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  • Faculty, University of Birmingham
  • PhD, Australian National University, 2004.

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About me
See my website: http://www.lisabortolotti.co.uk
My works
31 items found. Sort by:
  • Lisa Bortolotti (forthcoming). Classification and Diagnosis in Psychiatry: Delusions and Confabulations. Paradigmi.
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2010). Agency, Life Extension, and the Meaning of Life. Monist 93 (1):38-56.
    Contemporary philosophers and bioethicists argue that life extension is bad for the individual. According to the agency objection to life extension, being constrained as an agent adds to the meaningfulness of human life. Life extension removes constraints, and thus it deprives life of meaning. In the paper, I concede that constrained agency contributes to the meaningfulness of human life, but reject the agency objection to life extension in its current form. Even in an extended life, decision-making remains constrained, and many (...)
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  • Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (2010). What's Wrong with 'Mental' Disorders? Psychological Medicine.
    Commentary on the editorial by D Stein et al.'s "What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V".
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  • Matthew Broome, Lisa Bortolotti & Matteo Mameli (2010). Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: A Case Study. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2 (19).
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  • Daniela Cutas & Lisa Bortolotti (2010). Natural Versus Assisted Reproduction. In Search of Fairness. Studies in Ethics, Law and Technology 4 (1).
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2009). The Epistemic Benefits of Reason Giving. Theory and Psychology 19 (5):1-22.
    There is an apparent tension in current accounts of the relationship between reason giving and self knowledge. On the one hand, philosophers like Richard Moran (2001) claim that deliberation and justification can give rise to first-person authority over the attitudes that subjects form or defend on the basis of what they take to be their best reasons. On the other hand, the psychological evidence on the introspection effects and the literature on elusive reasons suggest that engaging in explicit deliberation or (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti, Delusion. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2009). Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs. Oxford University Press.
    This is a monograph which contributes to the debate on the nature of delusions and to the literature on the conditions for belief ascription. There are numerous challenges to the view that delusions are beliefs, and many of these are due to the conviction that there needs to be a background of rationality in the behaviour of the people we ascribe beliefs to: delusions cannot be beliefs because (a) they are badly integrated with the subject’s other intentional states; (b) they (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2009). Do We Have an Obligation to Make Smarter Babies? In T. Takala, P. Herrisone-Kelly & S. Holm (eds.), Cutting Through the Surface. Philosophical Approaches to Bioethics. Rodopi.
    In this paper I consider some issues concerning cognitive enhancements and the ethics of enhancing in reproduction and parenting. I argue that there are moral reasons to enhance the cognitive capacities of the children one has, or of the children one is going to have, and that these enhancements should not be seen as an alternative to pursuing important changes in society that might also improve one’s own and one’s children’s life. It has been argued that an emphasis on enhancing (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2009). Neurophilosophy at Work • by Paul Churchland. Analysis 69 (1).
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (ed.) (2009). Philosophy and Happiness. Palgrave MacMillan.
    Philosophy and Happiness addresses the need to situate any meaningful discourse about happiness in a wider context of human interests, capacities and circumstances. How is happiness manifested and expressed? Can there be any happiness if no worthy life projects are pursued? How is happiness affected by relationships, illness, or cultural variants? Can it be reduced to preference satisfaction? Is it a temporary feeling or a persistent way of being? Is reflection conducive to happiness? Is mortality necessary for it? These are (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Matthew Broome (2009). A Role for Ownership and Authorship in the Analysis of Thought Insertion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2):205-224.
    Philosophers are interested in the phenomenon of thought insertion because it challenges the common assumption that one can ascribe to oneself the thoughts that one can access first-personally. In the standard philosophical analysis of thought insertion, the subject owns the ‘inserted’ thought but lacks a sense of agency towards it. In this paper we want to provide an alternative analysis of the condition, according to which subjects typically lack both ownership and authorship of the ‘inserted’ thoughts. We argue that by (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Rochelle Cox (2009). 'Faultless' Ignorance: Strengths and Limitations of Epistemic Definitions of Confabulation. Consciousness and Cognition.
    There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; (2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Daniela Cutas (2009). Reproductive and Parental Autonomy: An Argument for Compulsory Parental Education. Reproductive Biomedicine Online 19 (ethics suppl.):5-14.
    In this paper we argue that society should make available reliable information about parenting to everybody from an early age. The reason why parental education is important (when offered in a comprehensive and systematic way) is that it can help young people understand better the responsibilities associated with reproduction, and the skills required for parenting. This would allow them to make more informed life-choices about reproduction and parenting, and exercise their autonomy with respect to these choices. We do not believe (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Yujin Nagasawa (2009). Immortality Without Boredom. Ratio 22 (3):261-277.
    In this paper we address Bernard Williams' argument for the undesirability of immortality. Williams argues that unavoidable and pervasive boredom would characterise the immortal life of an individual with unchanging categorical desires. We resist this conclusion on the basis of the distinction between habitual and situational boredom and a psychologically realistic account of significant factors in the formation of boredom. We conclude that Williams has offered no persuasive argument for the necessity of boredom in the immortal life. 1.
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  • Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (2009). Mental Illness as Mental: A Defence of Psychological Realism. Humana.Mente 11.
    This paper argues for psychological realism in the conception of psychiatric disorders. We review the following contemporary ways of understanding the future of psychiatry: (1) psychiatric classification cannot be successfully reduced to neurobiology, and thus psychiatric disorders should not be conceived of as biological kinds; (2) psychiatric classification can be successfully reduced to neurobiology, and thus psychiatric disorders should be conceived of as biological kinds. Position (1) can lead either to instrumentalism or to eliminativism about psychiatry, depending on whether psychiatric (...)
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  • Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.) (2009). Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press.
    Neuroscience has long had an impact on the field of psychiatry, and over the last two decades, with the advent of cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging, that influence has been most pronounced. However, many question whether psychopathology can be understood by relying on neuroscience alone, and highlight some of the perceived limits to the way in which neuroscience informs psychiatry. Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience is a philosophical analysis of the role of neuroscience in the study of psychopathology. The book examines (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2008). What Does Fido Believe? Think 7 (19):7-15.
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Matthew Broome (2008). Delusional Beliefs and Reason Giving. Philosophical Psychology 21 (6):801-21.
    Philosophers have been long interested in delusional beliefs and in whether, by reporting and endorsing such beliefs, deluded subjects violate norms of rationality (Campbell 1999; Davies & Coltheart 2002; Gerrans 2001; Stone & Young 1997; Broome 2004; Bortolotti 2005). So far they have focused on identifying the relation between intentionality and rationality in order to gain a better understanding of both ordinary and delusional beliefs. In this paper Matthew Broome and I aim at drawing attention to the extent to which (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2007). Disputes Over Moral Status: Philosophy and Science in the Future of Bioethics. Health Care Analysis 15 (2):153-8.
    Various debates in bioethics have been focused on whether non-persons, such as marginal humans or non-human animals, deserve respectful treatment. It has been argued that, where we cannot agree on whether these individuals have moral status, we might agree that they have symbolic value and ascribe to them moral value in virtue of their symbolic significance. In the paper I resist the suggestion that symbolic value is relevant to ethical disputes in which the respect for individuals with no intrinsic moral (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Bert Heinrichs (2007). Delimiting the Concept of Research: An Ethical Perspective. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 28 (3).
    It is important to be able to offer an account of which activities count as scientific research, given our current interest in promoting research as a means to benefit humankind and in ethically regulating it. We attempt to offer such an account, arguing that we need to consider both the procedural and functional dimensions of an activity before we can establish whether it is a genuine instance of scientific research. By placing research in a broader schema of activities, the similarities (...)
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  • Søren Holm & Lisa Bortolotti (2007). Large Scale Surveys for Policy Formation and Research–a Study in Inconsistency. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 28 (3).
    In this paper we analyse the degree to which a distinction between social science and public health research and other non-research activities can account for differences between a number of large scale social surveys performed at the national and European level. The differences we will focus on are differences in how participation is elicited and how data are used for government, research and other purposes. We will argue that the research / non-research distinction does not account for the identified differences (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2006). Moral Rights and Human Culture. ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ETHICS NETWORK 13 (4):603-620.
    In this paper I argue that there is no moral justification for the conviction that rights should be reserved to humans. In particular, I reject James Griffin’s view on the moral relevance of the cultural dimension of humanity. Drawing from the original notion of individual right introduced in the Middle Ages and the development of this notion in the eighteenth century, I emphasise that the practice of according rights is justified by the interest in safeguarding the powers of reason and (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & John Harris (2006). Disability, Enhancement and the Harm -Benefit Continuum. In John R. Spencer & Antje Du Bois-Pedain (eds.), Freedom and Responsibility in Reproductive Choice. Hart Publishers.
    Suppose that you are soon to be a parent and you learn that there are some simple measures that you can take to make sure that your child will be healthy. In particular, suppose that by following the doctor’s advice, you can prevent your child from having a disability, you can make your child immune from a number of dangerous diseases and you can even enhance its future intelligence. All that is required for this to happen is that you (or (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & Matteo Mameli (2006). Deception in Psychology : Moral Costs and Benefits of Unsought Self-Knowledge. Accountability in Research 13:259-275.
    Is it ethical to deceive the individuals who participate in psychological experiments for methodological reasons? We argue against an absolute ban on the use of deception in psychological research. The potential benefits of many psychological experiments involving deception consist in allowing individuals and society to gain morally significant self-knowledge that they could not otherwise gain. Research participants gain individual self-knowledge which can help them improve their autonomous decision-making. The community gains collective self-knowledge that, once shared, can play a role in (...)
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  • Matteo Mameli & Lisa Bortolotti (2006). Animal Rights, Animal Minds, and Human Mindreading. Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2):84-89.
    Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of human mindreading can be improved with the help of scientific studies of animal minds. But the scientific studies by themselves do not by themselves (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2005). Delusions and the Background of Rationality. Mind and Language 20 (2):189-208.
    I argue that some cases of delusions show the inadequacy of those theories of interpretation that rely on a necessary rationality constraint on belief ascription. In particular I challenge the view that irrational beliefs can be ascribed only against a general background of rationality. Subjects affected by delusions seem to be genuine believers and their behaviour can be successfully explained in intentional terms, but they do not meet those criteria that according to Davidson (1985a) need to be met for the (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2005). Intentionality Without Rationality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (3):385-392.
    It is often taken for granted in standard theories of interpretation that there cannot be intentionality without rationality. According to the background argument, a system can be interpreted as having irrational beliefs only against a general background of rationality. Starting from the widespread assumption that delusions can be reasonably described as irrational beliefs, I argue here that the background argument fails to account for their intentional description.
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  • Lisa Bortolotti & John Harris (2005). Stem Cell Research, Personhood and Sentience. Reproductive Biomedicine Online 10:68-75.
    In this paper the permissibility of stem cell research on early human embryos is defended. It is argued that, in order to have moral status, an individual must have an interest in its own wellbeing. Sentience is a prerequisite for having an interest in avoiding pain, and personhood is a prerequisite for having an interest in the continuation of one's own existence. Early human embryos are not sentient and therefore they are not recipients of direct moral consideration. Early human embryos (...)
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2003). Inconsistency and Interpretation. Philosophical Explorations 6 (2):109-123.
    In this paper my purpose is to examine whether the case of inconsistent believers can offer a reason to object to theories of belief ascription that rely on a rationality constraint. I shall first illustrate how the possibility of inconsistent believers might be a challenge for the rationality constraint and then assess Davidson's influential reply to that challenge.
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  • Lisa Bortolotti (2002). Functions in Mind: A Theory of Intentional Content. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (3):380 – 381.
    Book Information Functions in Mind: A Theory of Intentional Content. Functions in Mind: A Theory of Intentional Content Carolyn Price Oxford Clarendon Press 2001 vi + 263 Hardback £35 By Carolyn Price. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. vi + 263. Hardback:£35.
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