• There is an emerging consensus within Natural Law that explains transgender identity as an “embodied misunderstanding.” The basic line of argument is that our sexual identity as male or female refers to our possible reproductive roles of begetting or conceiving. Since these two possibilities are determined early on by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, our sexual identity cannot be changed or reassigned. I develop an argument from analogy, comparing gender and language, to show that this…Read more
  • Lopsided Lives
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 275-296. 2017.
    Intuitively there are many different things that non-derivatively contribute to well-being: pleasure, desire satisfaction, knowledge, friendship, love, rationality, freedom, moral virtue, and appreciation of true beauty. According to pluralism, at least two different types of things non-derivatively contribute to well-being. Lopsided lives score very low in terms of some types of things that putatively non-derivatively contribute to well-being, but very high in terms of other such types of thing…Read more
  • Doing Away with Harm
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2): 390-412. 2012.
  • Doing Away with Harm
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2): 390-412. 2012.
    I argue that extant accounts of harm all fail to account for important desiderata, and that we should therefore jettison the concept when doing moral philosophy.
  • Well-being and death
    Oxford University Press. 2009.
    Well-Being and Death addresses philosophical questions about death and the good life: what makes a life go well? Is death bad for the one who dies? How is this possible if we go out of existence when we die? Is it worse to die as an infant or as a young adult? Is it bad for animals and fetuses to die? Can the dead be harmed? Is there any way to make death less bad for us? Ben Bradley defends the following views: pleasure, rather than achievement or the satisfaction of desire, is what makes life …Read more
  • Introduction: "meaning in life and death : our stories" -- John Martin Fischer and Anthony B rueckner, "Why is death bad?", Philosophical studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (September 1986) -- "Death, badness, and the impossibility of experience," Journal of ethics -- John Martin Fischer and Daniel Speak, "Death and the psychological conception of personal identity," Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 24 -- "Earlier birth and later death : symmetry through thick and thin," Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel,…Read more
  • Desire satisfaction, death, and time
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (6): 799-819. 2017.
    Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or h…Read more