Telic egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. In its canonical form, the objection purports to show that it is not, in itself, an improvement if inequality is reduced. In a variant that is less often discussed, the objection is that telic egalitarians are committed to believing that sometimes one ought to reduce inequality, even when doing so makes no one better off. The standard egalitarian response to this ‘all things considered’ variant of the levelling down objection is (...) to embed egalitarianism in a pluralist consequentialist moral theory. In section 1, I briefly recapitulate this familiar strategy. In section 2, I argue that this standard pluralist consequentialist response is inadequate. The inadequacy of the standard response, I argue, stems from the fact that the following are jointly inconsistent: (1) a commitment to levelling down's impermissibility; (2) standard pluralist egalitarian consequentialism; (3) inequality being of non-trivial importance; and (4) the most plausible measures of inequality's badness. In section 3, I show that egalitarians can better respond to the all-things-considered levelling down objection by embedding egalitarianism in a nonconsequentialist moral theory. (shrink)

Because the poorest people tend to die from easily preventable diseases, addressing poverty is a relatively cheap way to save lives. War, by contrast, is extremely expensive. This article argues that, since states that wage war could alleviate poverty instead, poverty can render war unjust. Two just war theory conditions prove relevant: proportionality and last resort. Proportionality requires that war does not yield excessive costs in relation to the benefits. Standardly, just war theorists count only the direct costs: the death (...) and destruction wrought by war. This article argues that it can sometimes be appropriate to add the opportunity costs of a failure to alleviate poverty. Last resort is the condition that there must be no better alternative means of achieving the same just end for which the war is waged. This article argues that there are some cases in which alleviating poverty may constitute a better alternative. These are cases in which the most fitting description of the just end for war is sufficiently general that poverty alleviation offers a means to pursue it. The idea that poverty can sometimes render war unjust has, to date, been largely overlooked. It is, nevertheless, an idea with profound implications since, once taken seriously, war becomes much harder to justify. Wars that, in every other respect, seem just may prove disproportionate or unnecessary given the alternative of alleviating poverty. (shrink)

In a recent article, Sabine Müller, Merlin Bittlinger, and Henrik Walter launch a sweeping attack against what they call the "personal identity debate" as it relates to patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). In this critique offered by Müller et al., the so-called personal identity debate is said to: (a) be metaphysical in a problematic way, (b) constitute a threat to patients, and (c) use "vague" and "contradictory" statements from patients and their families as direct evidence for metaphysical theories. (...) In this response, I critically evaluate Müller et al.'s argument, with a special focus on these three just-mentioned aspects of their discussion. My conclusion is that Müller et al.'s overall argument is problematic. It overgeneralizes criticisms that may apply to some, but certainly not to all, contributions to what they call the personal identity-debate. Moreover, it rests on a problematic conception of what much of this debate is about. Nor is Müller et al.'s overall argument fair in its assessment of the methodology used by most participants in the debate. For these reasons, we should be skeptical of Müller et al.'s claim that the "personal identity debate" is a "threat to neurosurgical patients". (shrink)

Does natural selection explain why individual organisms have the traits that they do? According to "the Negative View," natural selection does not explain why any individual organism has the traits that it does. According to "the Positive View," natural selection at least sometimes does explain why an individual organism has the traits that it does. In this paper, I argue that recent arguments for the Positive View fail in virtue of running afoul of the doctrine of origin essentialism and I (...) demonstrate that other recent defenses of the Negative View depend upon my own for their plausibility. (shrink)

Currently, brain tissue transplantations are being developed as a clinical-therapeutic tool in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease. From an ethical point of view, distinguishing between the preservation and an alteration of personal identity seems to be central to determining the scope for further application of brain tissue transplantation therapy. The purpose of this article is to review "standard" arguments which are used on the one hand by proponents to prove preservation of personal identity and by opponents on (...) the other hand to prove that brain tissue transplantation results in an altered personal identity. Proponents and opponents are shown to use the same arguments, albeit with different presuppositions. These presuppositions concern the meaning of the term "identity", either numerical or qualitative, the definition of brain identity, either structurally or functionally, and the relationship between mental states, psychological functions and neurophysiological properties as criteria for personal identity. Furthermore the respective neurophysiological, clinical and philosophical evidence for the different presuppositions are discussed. It is concluded that evaluation of personal identity in brain tissue transplantation should not only rely on the "standard" arguments but, additionally, neurophysiological, clinical and philosophical implications should be discussed. (shrink)

What is the difference between the complex view of personal identity over time and the simple view? Traditionally, the defenders of the complex view are said to include Locke and Hume, defenders of the simple view to include Butler and Reid. In our own time it is standard to think of Chisholm and Swinburne as defenders of the simple view and Shoemaker, Parfit, Williams and Lewis as defenders of the complex view. But how exactly is the distinction to be characterized? (...) One difference between the two camps is that defenders of the simple view emphasize the difference between diachronic personal identity and the identity of other objects; they insist that in the case of the other familiar types that figure in philosophical puzzle cases about identity – ships, statues, plants and so on – the correct view is the complex one. On the other hand, defenders of the complex view do not hold a simple view of other things; rather they think that the complex view is correct across the board. We therefore need an account of the distinction which allows us to speak generally of ‘the complex/simple view of the diachronic identity of things of sort S’ where ‘S’ is a sortal term. A respectable view about problems of identity in general is that there aren’t any: any genuine philosophical puzzles can be rephrased so that the language of identity drops out . In what follows, I offer an account of the simple/complex contrast which conforms to this Lewisean view. 1 We can begin by distinguishing two types of constraint on personhood. Type , or synchronic constraints, are capturable in the form: If x is a person, then if x exists at t, Fxt where ‘ F represents a term for a non-historical property, a property …. (shrink)

Eric Olson has argued, startlingly, that no coherent account can be giv- en of the distinction made in the personal identity literature between ‘complex views’ and ‘simple views’. ‘We tell our students,’ he writes, ‘that accounts of personal identity over time fall into [these] two broad categories’. But ‘it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed’. I argue, first, that, for all Olson has said, a recent account by Noonan provides the (...) coherent characterization he claims impossible. If so we have not been wrong all along in the way he says in what we have been telling our students. I then give an account of the distinction between the reductionist and non-reductionist positions which makes it differ- ent from the complex/simple distinction. The aim is to make clear sense of the notion of a not simple but non-reductionist position — which seems an eminently reasonable possibility and something it may also be useful to tell our students about. (shrink)

It has sometimes been claimed (usually without evidence) that the harm caused by an individual's participation in a greenhouse-gas-intensive economy is negligible. Using data from several contemporary sources, this paper attempts to estimate the harm done by an average American. This estimate is crude, and further refinements are surely needed. But the upshot is that the average American is responsible, through his/her greenhouse gas emissions, for the suffering and/or deaths of one or two future people.

In a common example of the non-identity problem, a person deliberately conceives a child who she knows will have incurable blindness but a life well worth living. Although Wilma’s decision seems wrong, it is difficult to say why. This paper develops and defends a version of the “indirect strategy” for solving the NIP. This strategy rests on the idea that it is wrong to deliberately make it impossible to fulfill an obligation; consequently, it is wrong for Wilma to create Pebbles (...) because doing so makes it impossible to fulfill her obligation to protect her child from harms like blindness. A challenge for the indirect strategy is the well-known “rights waiver problem”: Since Pebbles’s very existence depends on Wilma’s having made herself unable to fulfill an obligation to Pebbles, Pebbles is likely to waive that obligation. I address this problem by recasting the indirect strategy in terms of a non-grievance evil. I argue that deliberately making it impossible to fulfill a moral obligation manifests a defective attitude toward morality—an attitude which sees moral obligations as things to be dodged whenever they are inconvenient. Next, I argue that acting on this attitude is a wrong-making feature that is independent of any wrong that might be done to Pebbles. I conclude that Wilma’s decision remains wrong even if Pebbles waives any objection to it. (shrink)

A person enters the moral realm when she affirms that other persons matter in the same way that she does. This, of course, is just the beginning, for she must then determine what follows from this affirmation. One way in which we treat other persons as mattering is by respecting them. And one way in which we respect persons is by respecting their wishes, desires, decisions, choices, ends, and goals. I will call all of these things ‘aims.’ Sometimes we respect (...) another person's aims simply byrefrainingfrom doing certain things, such as treating her in ways that thwart her aims, or interfering with her attempt to pursue them. Other times we respect a person's aims by taking positive action to help her pursue them.But how exactly does respect forpersonstranslate into respect for theiraims?And which aims merit respect? One answer comes from Kant. (shrink)

A person enters the moral realm when she affirms that other persons matter in the same way that she does. This, of course, is just the beginning, for she must then determine what follows from this affirmation. One way in which we treat other persons as mattering is by respecting them. And one way in which we respect persons is by respecting their wishes, desires, decisions, choices, ends, and goals. I will call all of these things ‘aims.’ Sometimes we respect (...) another person's aims simply byrefrainingfrom doing certain things, such as treating her in ways that thwart her aims, or interfering with her attempt to pursue them. Other times we respect a person's aims by taking positive action to help her pursue them.But how exactly does respect forpersonstranslate into respect for theiraims?And which aims merit respect? One answer comes from Kant. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists hold that intuitions are, or reduce to, beliefs. The argument from intuition without beliefs threatens to undercut any such doxastic account: since there are clear cases of intuition without belief, intuitions cannot be beliefs. Advocates of the intellectual seeming account conclude that intuitions belong to the basic mental kind of intellectual seeming. I argue that rightly understood, apparent cases of intuition without belief are cases of someone having the inclination to believe that p whilst believing that (...) not-p. These can be accommodated by a disjunctive doxastic account holding that to have an intuition is to either have a belief, or to have an inclination to believe. I conclude that intuitions reduce to beliefs, and that there is no need to acknowledge intellectual seemings as basic states in our mental taxonomy. (shrink)

According to outcome welfarism, roughly, the value of an outcome is fundamentally a matterof the individual welfare it contains. I assess various suggestions as to how to spell out this idea more fully on the basis of some basic intuitions about the content and implications of welfarism. I point out that what are in fact different suggestions are often conflated and argue that none fully captures the basic intuitions. I then suggest that what this means is that different doctrines of (...) welfarism may be appropriate in different contexts and that when deciding on a particular doctrine, we need to consider which intuitions it does accommodate. Finally, I consider the issue of just how a benefit must be related to an outcome in order to contribute to its value. (shrink)

This paper discusses what the so-called Priority View implies regarding possible people. It is argued that this view is plausible when applied to fixed populations, but that, when applied to the issue of possible people, it faces certain difficulties. If it is claimed that possible people fall within the scope of the Priority View, we are led to the repugnant conclusion at a faster pace than we are by, e.g., utilitarianism. And if it is claimed that possible people do not (...) fall within the scope of the Priority View, we shall have to combine this view with a different view in order to avoid certain counter-intuitive judgements. Such a combined view, however, leads to intransitivities. At the end of the paper, I discuss what these conclusions imply regarding both the Priority View and our moral obligations to possible people. (shrink)

People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and (...) equivocal evidence to interpret candidate rules as applying more narrowly than utilitarian rules. (shrink)

It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self. This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations. Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear (...) of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another. (shrink)

Utilitarianism seems to be going out of fashion, amidst increasing concerns for issues of freedom, equality, and justice. At least, anti-utilitarian and non-utilitarian moral philosophers have been very active. This paper is a very modest attempt to defend utilitarianism in particular and welfarism in general. Section I provides an axiomatic defence of welfarism and utilitarianism. Section II discusses the divergences between individual preferences and individual welfares and argues in favour of welfare utilitarianism. Section III criticizes some non-utilitarian principles, including knowledge (...) as intrinsically good, rights-based ethics, and Rawls's second principle. Section IV argues that most objections to welfarism are probably based on the confusion of non-ultimate considerations with basic values. This is discussed with reference to some recent philosophical writings which abound with such confusion. Section V argues that the acceptance of utilitarianism may be facilitated by the distinction between ideal morality and self-interest which also resolves the dilemma of average versus total utility maximization in optimal population theory. (shrink)

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization of (...) an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)

The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That (...) is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. (shrink)

I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.

The paper argues against a widely held synchronic view of emotional rationality. I begin by considering recent philosophical literature on various backward‐looking emotions, such as regret, grief, resentment, and anger. I articulate the general problem these accounts grapple with: a certain diminution in backward‐looking emotions seems fitting while the reasons for these emotions seem to persist. The problem, I argue, rests on the assumption that if the facts that give reason for an emotion remain unchanged, the emotion remains fitting. However, (...) I argue there are rationally self‐consuming attitudes: affective attitudes that become less fitting the longer they endure while the facts that give reason for them persist. A widely held synchronic view of fitting affective attitudes denies that fittingness at a time depends on the agent's attitudes at different times and therefore denies that the fittingness of an affective attitude can depend on its duration. Once we reject the synchronic view, we may see that affective attitudes are often fitting due to the fitting processes of which they are part. These fitting processes explain the fitting diminution of backward‐looking emotions as well as other diachronic aspects of the fittingness of emotions. -/- . (shrink)

Drawing on the author's recent bookEthics for a Broken World, this article explores the philosophical implications of the fact that climate change – or something like it – might lead to abroken worldwhere resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs, and where our affluent way of life is no longer an option. It argues that the broken world has an impact, not only on applied ethics, but also on moral theory. It then explores that impact. The article first argues (...) that the broken world creates severe difficulties for both libertarians and contractualists. It then explores the impact of the broken world on utilitarianism – and especially on reflective equilibrium arguments for rule-utilitarianism. The article concludes that, while such arguments may still be viable, the form of rule-utilitarianism that results will be less moderate and less liberal than contemporary rule-utilitarians might hope. (shrink)

I explore the moral implications of four possible futures: a broken future where our affluent way of life is no longer available; a virtual future where human beings spend their entire lives in Nozick's experience machine; a digital future where humans have been replaced by unconscious digital beings; and a theological future where the existence of God has been proved. These futures affect our current ethical thinking in surprising ways. They raise the importance of intergenerational ethics, alter the balance between (...) competing moral theories, and push morality in a more objective direction. (shrink)

Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures (...) – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies. (shrink)

A radical metaphysical theory typically comes packaged with a semantic theory that reconciles those radical claims with common sense. The metaphysical theory says what things exist and what their natures are, while the semantic theory specifies, in terms of these things, how we are to interpret everyday language. Thus may we “think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar.” This semantic accommodation of common sense, however, can end up undermining the very theory it is designed to protect. This paper (...) is a case study, showing in detail how one popular version of temporal parts theory is self-undermining. This raises the specter that the problem generalizes to other metaphysical theories. (shrink)

The dominant philosophical view of gamete donation as morally permissible rests on two premises: parental obligations are triggered primarily by playing a causal role in procreation, not by genetic ties, and those obligations are transferable—that is, they are obligations to make adequate provision for the child’s needs, not necessarily to raise the child oneself. Thus while gamete donors are indeed agent causes of the children that their donation helps to bring into existence, most think that donors’ obligations are discharged insofar (...) as they know that competent others intend to care for those children. In this article, I call into question this dominant view by challenging both of its premises. Challenging the first premise, I argue that genetic parenthood is what primarily triggers parental obligations. Challenging the second premise, I claim that those obligations are non-transferable—i.e., that they are obligations not simply to ensure that someone will raise one’s genetic child, but to raise that child oneself . The implication of my argument is that gamete donation is inherently wrong insofar as it involves acquiring non-transferable obligations that one has no intention of fulfilling. (shrink)

Abstract:Concern for one’s “reputation” has been introduced in recent game theory enabling theorists to demonstrate the rationality of cooperative behavior in certain contexts. And these impressive results have been generalized to a variety of situations studied by students of business and business ethicists. But it is not clear that the notion of reputation employed has much explanatory power once one sees what is meant. I also suggest that there may be some larger lessons about the notion of rationality used by (...) decision theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

This article suggests that investigational deep brain stimulation (DBS) for mental disorders raises few new bioethical issues. Although the scientific basis of the procedure may be both complex and largely unknown, addressing informed consent in such situations is a familiar problem. After reviewing the legal and moral background for investigating DBS and the scientific difficulties DBS faces as a potential treatment for mental disorders, the article focuses on informed consent and makes two primary suggestions. The study of DBS may proceed, (...) but “hyper-disclosure” of the complexities should be required for competent subjects or proper surrogates if the candidate is not competent, and the most rigorous standard for competence should be employed. Throughout, neuromodesty and caution are urged. (shrink)

Card argues that we should not give injustice priority over evil. I agree. But I think Card sets us up for some difficult balancings, for example of small evils against middle sized injustices. I suggest some ways of staying off the tightrope.

One major question in climate justice is whether developed countries’ historical emissions are relevant to distributing the burdens of mitigating climate change. To argue that developed countries should bear a greater share of the burdens of mitigation because of their past emissions is to advocate ‘historical accountability.’ Standard arguments for historical accountability rely on corrective justice. These arguments face important objections. By using the notion of a global emissions budget, however, we can reframe the debate over historical accountability in terms (...) of distributive justice. This paper argues that, given two defensible assumptions, distributive justice requires historical accountability. These assumptions are that the proper claimants on the emissions budgets are societies or states, not individuals, and that we should be allocating the entirety of the original, pre-industrial budget, rather than just the remainder. (shrink)

In this essay I consider the argument that Bernard Williams advances in ‘The Makropolus Case’ for the meaninglessness of immortality. I also consider various counter-arguments. I suggest that the more clearly these counter-arguments are targeted at the spirit of Williams's argument, rather than at its letter, the less clearly they pose a threat to it. I then turn to Nietzsche, whose views about the eternal recurrence might appear to make him an opponent of Williams. I argue that, properly interpreted, these (...) views in fact make him an ally. (shrink)

This article outlines an objective list theory of animal and alien well-being. Responding to three sorts of perfectionist criticism of such OLT, it argues that OLT is actually superior on each count. This is significant, because perfectionism is much discussed yet OLT is little discussed in philosophy of animal well-being, and because perfectionism can reasonably be expected to do comparatively well on the points where it is criticizing OLT.

This paper examines the relationship between justice and colonialism. It defines colonialism; examines the kind of injustice that colonialism involved; and the possibility of corrective justice.

Respect for autonomy is an important moral principle within medical ethics. However, the question of whether the normative importance of respect for autonomy is derived from other moral principles (such as welfare) or has independent moral value is debatable. In this paper it is argued that the normative importance of autonomy is derived from both welfare and non-welfare considerations. Welfare considerations provide two types of reason to respect autonomy, one related to the role of autonomy in creating welfare and one (...) related to its role in constituting welfare. In addition, autonomy seems to have normative importance that is unrelated to welfare considerations. This type of normative role is difficult to defend within medical ethics, because most non-welfare justifications of autonomy work for only a proportion of the autonomous decisions that patients make and give no clear guidance on how to respond to autonomous yet welfare-reducing treatment requests. A recent account of autonomy (Stephen Darwall’s “demand” account) provides a nuanced defence of autonomy that does not rely on welfare considerations. Darwall’s approach seems to work well within medical ethics and provides a principled explanation of how to respond to autonomous patient requests for treatment options that may not be in their best medical interests. It is argued that to fully respect autonomy within a medical consultation, practitioners must consider non-welfare autonomy as well as instrumental and intrinsic welfare-related autonomy. (shrink)

According to the Psychological Account of personal identity, personal identity across time is maintained by some form of psychological overlap or continuance. I show that the Psychological Account has trouble accommodating cases of transient retrograde amnesia. In such cases, the transitivity of psychological continuity may break down. I consider various means of responding to this problem, arguing that the best available response will undercut our ability to rely on intuitions about brain transplantation to support the Psychological Account. When the Psychological (...) Account is re-interpreted in such a way as to overcome the problems posed by cases of transient retrograde amnesia, it turns out that standard brain transplantation cases involve details which are strictly irrelevant according to the theory. On the other hand, these features seem to drive our intuitions about survival in these cases. In this way, my argument undermines one of the key motivations for adopting the Psychological Account. (shrink)

This paper tries to explain why racial profiling involves a serious injustice and to do so in a way that avoids the problems of existing philosophical accounts. An initially plausible view maintains that racial profiling is pro tanto wrong in and of itself by violating a constraint on fair treatment that is generally violated by acts of statistical discrimination based on ascribed characteristics. However, consideration of other cases involving statistical discrimination suggests that violating a constraint of this kind may not (...) be an especially serious wrong in and of itself. To fully capture the significant wrong that occurs when racial profiling is targeted at black Americans or other similarly situated groups, it is argued that we should appeal to the idea that this basic injustice is exacerbated when it forms part of a larger pattern of similar actions that collectively realize a state of cumulative injustice. (shrink)

This paper argues that some of the major theories in current business ethics fail to provide an adequate account of moral responsibility for the creation of systemic financial risk. Using the trading of credit default swaps during the 2008 financial crisis as a case study, I will formulate three challenges that these theories must address: the problem of risk imposition, the problem of unstructured collective harm and the problem of limited knowledge. These challenges will be used to work out key (...) shortcomings of stakeholder approaches and Integrative Social Contracts Theory. I will argue that pluralist connection models used in political theory can help to overcome these shortcomings. Adopting an approach based on these models shows that financial institutions incur obligations in five main areas: managing their own risk profile; remedying some of the harms caused by financial crises; supporting the development of better epistemic methods; curbing the transmission and amplification of initial losses; and instigating structural reforms. (shrink)

People may disagree about moral issues because they have fundamentally different intuitions. I argue that we ought to suspend judgement in such cases. Since we trust our own moral intuitions without positive evidence of their reliability, we must necessarily extend this trust to the moral intuitions of others: a fundamental self-other asymmetry in moral epistemology is untenable. This ensures that disagreements in moral intuition are defeating. In addition, I argue that brute conflicts in moral intuition require suspension of judgement only (...) if we are required to exhibit this kind of default trust with respect to the moral intuitions of others. (shrink)

Decisions about brain surgery pose existential challenges because they are often decisions about life or death, and sometimes about possible personality changes. Therefore they require rigorous neuroethical consideration. However, we doubt whether metaphysical interpretations of ambiguous statements of patients are useful for deriving ethical and legal conclusions. Particularly, we question the application of psychological theories of personal identity on neuroethical issues for several reasons. First, even the putative “standard view” on personal identity is contentious. Second, diverse accounts of personal identity (...) have been introduced into the neuroethical debate, which are incompatible. Third, the criteria for “diagnosing” the supposed changes in “identity” are ambiguous and indeterminate. Fourth, the metaphysical theories of personal identity imply highly questionable ethical and legal revisions, namely the denial of advance directives, particularly of Ulysses contracts, and, for patients with brain cancer, even therapeutic nihilism.We discuss three examples in which ideas from the personal identity debate in metaphysics are straightforwardly applied to discuss ethical issues of neurosurgery. We discuss revisions of the current medico-legal practice that have been proposed on grounds of psychological theories of personal identity. We argue that the established status quo in law and clinical practice is beneficial to the patients concerned. Furthermore, it is metaphysically neutral, which is an important principle of liberal, democratic, pluralistic societies.We recommend a pragmatic approach: empirical research on personality changes arising from brain disorders or interventions, comprehensive information about risks of personality changes, and advance directives, particularly Ulysses contracts. (shrink)

Der Artikel spürt den subtilen Veränderungen nach, die bei Patienten, die mit tiefer Hirnstimulation behandelt werden, möglicherweise beobachtet werden können. Dabei sollen im Rückgriff auf Konzeptionen zur narrativen Identität mittels einer möglichst genauen Beschreibung und Analyse der Selbstwahrnehmung der Patienten sowie der Wahrnehmung ihres Umfelds die Änderungen im praktischen Selbstverhältnis untersucht werden, u. a. am Beispiel technomorpher Metaphern, die von den Patienten in ihren Selbstbeschreibungen verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, die Neuartigkeit und das Spezifische der Neurotechnologien – über die bisherigen (...) Untersuchungen hinaus – hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit sich selbst herauszuarbeiten und greifbar zu machen. Abschließend werden auf Basis der Analyse der Patienten-Narrationen die entsprechenden normativen Implikationen für eine ethische Bewertung des Einsatzes von Neurotechnologien benannt. (shrink)