ethical challenges for policy makers, not the least among which are difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce healthcare resources. One important question is whether healthcare workers should receive priority access to a vaccine in the event that an effective vaccine becomes available. This question is especially relevant in the coronavirus pandemic with governments and health authorities currently facing questions of distribution of COVID-19 v…Read more
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21Moral Self-Orientation in Alzheimer's DementiaKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30 (2): 141-166. 2020.It is ordinarily thought that in Alzheimer's dementia, memory loss leads to a loss of the self. There is a familiar sense in which this is true given that there is, evidently, a close connection between episodic memory and personal identity. This view goes back to John Locke who argued that remembering our own experiences enabled the continuity of consciousness he thought constitutive of personal identity. Locke was also motivated by the idea—to be applied in "forensic" contexts—that continuity …Read more
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53The Significance of HabitNew Content is Available for Journal of Moral Philosophy. forthcoming._ Source: _Page Count 22 Analysis of the concept of habit has been relatively neglected in the contemporary analytic literature. This paper is an attempt to rectify this lack. The strategy begins with a description of some paradigm cases of habit which are used to derive five features as the basis for an explicative definition. It is argued that habits are social, acquired through repetition, enduring, environmentally activated, and automatic. The enduring nature of habits is captured by their b…Read more
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35Addiction and Moralization: the Role of the Underlying Model of AddictionNeuroethics 10 (1): 129-139. 2017.Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-di…Read more
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129The Significance of HabitJournal of Moral Philosophy 14 (3): 394-415. 2017._ Source: _Page Count 22 Analysis of the concept of habit has been relatively neglected in the contemporary analytic literature. This paper is an attempt to rectify this lack. The strategy begins with a description of some paradigm cases of habit which are used to derive five features as the basis for an explicative definition. It is argued that habits are social, acquired through repetition, enduring, environmentally activated, and automatic. The enduring nature of habits is captured by their b…Read more
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45Stigma and Self-Stigma in AddictionJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 14 (2): 275-286. 2017.Addictions are commonly accompanied by a sense of shame or self-stigmatization. Self-stigmatization results from public stigmatization in a process leading to the internalization of the social opprobrium attaching to the negative stereotypes associated with addiction. We offer an account of how this process works in terms of a range of looping effects, and this leads to our main claim that for a significant range of cases public stigma figures in the social construction of addiction. This rests …Read more
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62Introduction: Testing and Refining Marc Lewis’s Critique of the Brain Disease Model of AddictionNeuroethics 10 (1): 1-6. 2017.In this introduction we set out some salient themes that will help structure understanding of a complex set of intersecting issues discussed in this special issue on the work of Marc Lewis: conceptual foundations of the disease model, tolerating the disease model given socio-political environments, and A third wave: refining conceptualization of addiction in the light of Lewis’s model.
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9A History of Philosophy of Mind in AustralasiaIn Graham Oppy N. N. Trakakis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Monash University Publishing. 2010.
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16The moral goal of treatment in cases of dual diagnosisIn John Kleinig & Stanley Einstein (eds.), Ethical challenges for intervening in drug use: policy, research and treatment issues, Oicj. pp. 409-36. 2006.Substance use and misuse occurs at a very high rate among people with mental health problems and the relationship between the two conditions is complex. In this paper we argue that treatment of substance use in dual diagnosis clients must begin from an understanding of the losses suffered by those with mental illness. We outline the fundamental condition of effective agency, unified agency, which is disrupted in mental illness and show how this is needed to secure access to central social and mo…Read more
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7The Imprudence of the VulnerableEthical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4): 791-805. 2014.Significant numbers of people believe that victims of violent crime are blameworthy in so far as they imprudently place themselves in dangerous situations. This belief is maintained and fuelled by ongoing social commentary. In this paper I describe a recent violent criminal case, as a foil against which I attempt to extract and refine the argument based on prudence that seems to support this belief. I then offer a moral critique of what goes wrong when this argument, continually repeated as soci…Read more
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39Neuromarketing: what is it, and is it a threat to privacy?In Jens Clausen Neil Levy (ed.), Handbook on Neuroethics, Springer. pp. 1627-1645. 2014.This entry has two general aims. The first is to profile the practices of neuromarketing (both current and hypothetical), and the second is to identify what is ethically troubling about these practices. It will be claimed that neuromarketing does not really present novel ethical challenges, and that marketers are simply continuing to do what they have always done, only now they have at their disposal the tools of neuroscience which they have duly recruited. What will be presupposed is a principl…Read more
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33Dementia and the Power of Music TherapyBioethics 29 (8): 573-579. 2015.Dementia is now a leading cause of both mortality and morbidity, particularly in western nations, and current projections for rates of dementia suggest this will worsen. More than ever, cost effective and creative non-pharmacological therapies are needed to ensure we have an adequate system of care and supervision. Music therapy is one such measure, yet to date statements of what music therapy is supposed to bring about in ethical terms have been limited to fairly vague and under-developed claim…Read more
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9Anonymity and the Social SelfAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 47 (4). 2010.We will analyze the concept of anonymity, along with cognate notions, and their relation to privacy, with a view to developing an understanding of how we control our identity in public and why such control is important in developing and maintaining our social selves. We will take anonymity to be representative of a suite of techniques of nonidentifiability that persons use to manage and protect their privacy. At the core of these techniques is the aim of being untrackable; this means that others…Read more
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238Identity, control and responsibility: The case of Dissociative Identity DisorderPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 509-526. 2002.Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the pers…Read more
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12Personal Identity, the Causal Condition, and the Simple ViewPhilosophical Papers 39 (2): 183-208. 2010.Among theories of personal identity over time the simple view has not been popular among philosophers, but it nevertheless remains the default view among non philosophers. It may be construed either as the view that nothing grounds a claim of personal identity over time, or that something quite simple (a soul perhaps) is the ground. If the former construal is accepted, a conspicuous difficulty is that the condition of causal dependence between person-stages is absent. But this leaves such a view…Read more
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465Attacking authorityAustralian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 13 (2): 59-70. 2011.The quality of our public discourse – think of the climate change debate for instance – is never very high. A day spent observing it reveals a litany of misrepresentation and error, argumentative fallacy, and a general lack of good will. In this paper I focus on a microcosmic aspect of these practices: the use of two types of argument – the argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority – and a way in which they are related. Public debate is so contaminated by the misuse of the ad hominem tactic …Read more