Results for 'Douglas MacKay'

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  1.  93
    Policy Equipoise and Interventional Superiority.Douglas MacKay - forthcoming - Journal of Development Effectiveness.
    According to the norm of policy equipoise, it is permissible to randomly assign participants to two or more interventions in a public policy randomized controlled trial (RCT) when there is meaningful uncertainty among the relevant expert community regarding which intervention is superior. While this norm is gaining traction in the research ethics literature, the idea of interventional superiority remains unclear. Is one intervention superior to another if it is reasonably expected to realize one outcome of interest more effectively, even though (...)
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  2. Basic Income, Cash Transfers, and Welfare State Paternalism.Douglas MacKay - 2019 - Journal of Political Philosophy 27 (4):422-447.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  3. Government Policy Experiments and the Ethics of Randomization.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 48 (4):319-352.
    Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. RCTs are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention. While randomization plays an essential epistemic role in the context of policy RCTs however, it also plays an important distributive role. By randomly assigning participants to either the intervention or control arm of an RCT, people are subject to different policies and so, often, to different types and levels of benefits. In (...)
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  4. Geographic Location and Moral Arbitrariness in the Allocation of Donated Livers.Douglas MacKay & Samuel Fitz - 2019 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 47 (2):308-319.
    The federal system for allocating donated livers in the United States is often criticized for allowing geographic disparities in access to livers. Critics argue that such disparities are unfair on the grounds that where one lives is morally arbitrary and so should not influence one's access to donated livers. They argue instead that livers should be allocated in accordance with the equal opportunity principle, according to which US residents who are equally sick should have the same opportunity to receive a (...)
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  5. Calculating qalys: Liberalism and the value of health states.Douglas MacKay - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (2):259-285.
    The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people's lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that public officials choose laws and policies that are justifiable to their citizens – should evaluate health states. Since the public justification requirement prohibits public officials from (...)
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  6. Chapter 3 Efficiency and Wellbeing.Douglas MacKay - manuscript
    A principal rationale for public policy is to address market failures. Pareto efficiency is therefore a highly common and relatively non-controversial evaluative criterion for many policy analyses and is discussed at length in policy analysis texts. This makes sense, for Pareto improvements involve making at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. Who could object to that? But does efficiency deserve the prominence it enjoys in public policy? Is one policy option better than another, at least in (...)
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  7. The ethics of public policy RCTs: The principle of policy equipoise.Douglas MacKay - 2017 - Bioethics 32 (1):59-67.
    In this article, I ask whether a principle analogous to the principle of clinical equipoise should govern the design and conduct of RCTs evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions. I answer this question affirmatively, and introduce and defend the principle of policy equipoise. According to this principle, all arms of a policy RCT must be, at minimum, in a state of equipoise with the best proven policy that is also morally and practically attainable and sustainable. For all arms of a (...)
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  8. The Ethics of Public Policy Experiments: Lessons from Clinical Research Ethics.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - In Ana S. Iltis & Douglas MacKay (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Social scientists and research ethicists have begun, somewhat belatedly, to confront and address the ethical challenges raised by public policy experiments. In doing so however, they have not fully availed themselves of the large and sophisticated literature on the ethics of clinical research which has developed over the past 40 years. While clinical and public policy research are different, I argue that the clinical research ethics literature yields valuable insights for discussions of the ethics of policy experiments. Focusing on seven (...)
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  9. Nudging in Donation Policies: Registration and Decision-Making.Douglas MacKay & Katherine Saylor - 2021 - In Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.), Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation. Transcript Verlag. pp. 65-80.
    In this chapter, we provide an overview of the ethical considerations relevant to the use of nudges in organ donation policy. We do not defend a position on the permissibility of nudging in this context, but instead aim to clearly outline the strongest arguments on the different sides of this issue that have been presented in the English-language scholarly bioethics literature. We also highlight the questions that are in need of further investigation. In part 1, we briefly discuss nudging before (...)
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  10. Public Policy Experiments without Equipoise: When is Randomization Fair?Douglas MacKay & Emma Cohn - 2023 - Ethics and Human Research 45 (1):15-28.
    Government agencies and nonprofit organizations have increasingly turned to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate public policy interventions. Random assignment is widely understood to be fair when there is equipoise; however, some scholars and practitioners argue that random assignment is also permissible when an intervention is reasonably expected to be superior to other trial arms. For example, some argue that random assignment to such an intervention is fair when the intervention is scarce, for it is sometimes fair to use a (...)
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  11. Immigrant Selection, Health Requirements, and Disability Discrimination.Douglas MacKay - 2018 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 14 (1).
    Australia, Canada, and New Zealand currently apply health requirements to prospective immigrants, denying residency to those with health conditions that are likely to impose an “excessive demand” on their publicly funded health and social service programs. In this paper, I investigate the charge that such policies are wrongfully discriminatory against persons with disabilities. I first provide a freedom-based account of the wrongness of discrimination according to which discrimination is wrong when and because it involves disadvantaging people in the exercise of (...)
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  12.  53
    3. Nudging in Donation Policies.Douglas MacKay & Katherine Saylor - 2021 - In Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.), Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation. Transcript Verlag. pp. 65-80.
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  13. Chapter 2 Identifying Policy Problems.Douglas MacKay - manuscript
    Policy analyses begin with a systematic overview of the policy problem they address. This includes a comprehensive discussion of the nature and context of the problem, and the institutional and behavioral factors responsible for its emergence. Problem statements must also explain why the status quo is bad or undesirable, why it is something that governments, rather than private actors, should address, and establish that the relevant government institutions have the legitimacy to intervene. In this chapter, I provide an overview of (...)
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  14. Are Skill-Selective Immigration Policies Just?Douglas MacKay - 2016 - Social Theory and Practice 42 (1):123-154.
    Many high-income countries have skill-selective immigration policies, favoring prospective immigrants who are highly skilled. I investigate whether it is permissible for high-income countries to adopt such policies. Adopting what Joseph Carens calls a " realistic approach " to the ethics of immigration, I argue first that it is in principle permissible for high-income countries to take skill as a consideration in favor of selecting one prospective immigrant rather than another. I argue second that high-income countries must ensure that their skill-selective (...)
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  15. Designing a Just Soda Tax.Douglas MacKay & Alexandria Huber-Disla - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-21.
    Soda taxes are controversial. While proponents point to their potential health benefits and the public projects that could be funded with their revenue, critics argue that they are paternalistic and regressive. In this paper, we explore the prospects for designing a just soda tax, one that appropriately balances the often-competing ethical considerations of promoting social welfare, respecting people’s autonomy, and ensuring distributive fairness. We argue that policymakers have several paths forward for designing a just soda tax, but that the considerations (...)
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  16. Parenting the Parents: The Ethics of Parent-Targeted Paternalism in the Context of Anti-poverty Policies.Douglas MacKay - 2019 - In Nicolás Brando & Gottfried Schweiger (eds.), Philosophy and Child Poverty: Reflections on the Ethics and Politics of Poor Children and Their Families. Springer. pp. 321-340.
    Governments often aim to improve children’s wellbeing by targeting the decision-making of their parents. In this paper, I explore this phenomenon, providing an ethical evaluation of the ways in which governments target parental decision-making in the context of anti-poverty policies. I first introduce and motivate the concept of parent-targeted paternalism to categorize such policies. I then investigate whether parent-targeted paternalism is ever pro tanto wrong, arguing that it is when directed at parents who meet a threshold of parental competency. I (...)
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  17. The Duty to Rescue and Investigators' Obligations.Douglas MacKay & Tina Rulli - 2017 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (1):71-105.
    The duty to rescue is a highly plausible and powerful ethical principle. It requires agents to assist others in extreme need in cases where doing so does not conflict with some weighty moral aim; requires little personal sacrifice; and is likely to significantly benefit the recipients.1 As a general obligation, it binds all persons simply qua persons, and it is owed to all persons simply qua persons. Clinical investigators working in low-income countries frequently encounter sick or destitute people to whom (...)
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  18. Chapter 1 The Ethical Dimensions of Policy Analysis.Douglas MacKay - manuscript
    The field of public policy is dominated by the social sciences. Schools and departments of public policy and public administration are largely populated by economists, political scientists, and sociologists, and the vast majority of work in prestigious public policy journals employs empirical methods. This is unsurprising, in one respect, for collecting data, predicting and identifying the causal impacts of policies, and understanding political institutions and processes are massive, important tasks that require the tools of the social sciences. It is surprising, (...)
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  19. Fair Subject Selection in Clinical and Social Scientific Research.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - In Ana S. Iltis & Douglas MacKay (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter provides a critical overview and interpretation of fair subject selection in clinical and social scientific research. It first provides an analytical framework for thinking about the problem of fair subject selection. It then argues that fair subject selection is best understood as a set of four subprinciples, each with normative force and each with distinct and often conflicting implications for the selection of participants: fair inclusion, fair burden sharing, fair opportunity, and fair distribution of third-party risks. It then (...)
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  20. Government Policy Experiments and Informed Consent.Douglas MacKay & Averi Chakrabarti - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):188-201.
    Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical policy research conducted (...)
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  21. Four Faces of Fair Subject Selection.Katherine Witte Saylor & Douglas MacKay - 2020 - American Journal of Bioethics 20 (2):5-19.
    Although the principle of fair subject selection is a widely recognized requirement of ethical clinical research, it often yields conflicting imperatives, thus raising major ethical dilemmas regarding participant selection. In this paper, we diagnose the source of this problem, arguing that the principle of fair subject selection is best understood as a bundle of four distinct sub-principles, each with normative force and each yielding distinct imperatives: (1) fair inclusion; (2) fair burden sharing; (3) fair opportunity; and (4) fair distribution of (...)
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  22. Review of For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics. [REVIEW]Douglas MacKay - 2022 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (3):13-28.
    The principal goal of Alex John London's For the Common Good is to "articulate a new vision for the philosophical foundations of research ethics" which "moves issues of justice from the periphery of the field to the very center." At the core of this new vision is an understanding of research as a "collaborative social activity between free and equal persons," which aims to develop the knowledge public institutions require to establish and maintain a social order in which people may (...)
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  23. Rawlsian Justice and the Social Determinants of Health.Jayna Fishman & Douglas MacKay - 2018 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (4):608-625.
    In this article, we suggest that the evidence regarding the social determinants of health calls for a deep re‐thinking of our understanding of distributive justice. Focusing on John Rawls's theory of distributive justice in particular, we argue that a full reckoning with the social determinants of health requires a re‐working of Rawls's principles of justice. We argue first that the social bases of health – a Rawlsian conception of the social determinants of health – should be considered a social primary (...)
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  24. In Defense of (Some) Online Echo Chambers.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3):1-11.
    In this article, I argue that online echo chambers are in some cases and in some respects good. I do not attempt to refute arguments that they are harmful, but I argue that they are sometimes beneficial. In the first section, I argue that it is sometimes good to be insulated from views with which one disagrees. In the second section, I argue that the software-design principles that give rise to online echo chambers have a lot to recommend them. Further, (...)
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  25.  30
    Bioethics to the rescue! A response to Emmerich.Douglas Hardman & Phil Hutchinson - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (11):887-887.
    In our article, Where the ethical action is, we argue that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind but merely different aspects of a clinical situation. In response, Emmerich argues that in so doing, we neglect several important features of healthcare and medical education. Although we applaud the spirit of Emmerich’s response, we argue that his critique is an attempt at a general defence of the value of bioethical expertise in clinical practice, rather than a specific (...)
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  26. (1 other version)Consequentializing.Douglas W. Portmore - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is an encyclopedia entry on consequentializing. It explains what consequentializing is, what makes it possible, why someone might be motivated to consequentialize, and how to consequentialize a non-consequentialist theory.
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  27. Not Just A Tool: Why Social-Media Use Is Bad and Bad For Us, and The Duty to Quit.Douglas R. Campbell - 2024 - Journal of Global Ethics 20 (1):107-112.
    With an eye on the future of global ethics, I argue that social-media technologies are not morally neutral tools but are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of agent. They nudge us to do things that are bad for us. Moreover, I argue that we have a duty to quit using social-media platforms, not just on account of possible duties to preserve our own well-being but because users are akin to test subjects on whom developers are testing new nudges, (...)
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  28. Unintended Consequences or Pre-existing Barriers? A Commentary on Barnhill and Devine.Kathryn MacKay - 2018 - Public Health Ethics 11 (3):phy010.
    In this case discussion, Barnhill and Devine collect and present a significant amount of recent research on the various reasons why people struggle to succeed in weight loss programmes. Specifically, the authors focus on what they call ‘behavioural weight loss interventions’, which are ‘research, clinical or public health efforts to promote individual healthy eating and physical activity behaviours’. As defined, this is a very broad category of interventions and presumably includes all kinds of dieting and weight loss programmes or promotion (...)
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  29. Análise da interpretação possível do geocentrismo através das tradições de pesquisa.Douglas Antonio Bassani - 2023 - Griot : Revista de Filosofia 23:59-69.
    A pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar aspectos/elementos da cosmologia de Aristóteles a partir da filosofia da ciência de Larry Laudan. A tentativa é apresentar neste artigo uma interpretação possível sobre o processo evolutivo da cosmologia da época sob o enfoque da filosofia de Laudan, baseado nas tradições de pesquisa, teorias específicas, modelo reticulado, progresso científico, metodologia, axiologia, etc. Abordaremos sobre a questão da aceitação das teorias específicas, a questão da eficácia na resolução de problemas, entre outras questões importantes para a (...)
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  30. A Comprehensive Account of Blame: Self-Blame, Non-Moral Blame, and Blame for the Non-Voluntary.Douglas W. Portmore - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...)
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  31. From Tapestry to Loom: Broadening the Perspective on Values in Science.Heather Douglas - 2018 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10 (8).
    After raising some minor philosophical points about Kevin Elliott’s A Tapestry of Values (2017), I argue that we should expand on the themes raised in the book and that philosophers of science need to pay as much attention to the loom of science (i.e., the institutional structures which guide the pursuit of science) as the tapestry of science. The loom of science includes such institutional aspects as patents, funding sources, and evaluation regimes that shape how science gets pursued, and that (...)
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  32. Moral Worth and Our Ultimate Moral Concerns.Douglas W. Portmore - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
    Some right acts have what philosophers call moral worth. A right act has moral worth if and only if its agent deserves credit for having acted rightly in this instance. And I argue that an agent deserves credit for having acted rightly if and only if her act issues from an appropriate set of concerns, where the appropriateness of these concerns is a function what her ultimate moral concerns should be. Two important upshots of the resulting account of moral worth (...)
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  33. Control, Attitudes, and Accountability.Douglas W. Portmore - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (Horn 3) deny (...)
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  34. Consequentializing agent‐centered restrictions: A Kantsequentialist approach.Douglas W. Portmore - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (4):443-467.
    There is, on a given moral view, an agent-centered restriction against performing acts of a certain type if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes many such agent-centered restrictions has been seen by several philosophers as a decisive objection against consequentialism. Despite this, I argue that agent-centered restrictions are more plausibly accommodated within a (...)
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  35. Self‐Motion and Cognition: Plato's Theory of the Soul.Douglas R. Campbell - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):523-544.
    I argue that Plato believes that the soul must be both the principle of motion and the subject of cognition because it moves things specifically by means of its thoughts. I begin by arguing that the soul moves things by means of such acts as examination and deliberation, and that this view is developed in response to Anaxagoras. I then argue that every kind of soul enjoys a kind of cognition, with even plant souls having a form of Aristotelian discrimination (...)
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  36. Maximalism and Moral Harmony.Douglas W. Portmore - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):318-341.
    Maximalism is the view that an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action if and only if she is permitted to perform some instance of this type, where φ-ing is an instance of ψ-ing if and only if φ-ing entails ψ-ing but not vice versa. Now, the aim of this paper is not to defend maximalism, but to defend a certain account of our options that when combined with maximalism results in a theory that accommodates the idea (...)
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  37. Introduction.Thomas Douglas & David Birks - 2018 - In David Birks & Thomas Douglas (eds.), Treatment for Crime: Philosophical Essays on Neurointerventions in Criminal Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Crime-preventing neurointerventions (CPNs) are increasingly being used or advocated for crime prevention. There is increasing use of testosterone-lowering agents to prevent recidivism in sexual offenders, and strong political and scientific interest in developing pharmaceutical treatments for psychopathy and anti-social behaviour. Recent developments suggest that we may ultimately have at our disposal a range of drugs capable of suppressing violent aggression, and it is not difficult to imagine possible applications of such drugs in crime prevention. But should neurointerventions be used in (...)
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  38.  99
    Nudging and Social Media: The Choice Architecture of Online Life.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee 2:93-114.
    This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...)
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  39. The Soul’s Tomb: Plato on the Body as the Cause of Psychic Disorders.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Apeiron 55 (1):119-139.
    I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at Timaeus 86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the (...)
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  40. (1 other version)If Nudges Treat Their Targets as Rational Agents, Nonconsensual Neurointerventions Can Too.Thomas Douglas - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1:1-16.
    Andreas Schmidt and Neil Levy have recently defended nudging against the objection that nudges fail to treat nudgees as rational agents. Schmidt rejects two theses that have been taken to support the objection: that nudges harness irrational processes in the nudgee, and that they subvert the nudgee’s rationality. Levy rejects a third thesis that may support the objection: that nudges fail to give reasons. I argue that these defences can be extrapolated from nudges to some nonconsensual neurointerventions; if Schmidt’s and (...)
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  41. Desert, Control, and Moral Responsibility.Douglas W. Portmore - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (4):407-426.
    In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having (...)
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  42. Plato's Theory of Reincarnation: Eschatology and Natural Philosophy.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (4):643-665.
    This article concerns the place of Plato’s eschatology in his philosophy. I argue that the theory of reincarnation appeals to Plato due to its power to explain how non-human animals came to be. Further, the outlines of this theory are entailed by other commitments, such as that embodiment disrupts psychic functioning, that virtue is always rewarded and vice punished, and that the soul is immortal. I conclude by arguing that Plato develops a view of reincarnation as the chief tool that (...)
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  43. Cancel Culture, Then and Now: A Platonic Approach to the Shaming of People and the Exclusion of Ideas.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Journal of Cyberspace Studies 7 (2):147-166.
    In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their morally reprehensible (...)
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  44. The Morality of Moral Neuroenhancement.Thomas Douglas - 2014 - In Levy Neil & Clausen Jens (eds.), Handbook on Neuroethics. Springer.
    This chapter reviews recent philosophical and neuroethical literature on the morality of moral neuroenhancements. It first briefly outlines the main moral arguments that have been made concerning moral status neuroenhancements. These are neurointerventions that would augment the moral status of human persons. It then surveys recent debate regarding moral desirability neuroenhancements: neurointerventions that augment that the moral desirability of human character traits, motives or conduct. This debate has contested, among other claims (i) Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu’s contention that there (...)
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  45. Profiles of Dialogue for Relevance.Douglas Walton & Fabrizio Macagno - 2016 - Informal Logic 36 (4):523-562.
    This paper uses argument diagrams, argumentation schemes, and some tools from formal argumentation systems developed in artificial intelligence to build a graph-theoretic model of relevance shown to be applicable as a practical method for helping a third party judge issues of relevance or irrelevance of an argument in real examples. Examples used to illustrate how the method works are drawn from disputes about relevance in natural language discourse, including a criminal trial and a parliamentary debate.
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  46. Statutory Interpretation: Pragmatics and Argumentation.Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno & Giovanni Sartor - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons (...)
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  47. Is Preventive Detention Morally Worse than Quarantine?Thomas Douglas - 2019 - In Jan W. De Keijser, Julian V. Roberts & Jesper Ryberg (eds.), Predictive Sentencing: Normative and Empirical Perspectives. Hart Publishing.
    In some jurisdictions, the institutions of criminal justice may subject individuals who have committed crimes to preventive detention. By this, I mean detention of criminal offenders (i) who have already been punished to (or beyond) the point that no further punishment can be justified on general deterrent, retributive, restitutory, communicative or other backwardlooking grounds, (ii) for preventive purposes—that is, for the purposes of preventing the detained individual from engaging in further criminal or otherwise socially costly conduct. Preventive detention, thus understood, (...)
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  48. Transitivity, Moral Latitude, and Supererogation.Douglas W. Portmore - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (3):286-298.
    On what I take to be the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer how things would be if she were to perform the one to how things would be (...)
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  49. What Timaeus Can Teach Us: The Importance of Plato’s Timaeus in the 21st Century.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Athena 18:58-73.
    In this article, I make the case for the continued relevance of Plato’s Timaeus. I begin by sketching Allan Bloom’s picture of the natural sciences today in The Closing of the American Mind, according to which the natural sciences are, objectionably, increasingly specialized and have ejected humans qua humans from their purview. I argue that Plato’s Timaeus, despite the falsity of virtually all of its scientific claims, provides a model for how we can pursue scientific questions in a comprehensive way (...)
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  50. Organized Sound, Sounds Heard, and Silence.Douglas C. Wadle - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    In this paper I argue that composer John Cage’s so-called ‘silent piece’, 4’33”, is music. I first defend it against the charge that it does not involve the organization of sound, which has been taken to be a necessary feature of music. I then argue that 4’33” satisfies the only other condition that must be met for it to be music: it bears the right socio-historical connections to its predecessors within its tradition (Western art music). I argue further that one (...)
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