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472Why 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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453Attacking 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
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335Unreal friendsEthics and Information Technology 2 (4): 223-231. 2000.It has become quite common for people to develop `personal'' relationships nowadays, exclusively via extensive correspondence across the Net. Friendships, even romantic love relationships, are apparently, flourishing. But what kind of relations really are possible in this way? In this paper, we focus on the case of close friendship. There are various important markers that identify a relationship as one of close friendship. One will have, for instance, strong affection for the other, a dispositi…Read more
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269The 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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236Establishing personal identity in cases of DIDPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 143-51. 2003.In some recent criminal cases in the United States a defense has been mounted based on an affliction known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). The crux of the defense rests on the proposition that a dominant personality was incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of wrongfulness of conduct caused by an alter personality. This defense has been successful in some cases, but not others, and so philosophers, lawyers, and psychiatrists are now in…Read more
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235Identity, 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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200Delusion, dissociation and identityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (1): 31-49. 2003.The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders. We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically ext…Read more
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194Personal identity, multiple personality disorder, and moral personhoodPhilosophical Psychology 11 (1): 67-88. 1998.Marya Schechtman argues that psychological continuity accounts of personal identity, as represented by Derek Parfit's account, fail to escape the circularity objection. She claims that Parfit's deployment of quasi-memory (and other quasi-psychological) states to escape circularity implicitly commit us to an implausible view of human psychology. Schechtman suggests that what is lacking here is a coherence condition, and that this is something essential in any account of personal identity. In resp…Read more
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159Personal 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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133The unity and disunity of agencyPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (4): 308-312. 2003.Effective agency, according to contemporary Kantians, requires a unity of purpose both at a time, in order that we may eliminate conflict among our motives, and over time, because many of the things we do form part of longer-term projects and make sense only in the light of these projects and life plans. Call this the unity of agency thesis. This thesis can be regarded as a normative constraint on accounts of personal identity and indeed on accounts of what it is to have the life of a person in …Read more
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123The 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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114Mental time travel, agency and responsibilityIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2009.We have argued elsewhere that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this chapter 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 with…Read more
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103Privacy, Separation, and ControlThe Monist 91 (1): 130-150. 2008.Defining privacy is problematic because the condition of privacy appears simultaneously to require separation from others, and the possibility of choosing not to be separate. This latter feature expresses the inherent normative dimension of privacy: the capacity to control the perceptual and informational spaces surrounding one’s person. Clearly the features of separation and control as just described are in tension because one may easily enough choose to give up all barriers between oneself and…Read more
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92Truth, Lies, and the Narrative SelfAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4): 301-316. 2012.Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jes…Read more
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90Anonymity 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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67Blaming agents and excusing persons: The case of DIDPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 169-74. 2003.
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66Internet ethicsInternational Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2012.In the past sixty years computer technology has revolutionized the way information is processed, stored, distributed, and communicated. These changes have greatly affected myriad ways of life including especially the activities of government, commerce and social life broadly construed. This entry will not attempt to cover the broad sweep of ethical issues raised by information and computer technology. It will focus on those questions within computer ethics raised by the Internet.
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60Introduction: 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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53What's the buzz? Undercover marketing and the corruption of friendshipJournal of Applied Philosophy 25 (1). 2008.Undercover marketing targets potential customers by concealing the commercial nature of an apparently social transaction. In a typical case an individual approaches a marketing target apparently to provide some information or advice about a product in a way that makes it seem like they are a fellow consumer. In another kind of case, a friend displays a product to you, and encourages its purchase, but fails to disclose their association with the marketing firm. We focus on this second type of cas…Read more
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51The 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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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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43Addiction, Competence, and CoercionJournal of Philosophical Research 39 199-234. 2014.In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe …Read more
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41Pleasure and addictionFrontiers in Psychiatry 4. 2013.What is the role and value of pleasure in addiction? Foddy and Savulescu have claimed that substance use is just pleasure-oriented behavior. They describe addiction as "strong appetites toward pleasure" and argue that addicts suffer in significant part because of strong social and moral disapproval of lives dominated by pleasure seeking. But such lives, they claim, can be autonomous and rational. The view they offer is largely in line with the choice model and opposed to a disease model of addic…Read more
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40Normative agencyIn Catriona MacKenzie Kim Atkins (ed.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, Routledge. 2008.20 page
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40Identity and Information TechnologyIn Jeroen den Hoven John Weckervant (ed.), Moral Philosophy and Information Technology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 142. 2008.
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36Neuromarketing: 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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34Authenticating an Online IdentityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 12 (10): 39-41. 2012.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 39-41, October 2012