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8788Good-for-nothingsProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 85 (2): 47-64. 2010.Many academic works as well as many works of art are such that if they had never been produced, no one would be worse off. Yet it is hard to resist the judgment that some such works are good nonetheless. We are rightly grateful that these works were created; we rightly admire them, appreciate them, and take pains to preserve them. And the authors and artists who produced them have reason to be proud. This should lead us to question the view that in order for a thing to be good, in a sense wh…Read more
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2678Sanity and the Metaphysics of ResponsibilityIn Ferdinand David Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 46-62. 1987.My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have create…Read more
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1636Confronting physician assisted suicide and euthanasia: My father's deathHastings Center Report 38 (5). 2008.
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1518Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good LifeSocial Philosophy and Policy 14 (1): 207. 1997.The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one'…Read more
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516Meaningfulness: A Third Dimension of the Good LifeFoundations of Science 21 (2): 253-269. 2016.This paper argues that an adequate conception of a good life should recognize, in addition to happiness and morality, a third dimension of meaningfulness. It further proposes that we understand meaningfulness as involving both a subjective and an objective condition, suitably linked. Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. In other words one’s life is meaningful insofar as one is gripped or excited by things worthy of one’s love, and one is able to do something …Read more
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503Freedom Within ReasonOup Usa. 1990.In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what it is. The fre…Read more
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376Meaning and moralityProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (3). 1997.Susan Wolf; XV*—Meaning and Morality1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 97, Issue 1, 1 June 1997, Pages 299–316, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-926.
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351Moral psychology and the unity of the virtuesRatio 20 (2). 2007.The ancient Greeks subscribed to the thesis of the Unity of Virtue, according to which the possession of one virtue is closely related to the possession of all the others. Yet empirical observation seems to contradict this thesis at every turn. What could the Greeks have been thinking of? The paper offers an interpretation and a tentative defence of a qualified version of the thesis. It argues that, as the Greeks recognized, virtue essentially involves knowledge ? specifically, evaluative knowle…Read more
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305Responsibility, Moral and OtherwiseInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (2): 127-142. 2015.Philosophers frequently distinguish between causal responsibility and moral responsibility, but that distinction is either ambiguous or confused. We can distinguish between causal responsibility and a deeper kind of responsibility, that licenses reactive attitudes and judgments that a merely causal connection would not, and we can distinguish between holding people accountable for their moral qualities and holding people accountable for their nonmoral qualities. But, because we sometimes hold pe…Read more
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290Multiculturalism: Expanded Paperback EditionPrinceton University Press. 1994.A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding ...
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270'One Thought Too Many': Love, Morality, and the Ordering ofIn Ulrike Heuer & Gerald Lang (eds.), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes From the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 71. 2012.
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269Character and ResponsibilityJournal of Philosophy 112 (7): 356-372. 2015.Many philosophers have been persuaded that if we don’t create our own characters, we cannot be responsible for acts that flow from our characters; they also raise doubts about whether acts that do not flow from our characters can fairly be attributed to us. Both these concerns, however, reflect a simplistic and implausible conception of character and of its relation to our actions and our selves. I suggest a different relationship between character and responsibility: We can be responsible for a…Read more
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236Happiness and meaning: Two aspects of the good lifeSocial Philosophy and Policy 14 (1): 207-225. 1997.The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one'…Read more
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154Meaning in Life: Meeting the ChallengesFoundations of Science 21 (2): 279-282. 2016.Responding to comments by Cheshire Calhoun and Arnold Burms, this piece clarifies some of Wolf’s ideas about the relation between meaningfulness in life, on the one hand, and reasons of love, fulfillment, and objective value, on the other. Meaning tends to come from activities whose reasons are grounded in love of a worthy object, and not necessarily from reasons having anything to do with an interest in meaningfulness itself. But what counts as a worthy object cannot be determined either from a…Read more
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154Morality and the View from HereThe Journal of Ethics 3 (3): 203-223. 1999.According to one influential conception of morality, being moral is a matter of acting from or in accordance with a moral point of view, a point of view which is arrived at by abstracting from a more natural, pre-ethical, personal point of view, and recognizing that each person''s personal point of view has equal standing. The idea that, were it not for morality, rational persons would act from their respectively personal points of view is, however, simplistic and misleading. Because our nonmora…Read more
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129Deconstructing welfare: Reflections on Stephen Darwall's welfare and rational careUtilitas 18 (4): 415-426. 2006.In his book Welfare and Rational Care, Stephen Darwall proposes to give an account of human welfare. Or rather, he offers two accounts, a metaethical and a normative account. The two accounts, he suggests, are somewhat supportive of each other though they are logically independent
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122The Deflation of Moral Philosophy:Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Bernard WilliamsEthics 97 (4): 821-. 1987.
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110The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and LoveOxford University Press. 2014.For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love."
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106The Moral of Moral LuckPhilosophic Exchange 31 (1). 2001.This essay is primarily concerned with one type of moral luck – luck in how things turn out. Do acts that actually lead to harm deserve the same treatment as similar acts that, by chance, do not lead to harm? This paper argues that we must recognize the truth in two, opposing tendencies in such cases.
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102Meaning in Life and Why It MattersPrinceton University Press. 2010.Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these actions that give meaning to ou…Read more
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92Neurolaw: The big questionAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (1). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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84Managing Incidental Findings in Human Subjects Research: Analysis and RecommendationsJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 36 (2): 219-248. 2008.No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researche…Read more
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84Recommendations for Nanomedicine Human Subjects Research Oversight: An Evolutionary Approach for an Emerging FieldJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 716-750. 2012.Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and c…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Normative Ethics |