In the course of developing his arguments against making genetic enhancements to one's children, Habermas assumes that a clear line can be drawn between the natural and the manufactured. But given the current state of medical science, this is precisely what we can no longer take for granted.

Citing grounds of conscience, pharmacists are increasingly refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception, or the "morning-after pill." Whether correctly or not, these pharmacists believe that emergency contraception either constitutes the destruction of post-conception human life, or poses a significant risk of such destruction. We argue that the liberty of conscientious refusal grounds a strong moral claim, one that cannot be defeated solely by consideration of the interests of those seeking medication. We examine, and find lacking, five arguments for requiring (...) pharmacists to fill prescriptions. However, we argue that in their professional context, pharmacists benefit from liberty restrictions on those seeking medication. What would otherwise amount to very strong claims can be defeated if they rest on some prior restriction of the liberty of others. We conclude that the issue of what policy should require pharmacists to do must be settled by way of a theory of second best. Asking "What is second best?" rather than "What is best?" offers a way to navigate the liberty restrictions that may be fixed obstacles to optimality. (shrink)

The call has been made for global bioethics. In an age of pandemics, international drug trials, and genetic technology, health has gone global, and bioethics must follow suit. George Annas is one among a number of thinkers to recommend that bioethics expand beyond its traditional domain of patient–physician interactions to encompass a broader range of health-related matters. Medicine, Annas argues, must “develop a global language and a global strategy that can help to improve the health of all of the world's (...) citizens.” Individual countries cannot address global health issues, and culturally specific principles are inadequate for addressing global bioethics concerns. We will need a language and moral framework grounded in a foundation of universally shared, transcultural judgments about humankind that will also recognize moral pluralism. The claim has been made that such a foundation already exists in human rights, and that human rights should, therefore, be the new lingua franca of bioethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genetic enhancement is the modification of the human genome for the purpose of improving capacities or ‘adding in’ desired characteristics. Although this technology is still largely futuristic, debate over the moral issues it raises has been significant. George Annas has recently leveled a new attack against genetic enhancement, drawing on human rights as his primary weapon. I argue that Annas’ appeal to human rights ultimately falls flat, and so provides no good reason to object to genetic technology. Moreover, this (...) argument is an example of the broader problem of appealing to human rights as a panacea for ethical problems. Human rights, it is often claimed, are ‘trumps’: if it can be shown that a proposed technology violates human rights, then it must be cast aside. But human rights are neither a panacea for ethical problems nor a trump card. If they are drafted into the service of an argument, it must be shown that an actual human rights violation will occur. Annas’ argument against genetic technology fails to do just this. I shall conclude that his appeal to human rights adds little to the debate over the ethical questions raised by genetic technology. (shrink)

The circumstances of a public health emergency shape reasoning and decision-making in ways that deviate from routine circumstances, where adherence to established values, principles, and methodologies is expected. Understanding what drives these deviations is critical to assessing their ethical consequences. In this paper we describe four conditions that influence decision-making during PHEs, in particular regarding the deployment and conduct of research on experimental or novel biomedical interventions. These four conditions are politicization, urgency, uncertainty, and fear. We argue that taken together (...) these four conditions create pressure to address the most visible targets of immediate crisis events, driving emphasis on research and development of biomedical interventions. However, this emphasis raises ethical concerns regarding the extent to which attention to and investment in the underlying causes of PHEs, particularly impoverished global public health infrastructure, is diminished as a result. (shrink)

Genetic enhancement is the modification of the human genome for the purpose of improving capacities or ‘adding in’ desired characteristics. Although this technology is still largely futuristic, debate over the moral issues it raises has been significant. George Annas has recently leveled a new attack against genetic enhancement, drawing on human rights as his primary weapon. I argue that Annas’ appeal to human rights ultimately falls flat, and so provides no good reason to object to genetic technology. Moreover, this argument (...) is an example of the broader problem of appealing to human rights as a panacea for ethical problems. Human rights, it is often claimed, are ‘trumps’: if it can be shown that a proposed technology violates human rights, then it must be cast aside. But human rights are neither a panacea for ethical problems nor a trump card. If they are drafted into the service of an argument, it must be shown that an actual human rights violation will occur. Annas’ argument against genetic technology fails to do just this. I shall conclude that his appeal to human rights adds little to the debate over the ethical questions raised by genetic technology. (shrink)

In ‘Obesity, equity and choice’, Timothy Wilkinson argues that preventive regulations to address obesity, such as taxes on sugary drinks, are at worst inequitable and at best fail to increase or improve equity. He concludes that we do not yet have good reasons to adopt them. I argue that equity considerations are not as problematic for preventive regulations as Wilkinson suggests.

It is clear from George Annas's response to our arguments that he has misunderstood and misrepresented our positions on several key points. We suspect that this may be due in part to significant differences between our respective agendas and points of view, so we begin this exchange with an exploration of these differences.

There are many good reasons for a merger between bioethics and human rights. First, though, significant philosophical groundwork must be done to clarify what a human right to health would be and—if we accept that it exists—exactly how it might influence the practical decisions we face about who gets what in very different contexts.

Health worker shortages in many countries are reaching crisis levels, exacerbated by factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In New Zealand, the medical specialists union has called for a health workforce emergency to be declared, yet at the same time, many foreign-trained healthcare workers are unable to stay in the country or unable to work. While their health systems differ, countries such as New Zealand, the USA and the UK at least partially rely on international medical graduates (IMGs) to ensure (...) access to health services, particularly in underserved communities. This paper focuses on the challenges faced by many IMGs, particularly those that constrain their capacity to live and work in the countries that rely on their skills. These challenges give rise to two ethical problems. First, they represent a failure of reciprocity towards IMGs; second, they represent a source of harm, both to IMGs themselves and to communities whose healthcare service depends on contributions made by IMGs. We argue that brain waste and disvaluing the contributions of IMGs and other foreign-trained health professionals have significant costs for maintaining a functional healthcare system, costs which must be adequately recognised and counted. (shrink)

There are many good reasons for a merger between bioethics and human rights. First, though, significant philosophical groundwork must be done to clarify what a human right to health would be and—if we accept that it exists—exactly how it might influence the practical decisions we face about who gets what in very different contexts.

The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics. The volume orients the reader in a changing landscape shaped by globalization, health disparities, and rapidly advancing technologies. Bioethics has begun a turn toward a systematic concern with social justice, population health, and public policy. While also covering more traditional topics, this volume fully captures this recent shift and foreshadows the resulting developments in bioethics. It highlights emerging issues such as climate (...) change, transgender, and medical tourism, and re-examines enduring topics, such as autonomy, end-of-life care, and resource allocation. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics. The volume orients the reader in a changing landscape shaped by globalization, health disparities, and rapidly advancing technologies. Bioethics has begun a turn toward a systematic concern with social justice, population health, and public policy. While also covering more traditional topics, this volume fully captures this recent shift and foreshadows the resulting developments in bioethics. It highlights emerging issues such as climate (...) change, transgender, and medical tourism, and re-examines enduring topics, such as autonomy, end-of-life care, and resource allocation. (shrink)

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely criticized for being too delayed and indecisive. As a result, the precautionary principle has been endorsed, applauded, and proposed to guide future responses to global public health emergencies. Drawing from controversial issues in response to COVID-19, especially in Vietnam, this paper critically discusses some key ethical and legal issues of employing the precautionary principle in public health emergencies. Engaging with discussions concerning this principle, especially in environmental law where the precautionary principle first (...) appeared as a guiding principle with objective content(s), this paper formulates the precautionary principle as ‘in dubio pro salus’, which is about advising, justifying and demanding states to proactively prepare for scenarios arising out of any public health emergency. It distinguishes the precautionary principle into moderate and hard versions. A moderate version largely takes a holistic approach and fulfils a series of criteria specified in this paper, while a hard version either permits restrictive measures to be deployed primarily on a hypothetic basis or expresses an instrumental mentality. The hard version should be rejected because of the ethical and legal problems it raises, including risk-risk tradeoffs, internal paradoxes, unjustified causing of fear and unreasonable presupposition. Ultimately, this paper defends the moderate version. (shrink)

Elizabeth Fenton has criticised an earlier article by the authors in which the claim was made that, by providing humankind with means of causing its destruction, the advance of science and technology has put it in a perilous condition that might take the development of genetic or biomedical techniques of moral enhancement to get out of. The development of these techniques would, however, require further scientific advances, thus forcing humanity deeper into the danger zone created by modern science. (...) Fenton argues that the benefits of scientific advances are undervalued. The authors believe that the argument rather relies upon attaching a special weight to even very slight risks of major catastrophes, and attempt to vindicate this weighting. (shrink)

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

We investigate whether standard counterfactual analyses of causation imply that the outcomes of space-like separated measurements on entangled particles are causally related. Although it has sometimes been claimed that standard CACs imply such a causal relation, we argue that a careful examination of David Lewis’s influential counterfactual semantics casts doubt on this. We discuss ways in which Lewis’s semantics and standard CACs might be extended to the case of space-like correlations.

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant (...) knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits aren’t available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or ‘wager on’, God. This article distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite (...) vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, we’ll turn to the epistemic-pragmatic distinction, and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, we’ll cover outstanding objections and responses. (shrink)

Recent defenses of same-sex marriage and polygamy have invoked the liberal doctrines of neutrality and public reason. Such reasoning is generally sound but does not go far enough. This paper traces the full implications of political liberalism for marriage. I argue that the constraints of public reason, applied to marriage law, entail ‘minimal marriage’, the most extensive set of state-determined restrictions on marriage compatible with political liberalism. Minimal marriage sets no principled restrictions on the sex or number of spouses and (...) the nature and purpose of their caring relationships, nor on which marital rights are exchanged, and whether they are exchanged reciprocally or asymmetrically. Minimal marriage supports adult care networks, urban tribes, friendships, and other forms of relationships as well as ‘traditional’ marriages. I provide a publically justifiable rationale for a legal framework supporting non-dependent caring relationships between adults. The argument is that caring relationships are primary goods, and that liberal justice accordingly requires legal frameworks supporting caring relationships. Minimal marriage is one such framework. (shrink)

This edited volume represents a unique addition to the available literature on animal ethics, animal studies, and neuroethics. Its goal is to expand discussions on animal ethics and neuroethics by weaving together different threads: philosophy of mind and animal minds, neuroscientific study of animal minds, and animal ethics. Neuroethical questions concerning animals’ moral status, animal minds and consciousness, animal pain, and the adequacy of animal models for neuropsychiatric disease have long been topics of debate in philosophy and ethics, and more (...) recently also in neuroscientific research. The book presents a transdisciplinary blend of voices, underscoring different perspectives on the broad questions of how neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of nonhuman minds, and on debates over the moral status of nonhuman animals. All chapters were written by outstanding scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, animal behavior, biology, neuroethics, and bioethics, and cover a range of issues and species/taxa. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scientists and students interested in the debate on animal ethics, while also offering an important resource for future researchers. Chapter 13 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

A new resolution of the mind-body problem that reconciles materialism and idealism.

Bayesian models of legal arguments generally aim to produce a single integrated model, combining each of the legal arguments under consideration. This combined approach implicitly assumes that variables and their relationships can be represented without any contradiction or misalignment, and in a way that makes sense with respect to the competing argument narratives. This paper describes a novel approach to compare and ‘average’ Bayesian models of legal arguments that have been built independently and with no attempt to make them consistent (...) in terms of variables, causal assumptions or parameterization. The approach involves assessing whether competing models of legal arguments are explained or predict facts uncovered before or during the trial process. Those models that are more heavily disconfirmed by the facts are given lower weight, as model plausibility measures, in the Bayesian model comparison and averaging framework adopted. In this way a plurality of arguments is allowed yet a single judgement based on all arguments is possible and rational. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

(2013). Legal idioms: a framework for evidential reasoning. Argument & Computation: Vol. 4, Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology, pp. 46-63. doi: 10.1080/19462166.2012.682656.

This chapter defends the account of metaphysical indeterminacy of Barnes and Williams against Eklund's objections.

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the permissivism literature, presuppose that people who (...) disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

This paper argues that many ethical issues in neuroeducational research cannot be appropriately addressed using the principles and guidance available in one of these areas alone, or by applying these in simple combination. Instead, interdisciplinary and public dialogue will be required to develop appropriate normative principles. In developing this argument, it examines neuroscientific and educational perspectives within three broad categories of ethical issue arising at the interface of cognitive neuroscience and education: issues regarding the carrying out of interdisciplinary research, the (...) scrutiny and communication of findings and concepts, and the application of research and associated issues of policy likely to arise in the future. To help highlight the need for interdisciplinary and public discussion, we also report the opinions of a group of educators (comprising trainee teachers, teachers and head teachers) on the neuroeducational ethics of cognitive enhancing drugs, infant screening, genetic profiling and animal research. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Rosen's Argument Objections to Rosen's Argument The Significance of the Narrower Conclusion My Proposed View Objections to the Proposed View Understanding My Disagreement with Rosen Conclusion.

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, (...) emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)