In a recent Bioethics editorial, Udo Schuklenk argues against allowing Canadian doctors to conscientiously object to any new euthanasia procedures approved by Parliament. In this he follows Julian Savulescu's 2006 BMJ paper which argued for the removal of the conscientious objection clause in the 1967 UK Abortion Act. Both authors advance powerful arguments based on the need for uniformity of service and on analogies with reprehensible kinds of personal exemption. In this article I want to defend the practice of conscientious (...) objection in publicly-funded healthcare systems, at least in the area of abortion and end-of-life care, without entering either of the substantive moral debates about the permissibility of either. My main claim is that Schuklenk and Savulescu have misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors. However, I acknowledge Schuklenk's point about differential access to lawful services in remote rural areas, and I argue that the health service should expend more to protect conscientious objection while ensuring universal access. (shrink)

There seem to be two clearly-defined camps in the debate over the problem of moral expertise. On the one hand are the “Professionals”, who reject the possibility entirely, usually because of the intractable diversity of ethical beliefs. On the other hand are the “Ethicists”, who criticise the Professionals for merely stipulating science as the most appropriate paradigm for discussions of expertise. While the subject matter and methodology of good ethical thinking is certainly different from that of good clinical thinking, they (...) argue, this is no reason for rejecting the possibility of a distinctive kind of expertise in ethics, usually based on the idea of good justification. I want to argue that both are incorrect, partly because of the reasons given by one group against the other, but more importantly because both neglect what is most distinctive about ethics: that it is personal in a very specific way, without collapsing into relativism. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Bioethics, Bernard Gesang asks whether a moral philosopher possesses greater moral expertise than a non-philosopher, and his answer is a qualified yes, based not so much on his infallible access to the truth, but on the quality of his theoretically-informed moral justifications. I reject Gesang's claim that there is such a thing as moral expertise, although the moral philosopher may well make a valid contribution to the ethics committee as a concerned and educated citizen. I (...) suggest that wisdom is a lot more interesting to examine than moral expertise. Again, however, moral philosophers have no monopoly on wisdom, and the study of philosophy may even impede its cultivation. (shrink)

In a recent article, Henri Wijsbek discusses the 1991 Chabot “psychiatric euthanasia” case in the Netherlands, and argues that Chabot was justified in helping his patient to die. Dutch legislation at the time permitted physician assisted suicide when the patient’s condition is severe, hopeless, and unbearable. The Dutch Supreme Court agreed with Chabot that the patient met these criteria because of her justified depression, even though she was somatically healthy. Wijsbek argues that in this case, the patient’s integrity had been (...) undermined by recent events, and that this is the basis for taking her request seriously; it was unreasonable to expect that she could start again. In this paper, I do not challenge the Dutch euthanasia criteria in the case of somatic illness, but I argue that both Chabot and Wijsbek are wrong because we can never be sufficiently confident in cases of severe exogenous depression to assist the patient in her irreversible act. This is partly because of the essential difference between somatic and mental illness, and because of the possibility of therapy and other help. In addition, I argue that Wijsbek’s concept of integrity cannot do the work that he expects of it. Finally, I consider a 2011 position paper from the Royal Dutch Medical Association on euthanasia, and the implications it might have for Chabot-style cases in the future. (shrink)

Richard Brandt, following Hume, famously argued that suicide could be rational. In this he was going against a common ‘absolutist’ view that suicide is irrational almost by definition. Arguments to the effect that suicide is morally permissible or prohibited tend to follow from one’s position on this first issue of rationality. I want to argue that the concept of rationality is not appropriately ascribed – or withheld – to the victim or the act or the desire to commit the act. (...) To support this, I explore how the concept is ascribed and withheld in ordinary situations, and show that it is essentially future-oriented. Since the suicide victim has no future, it makes no sense to call his act rational or irrational. The more appropriate reaction to a declared desire for suicide, or to the news of a successful suicide, is horror and pity, and these are absent from Brandt’s account, as is a humble acknowledgement of the profound mystery at the heart of any suicide. (shrink)

Mainstream philosophical discussions of ethics usually involve either a search for a problem-solving theory (such as utilitarianism), or an exploration of ontological status (of things like obligations or reasons). This book will argue that such efforts are often misplaced. Instead, the proper starting point should always be the actual words and deeds of ordinary people in ordinary disagreements; for the ethical concepts in play can only derive their full meaning within the context of ordinary human lives. This will require a (...) better understanding of the 'ordinary', and of what it means to lead a life. (shrink)

In Kimberly Brownlee’s book, Conscience and Conviction, she argues that Thomas More’s paradigmatic ‘personal objection’ successfully meets the 4 conditions of her ‘Communicative Principle’. In this article I want to challenge Brownlee’s ‘universality’ condition and the ‘dialogical’ condition by focusing on a counter-example of a British GP conscientiously objecting to authorizing an abortion. I argue that such an objection can be morally admirable, even though the GP is not politically active, even though she is not open-minded to the possibility that (...) she might be wrong, and even if she refuses to condemn her non-objecting colleagues. I suggest that this particular counter-example can tell us more general things about the nature of ethical disagreement and ethical incomprehension. (shrink)

How and to what degree are we responsible for our characters, our lives, our misfortunes, our relationships and our children? This question is at the heart of "Moral Responsibility". The book explores accusations and denials of moral responsibility for particular acts, responsibility for character, and the role of luck and fate in ethics. Moral responsibility as the grounds for a retributivist theory of punishment is examined, alongside discussions of forgiveness, parental responsibility, and responsibility before God. The book also discusses collective (...) responsibility, bringing in notions of complicity and membership, and drawing on the seminal contemporary discussion of collective agency and responsibility: the Nuremberg trials. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin introduced the example of Margo, who was so severely demented that she could not recognise any family or friends, and could not remember anything of her life. At the same time, however, she seemed full of childish delight. Dworkin also imagines that, before her dementia, Margo signed an advance refusal of life-saving treatment. Now severely demented, she develops pneumonia, easy to treat, but lethal if untreated. Dworkin argues that the advance refusal ought to be heeded and Margo be (...) allowed to die of that pneumonia, on the basis that the prior refusal expresses her true wishes. In this paper I want to challenge Dworkin’s understanding of identity and his conclusion about advance refusals, and I develop my argument in two directions. First, I argue that the demented Margo is not some ‘lesser’ version of the ‘true’ Margo, but instead that the present Margo’s wishes should take precedence over those of the past Margo, on the grounds that all of us are entitled to change our minds. Second, I argue for a stronger role for friends and family members in sustaining the demented Margo’s identity through her years of decline. Based on this, I argue for a presumption against the advance refusal, but I allow that in extreme cases, a friend might have the authority to demand that it be heeded. (shrink)

In a recent thought-provoking piece, Peter Roberts argues against the central role of happiness as a guiding concept in education, and argues for more attention to be paid to despair. This does not mean cultivating despair in young people, but allowing them to make sense of their own natural occasional despair, as well as the despair of others. I agree with Roberts about happiness, and about the need for more attention to despair, but I argue that focusing too much on (...) despair is dangerous without paying simultaneous attention to goodness. Roberts argues that students must be helped to face the despair born of the realisation that we can never be sure of the moral grounds on which our actions are based, we can never fully know ourselves, and that education should make us more appreciative of what we don't know. I argue against all three claims: there are some moral truths that we can know; we can know enough of ourselves in certain contexts; education should not only teach intellectual humility, it should also give us confidence in appreciating the sources of meaning that are ordinarily available, e.g. personal relationships. The paper concludes with a response to the objection that my position is little more than old-fashioned moralism and conservatism. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 218-224, February 2022.

In a recent thought-provoking piece, Peter Roberts argues against the central role of happiness as a guiding concept in education, and argues for more attention to be paid to despair. This does not mean cultivating despair in young people, but allowing them to make sense of their own natural occasional despair, as well as the despair of others. I agree with Roberts about happiness, and about the need for more attention to despair, but I argue that focusing too much on (...) despair is dangerous without paying simultaneous attention to goodness. Roberts argues that students must be helped to face the despair born of the realisation that we can never be sure of the moral grounds on which our actions are based, we can never fully know ourselves, and that education should make us more appreciative of what we don't know. I argue against all three claims: there are some moral truths that we can know; we can know enough of ourselves in certain contexts; education should not only teach intellectual humility, it should also give us confidence in appreciating the sources of meaning that are ordinarily available, e.g. personal relationships. The paper concludes with a response to the objection that my position is little more than old-fashioned moralism and conservatism. (shrink)

Charles Griswold’s 2007 book Forgiveness argues that genuine forgiveness of an unexcused, unjustified and unignored offence must be normgoverned and conditional. In the same way that gift-giving is governed by norms of appropriateness, so too is forgiveness; and the appropriateness of forgiving is centrally dependent on the offender’s repentance. In response, I claim that genuine forgiveness must always be elective and unconditional, and therefore genuinely unpredictable, no matter how much – or how little – the offender repents. I consider and (...) reject one defence of unconditional forgiveness, that of Garrard and McNaughton. I then develop my own account, which builds on Bernard Williams’ notion of practical necessity. (shrink)

I confess to finding the term ‘supererogation’ ugly and unpronounceable. I am also generally suspicious of technical terms in moral philosophy, since they are vulnerable to self-serving definition and counter-definition, to the point of obscuring whether there is a single phenomenon about which to disagree. It was surely not accidental that J.O. Urmson, in his classic 1958 article that launched the contemporary Anglophone debate, eschewed the technical term in favour of the more familiar concepts of saints and heroes. Since then, (...) however, the term Supererogation has bedded down to encompass a number of more or less clear-cut philosophical debates, one of which concerns precisely the extent to which saintliness and heroism exhaust the supererogatory. And it has to be admitted that the word ‘saint’ has certain theological connotations that might be misleading in a secular philosophical discussion, while the word ‘hero’ has potentially limiting associations with knights and soldiers and other forms of testosterone-driven accomplishment. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophy assumes an account of what it means to legitimately change one’s mind in ethics, and I wish to challenge this account by enlarging the category of the legitimate. I am just as eager to avoid illegitimate mind-changing brought on by deceit or brainwashing, but I claim that legitimacy should be defined in terms of transparency of method. A social reformer should not be embarrassed to admit that he acquired many beliefs about justice while reading Dickens. As such, (...) appeals to the heart and the imagination are just as legitimate, within limits, as appeals to the mind; and showing can be as legitimate as telling. To demonstrate this, I consider the example of a vegetarian trying to ‘convert’ a carnivore. I then ask what it means when the carnivore claims to have been previously mistaken. (shrink)

Medical ethics is normally taught in a combination of three ways: through discussions of normative theories and principles; through for-and-against debating of topics; or through case studies. I want to argue that a fourth approach might be better, and should be used more: teaching medical ethics through medical law. Medical law is already deeply imbued with ethical concepts, principles and reasons, and allows the discussion of ethics through the “back door,” as it were. The two greatest advantages of the law (...) are its familiar authority, especially among the disengaged medical students who have little interest or respect for the subject of ethics; and its focus on the reality of the people and the tragedies discussed. Finally, I argue that medical law, unlike ethics, allows more efficient and more detailed MCQ assessment. (shrink)

I claim that the dominant moral-realist understanding of action and moral responsibility cannot provide a comprehensive account of morality since it neglects the irreducibly personal component of the individual’s moral experience. This is not to embrace non-cognitivism, however; indeed, I challenge the whole realist framework of most contemporary moral philosophy. To this end I explore the phenomenon of moral necessity, exemplified by Luther’s declaration that he “has to” continue his protests against the church. I am careful to distinguish this kind (...) of necessity from physical or psychological necessity, from means-end necessity and from the Categorical Imperative, and I suggest that it is far more widespread and far more complex than the realist or non-cognitivist would allow. Thesedeclarations are personal in that they do not entail any necessary universalisability of the judgement; however, their personal nature does not mean that they must collapse into the merely personal realm of whim and preference. Instead, Luther can be said to experience a legitimately objective demand that he behave thus and so, even though others would not experience such a demand in a relevantly similar situation. This irreducible heterogeneity of the moral, I suggest, lies at the heart of the intractability of many moral arguments. My argument can be derived as broadly Wittgensteinian (without being exegetical), and draws on the work of Peter Winch and Bernard Williams. (shrink)

Forgiveness is a perennially rich topic in philosophy. It gathers together questions of ethics as well as philosophy of mind, action and emotion; it has analytic and Continental slants, and an impo...

In Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is an impoverished university student who commits a brutal double-murder of an old money-lender and her sister, and then for much of the novel manages to evade detection.1 He is racked by guilt and anxiety from the act. Sonia is a young woman who lives with her parents and several siblings. Her father is an alcoholic, unable to hold down a job, and Sonia has therefore become a prostitute to support the family. (...) What is remarkable about Sonia is that she feels no bitterness, either to her father, or to her family, or to her clients, or even to fate itself.The novel traces an arc from the murders in part I to Raskolnikov's confession to the police .. (shrink)

I examine the ‘momentous’ choices that one makes early in life – about career or spouse, for example – and I ask what it means to regret such choices at the end of one’s life. I argue that such regrets are almost meaningless because of the difficulty of imaginatively accessing a much earlier self. I then contrast long-term regret to remorse, and argue that the two are qualitatively different experiences because remorse involves another person as victim.

Notoriously, most philosophers write for other philosophers. Most philosophy books are designed for students of philosophy, students who can be assumed to have signed up and remained in the subject voluntarily, and therefore to have a certain interest in the subject and a certain understanding of the point of it all. In this paper I want to consider the philosopher’s engagement with those who, living in the ‘real world’, have had neither interest in nor exposure to philosophy beyond the stereotypes (...) of popular culture.1 By ‘engagement’ I have in mind formal pedagogical encounters such as compulsory teaching sessions in professional schools, public discussions and television talk-shows where the speaker is introduced as a ‘philosopher’, but above all the informal conversations that a philosopher inevitably has with his family, neighbours, doctor, accountant, his child’s teachers, his priest etc., where he is not so much teaching philosophy as explaining what the subject is. I’m hoping this is not of merely anthropological concern, but that this exploration can reveal something important about teaching the subject to philosophy students as well, even if for reasons of space it will have to be a bit polemical. (shrink)

There is a long-standing philosophical discussion about the relationship between love and choice. The most simplistic versions see love as something one “falls” into, without any choice at all. A more sophisticated account of love would accommodate some degree of indirect choice: I feel an initial interest, and choose to seek her out more. I can also choose to create and sustain the conditions that support love, for example, by avoiding infidelity and long commutes. However, such indirect choices are relatively (...) discrete or time-limited. In contrast, I want to explore a more temporally extended kind of choice, which starts when I take responsibility for the other. This is an attitude involving a prospective commitment, an achievement of the imagination, and an active concern. I argue that one essential requirement of longer-term adult romantic and friendly love is precisely that the lover takes responsibility for meeting the beloved’s unpredictable and possibly onerous needs in the future. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Special Issue on Recklessness and Negligence. It highlights the main issues and controversies that surround these concepts and then briefly introduces each of the papers that comprise the Special Issue.

Imagine that you find yourself in a situation of considerable adversity and apparent permanence. Does it make sense for me to advise you to learn to love your situation? I argue that such advice is capable of a robust meaning beyond the mere expression of compassion, and far beyond the pragmatic advice to ‘accept it’ or ‘make the best of it’. I respond to the objections that love cannot be commanded, and that I am counselling pernicious forms of self-deception or (...) self-deprecation. The key, I suggest, is to understand what it means to lead a life ‘from the inside’. (shrink)

The 2016, the UK Supreme Court case of Jogee confirmed a long-standing convention in English law. In cases where D is assisting or encouraging P to commit an offence, D will only be liable as an accessory for that offence if she intentionally assists or encourages P and if she knows the essential features of the offence. In this paper, I discuss and develop some of the arguments from Sanford Kadish’s 1996 article “Reckless Complicity.” I argue that a special sub-category (...) of complicity, namely ‘enabling’, can be done recklessly, and is sufficiently blameworthy to ground criminal liability. (shrink)

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore (...) partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change. (shrink)

In 1965 Peter Winch published ‘The Universalisability of Moral Judgements’. I feel that the argument in this paper has never been successfully refuted, and that it remains relevant to many contemporary debates in moral philosophy. Winch argued against the widespread assumption that a moral judgement, if true, ought to be universalisable for all people in relevantly similar situations. He considers the example of Captain Vere in Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’: Vere managed to condemn a man he considered innocent, while Winch concludes (...) that in the same situation he could not have done it. Many contemporary moral realists would demand that at least one of them was incorrect, probably because of misperceiving the situation . Instead, says Winch, there is a sense in which one action legitimately ‘struck’ Vere, but not Winch, as correct, and that this is the end of the ‘dispute’ between them. However, this requires a robust defence against counter-charges of relativism. Part of the problem with Winch’s article, I argue, is his ambiguous use of the concept of ‘moral rightness’, but I remedy this, and defend Winch against two further sympathetic criticisms. (shrink)

John Bayley was married to Iris Murdoch for 45 years. In the last few years of her life, Murdoch developed Alzheimer’s, and John Bayley wrote a memoir about their life together, including the difficulties of looking after her with the disease. Although the Memoir was generally well-received, some critics called the publication an act of betrayal, because of the intimacy of some of the revelations, because of the public reduction of a great mind to a sick old woman, and especially (...) because of Murdoch’s inability to consent or respond to it. I agree, but I think it was even worse than that. I want to distinguish the ‘shallow’ betrayal of a ‘three-dimensional’ person in the narrow timeframe of the present from a ‘deep’ betrayal – and I will argue that Bayley is guilty of both. Deep betrayal essentially involves a close intimate of the victim betraying the ‘four-dimensional’ person across her whole life, as well as betraying the relationship between them. Such a betrayal inevitably casts a shadow back on our understanding of the earlier relationship between Bayley and Murdoch. (shrink)

Forgiveness is one possible response by a 'victim' to a specific act of wrongdoing, especially when the 'wrongdoer' apologises and invites joint condemnation of the act , perhaps explaining the source of misjudgement or ignorance that brought it about. In this paper, however, I will ask what the victim can do when faced with an unrepentant wrongdoer, perhaps some-one who even refuses to acknowledge that a wrong act was committed or that the victim 'really' suffered . Importantly, I will ask (...) if it is possible to forgive some-one just for being who they are - for example, estranged parents - without necessarily implying an attempt to resume a broken relationship. This will involve a conceptual analysis of the term as used in the situation, in parallel to a phenomenological analysis of how the victim is to come to see the wrongdoer and her act in order to forgive her. My account will stress two aspects of the 'wrongdoing situation' in order to relocate the problem rather than attempt to solve it - first, the wrongdoer's unique narrative history, and the more or less intelligible role played by the wrong act within such a self-understanding; second, the fundamental uncertainty of motive that lies at the heart of all human action and thus impedes one's ability to ever fully understand a wrong act, whether committed by others or by oneself. (shrink)

By looking at the situations faced by the protagonists of two classic plays , I try to shed light on what it means to face an insoluble moral dilemma, what it might mean to deal with it, and how the dilemma can reveal certain crucial information about the decision-maker to us readers-spectators, to other characters in the play who witness, or are implicated by, the incident, as well as, and perhaps most importantly, to the protagonist himself. In so doing, I (...) distinguish the above dilemmas from moral-prudential dilemmas and from apparent dilemmas constituted by the mere lack of epistemological access. Indeed, I generally resist the various reductive approaches characteristic of much analytic moral philosophy, and challenge the notion of a uniquely right answer to which all rational moral agents can be held accountable. (shrink)

This volume of original work comprises a modest challenge, sometimes direct, sometimes implicit, to the mainstream Anglo-American conception of the discipline of medical ethics. It does so not by trying to fill the gaps with exotic minority interest topics, but by re-examining some of the fundamental assumptions of the familiar philosophical arguments, and some of the basic situations that generate the issues. The most important such situation is the encounter between the doctor and the suffering patient, which forms one of (...) the themes of the book. The authors show that concepts such as the body, suffering and consent - and the role such concepts play within patients' lives - are much more complicated than the Anglo-American mainstream appreciates. Some of these concepts have been discussed with subtlety by Continental philosophers, and a secondary purpose of the volume is to apply their ideas to medical ethics. Designed for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students with some philosophical background in ethics, Reconceiving Medical Ethics opens up new avenues for discussion in this ever-developing field. (shrink)

According to its simplest definition, supererogation means freely and intentionally doing good beyond the requirements of duty. A more complex definition incorporates the responses of third parties: the supererogatory act is one that is praiseworthy if performed, but not blameworthy if omitted, as long as one does one's duty. This collection of essays, based on papers delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Annual Conference in Dublin in June 2014, explores a broad range of philosophical problems that stem from various (...) definitions of supererogation. How can something be good and yet not required? How relevant is the agent's motivation to our assessment of that agent's sacrifice? What is the difference between supererogation and virtue? Is supererogation essential to friendship and love? Do all of us have the genuine capacity to be saints and heroes? (shrink)

Elvio Baccarini has responded generously to my book Medical Ethics: Ordinary Concepts, Ordinary Lives , but I would like to respond to three of his criticisms: first, about the role that theory ought to play in, and in relation to, moral experience; second, about my defence of a doctor’s right to conscientiously object to performing legal abortions; and third, to the reality of posthumous harm. Baccarini claims that I have overstated my claims, and drawn illegitimate metaphysical conclusions from people’s ordinary (...) language. However, I argue that moral language is special precisely because of the way it expresses an irreducible personal perspective. (shrink)

We are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero—even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of “creative nonfiction” and “life writing” have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation. Cowley and his (...) contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one’s life story or understand another’s. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues. (shrink)

Most discussions in ethics argue that a certain practice or act is morally justified, with any underlying theory taken as supporting a guide to general action by aiding discovery of the objectively and singularly right thing to do. I suggest that this oversimplifies the agent’s own experience of the moral dilemma, and I take the recent English case of Diane Pretty’s request for assisted suicide as an example. Here the law reacted one way, despite the obvious sympathy many felt for (...) her. This only appears paradoxical, I suggest, because too much is expected of the concept of justification, and because moral understanding of a particular case is too often reduced to the legalistic search for general justificatory reasons. The starting point should be, I conclude, a full awareness of the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I”. (shrink)

Forgiveness is a perennially rich topic in philosophy. It gathers together questions of ethics as well as philosophy of mind, action and emotion; it has analytic and Continental slants, and an impo...

Most discussions of conscientious objection in healthcare assume that the objection is universal: a doctor objects to all abortions. I want to investigate selective objections, where a doctor objec...

Volume 28, Issue 2, May 2020, Page 205-312.

Volume 25, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 286-289.