11 found
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  1.  64
    Against the strengthened impairment argument: never-born fetuses have no FLO to deprive.Alex R. Gillham - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics (12):1-4.
    In order for the so-called strengthened impairment argument to succeed, it must posit some reason R that causing fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, one that also holds in cases of abortion. In formulating SIA, Blackshaw and Hendricks borrow from Don Marquis to claim that the reason R that causing FAS is immoral lies in the fact that it deprives an organism of a future like ours. I argue here that SIA fails to show that it is immoral to cause FAS (...)
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  2.  35
    Abortion, Impairment, and Well-Being.Alex R. Gillham - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (6):541-550.
    Hendricks’ The Impairment Argument (TIA) claims that it is immoral to impair a fetus by causing it to have fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Since aborting a fetus impairs it to a greater degree than causing it to have FAS, then abortion is also immoral. In this article, I argue that TIA ought to be rejected. This is because TIA can only succeed if it explains why causing an organism to have FAS impairs it to a morally objectionable degree, entails that (...)
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  3.  26
    The impairment argument, ethics of abortion, and nature of impairing to the n + 1 degree.Alex R. Gillham - 2023 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (2):215-224.
    I argue here that the impairment principle requires clarification. It needs to explain what makes one impairment greater than another, otherwise we will be unable to make the comparisons it requires, the ones that enable us to determine whether b really is a greater impairment than a, and as a result, whether causing b is immoral because causing a is. I then develop two of what I think are the most natural accounts of what might make one impairment greater than (...)
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  4. How Problematic is an Unpopulated Hell?Alex R. Gillham - 2020 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 25 (1):107-121.
    The Problem of Suffering (PoS) claims that there is a tension between the existence of a perfect God and suffering. The Problem of Hell (PoH) is a version of PoS which claims that a perfect God would lack morally sufficient reasons to allow individuals to be eternally damned to Hell. A few traditional solutions have been developed to PoH, but each of them is problematic. As such, if there is a solu­tion to PoH that is resistant to these problems, then (...)
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  5.  19
    Classifying the Epicurean Goods.Alex R. Gillham - 2021 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 77 (1):47-70.
    Scholars have paid little attention to the classifications among goods that Epicureans posit. This paper remedies that deficiency. I argue for three claims. First, if we take instrumental goods to be those that are a means or causally lead to the intrinsic good and we take constitutive goods to be those that are part of or amount to the intrinsic good, then the Epicureans probably took reverence for a wise man and wisdom to be instrumental goods but self-sufficiency and phronesis (...)
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  6.  18
    The pregnancy rescue case versus typical abortion.Alex R. Gillham - 2024 - Bioethics 38 (9):803-810.
    Hendricks' pregnancy rescue case (PRC) tries to show that abortion is typically morally wrong. I argue here that there are at least two morally relevant differences between the abortion in PRC and the typical abortion so that the latter isn't morally wrong even if the former is morally wrong. I develop five modifications to PRC to show that these two differences are morally important. First, in PRC we don't know whether the person gives informed consent to the abortion, nor does (...)
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  7. Religious Experience, Pragmatic Encroachment, and Justified Belief in God.Alex R. Gillham - 2020 - Open Theology 1 (6):296-305.
    The secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold problem for evidentialism and explain pragmatic encroachment (PE) as a solution to it. Second, I argue that religious experience can justify (...)
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  8. Threats, Coercion, and Willingness to Damn: Three More Objections against the Unpopulated Hell View.Alex R. Gillham - 2020 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 25 (2):235-254.
    In this paper, I develop and evaluate three new objections to the Unpopulated Hell View (UHV). First, I consider whether UHV is false because it presupposes that God makes threats, which a perfect being would not do. Second, I evaluate the argument that UHV is false because it entails that God coerces us and therefore limits our freedom to an objectionable degree. Third, I consider whether UHV is false because it implies that God is willing to damn some individuals to (...)
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  9. Epicurean Tranquility and the Pleasure of Philosophy.Alex R. Gillham - 2021 - Southwest Philosophy Review 37 (1):149-158.
    This paper explores how philosophy might be worthwhile on hedonic grounds for the Epicurean Sage who has achieved tranquility, reached the limit of pleasure, and thus for whom there is no further pleasure to pursue. I argue that philosophy might be worthwhile to the Epicurean Sage because it helps her maintain tranquility by preventing a painful boredom that could result without it.
     
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  10.  22
    Willingly Making Reparations, Loss of Unjust Advantage, and Counterfactual Comparative Harm.Alex R. Gillham - 2022 - Social Philosophy Today 38:67-82.
    The Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) of harm holds that event e harms subject S when e makes S worse off than S would have been without e occurring. In this paper, I argue that CCA is unattractive because it entails that someone who willingly makes monetary reparations harms himself. I explain why I find this entailment unattractive. I then acknowledge that my intuition about the unattractiveness of this entailment might simply be mistaken, so I offer an argument for the claim (...)
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  11.  16
    Evidentialism about Faith and the Justification Encroachment Dilemma.Alex R. Gillham - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (1):62-66.
    In this paper, I develop what I call the Justification Encroachment (JE) Dilemma for Dormandy’s Evidentialism about Faith (EaF). The dilemma is this. If JE is true, then belief about objects of faith will be very difficult to justify, perhaps even impossible. If JE is false, then beliefs about objects of faith require no greater justification than any other belief, so that faith requires no more respect for evidence than anything else. After developing each horn, I consider very briefly how (...)
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