• Contributors

  • Alastair Norcross
  • Alison Hills
  • Andrew Reisner
  • Antti Kauppinen
  • Bart Streumer
  • Brian McElwee
  • Dan Moller
  • Daniel Star
  • David Enoch
  • David Owens
  • David Wasserman
  • Fiona Woollard
  • Frances Kamm
  • Gerald Lang
  • Gilbert Harman
  • Guy Kahane
  • Hagop Sarkissian
  • Helen Frowe
  • Iwao Hirose
  • James Morauta
  • Japa Pallikkathayil
  • Jeff McMahan
  • John Broome
  • John Oberdiek
  • Jonas Olson
  • Joseph Raz
  • Julia Driver
  • Kimberley Brownlee
  • Krister Bykvist
  • Laura Franklin-Hall
  • Matthew Smith
  • Matthew Silverstein
  • Melinda Roberts
  • Mike Otsuka
  • Neil Levy
  • Nicholas Southwood
  • Nick Shackel
  • Nir Eyal
  • Rahul Kumar
  • Rebecca Roache
  • Richard Ashcroft
  • S. Matthew Liao
  • Saul Smilansky
  • Sergio Tenenbaum
  • Shlomi Segall
  • Simon Kirchin
  • Stephen Kearns
  • Thom Brooks
  • Toby Ord
  • Tom Douglas
  • Tom Hurka
  • Ulrike Heuer
  • Wlodek Rabinowicz

• Readings

  • 
    From Normativity to Responsibility
    Joseph Raz
    
  • 
    Ethics and Moral Philosophy
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover
    N. Ann Davis, Richard Keshen and Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Reflective Knowledge
    Ernest Sosa
    
  • 
    Know How
    Jason Stanley
    
  • 
    New Waves in Ethics
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War
    F. M. Kamm
    
  • 
    On What Matters
    Derek Parfit
    
  • 
    Semantic Relationism
    Kit Fine
    
  • 
    All the Power in the World
    Peter Unger
    
  • 
    Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory
    Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni
    
  • 
    Beyond Humanity?
    Allen E. Buchanan
    
  • 
    Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
    Patricia S. Churchland
    
  • 
    Equality and Tradition
    Samuel Scheffler
    
  • 
    Climate Ethics
    Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue
    
  • 
    The Character of Consciousness
    David J. Chalmers
    
  • 
    Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
    Thomas Nagel
    
  • 
    Well-Being and Death
    Ben Bradley
    
  • 
    The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoisim
    Alison Hills
    
  • 
    Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation
    Michael Strevens
    
  • 
    The Case for Contextualism
    Keith DeRose
    
  • 
    When Truth Gives Out
    Mark Richard
    
  • 
    The Idea of Human Rights
    Charles R. Beitz
    
  • 
    Willing, Wanting, Waiting
    Richard Holton
    
  • 
    The Idea of Justice
    Amartya Sen
    
  • 
    Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem
    Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman
    
  • 
    What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
    Richard Kraut
    
  • 
    Content and Justification
    Paul A. Boghossian
    
  • 
    Thoughts: Papers on Mind, Meaning, and Modality
    Stephen Yablo
    
  • 
    Normativity
    Judith Jarvis Thomson
    
  • 
    How We Get Along
    J. David Velleman
    
  • 
    Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity
    Christine M. Korsgaard
    
  • 
    Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason
    Sergio Tenenbaum
    
  • 
    Killing in War
    Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Experimental Philosophy
    Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
    
  • 
    Disadvantage
    Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit
    
  • 
    Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics
    Allan Gibbard
    
  • 
    Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame
    T. M. Scanlon
    
  • 
    The Philosophy of Philosophy
    Timothy Williamson
    
  • 
    Morality without Foundations
    Mark Timmons
    
  • 
    Authority and Estrangement
    Richard Moran
    
  • 
    Moral Psychology, Volume 1
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    
  • 
    The Reflective Life
    Valerie Tiberius
    
  • 
    Moral Literacy
    Barbara Herman
    
  • 
    On Human Rights
    James Griffin
    
  • 
    Experiments in Ethics
    Kwame Anthony Appiah
    
  • 
    Reasons without Rationalism
    Kieran Setiya
    
  • 
    Moral Realism: A Defence
    Russ Shafer-Landau
    
  • 
    The Way We Eat
    Peter Singer and Jim Mason
    
  • 
    Metaphysical Essays
    John Hawthorne
    
  • 
    10 Moral Paradoxes
    Saul Smilansky
    
  • 
    Normativity and the Will
    R. Jay Wallace
    
  • 
    Ideal Code, Real World
    Brad Hooker
    
  • 
    The Nature of Normativity
    Ralph Wedgwood
    
  • 
    Structures of Agency: Essays
    Michael E. Bratman
    
  • 
    The Second-Person Standpoint
    Stephen Darwall
    
  • 
    Ethics and the A Priori
    Michael Smith
    
  • 
    Weighing Lives
    John Broome
    
  • 
    Reasons and the Good
    Roger Crisp
    
• 
  This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
  

December 9, 2011
9am to 4pm
SUNY Global Center
116 East 55th Street, NY, NY
Sponsored by SUNY Downstate Medical Center

Speakers include:
Andre A. Fenton, SUNY Downstate Medical Center and New York University
David Glanzman, UCLA
Merle Kindt, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Adam Kolber, Brooklyn Law School
John L. Kubie, SUNY Downstate Medical Center
S. Matthew Liao, New York University
Todd C. Sacktor, SUNY Downstate Medical Center
David Wasserman, Yeshiva University

The NYU Center for Bioethics, Duke Kenan Institute for Ethics, Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies present a two-part conference on the Moral Brain.

Date: Friday, March 30th – Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Location: New York University, WSQ Campus, Room TBA
RSVP Required: http://goo.gl/PXHmO

UPDATE: Added a tentative list of chairpersons to Part I

Part I: “The Significance of Neuroscience for Morality: Lessons from a Decade of Research”
Organized by the NYU Center for Bioethics in collaboration with the Duke Kenan Institute for Ethics

Owing to some clerical error, this job is not in the JFP (Jobs for Philosophers) yet. Do let anyone you think would be suitable know about this position. Thanks!

The NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Environmental Studies Program invite applications for the position of Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, pending administrative and budgetary approval. The initial appointment will be for one year beginning September 1, 2012, renewable annually for a maximum of three years. An applicant should have a keen interest in and preferably have written and taught in areas bioethics and environmental studies. We also welcome candidates who have training in such areas as ethics, political philosophy, social and political theory, public policy, or environmental health, who have strong or emerging teaching and research interests in bioethics and environmental studies. Applicants must expect to receive their Ph.D by Fall 2012 or have completed it no more than three years before the start date. We especially urge minority and female candidates to apply.

Egalitarianisms: Current Debates on Equality and Priority in Health, Wealth, and Welfare
March 30th -31st, 2012
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Confirmed Speakers
Nir Eyal (Harvard)
Iwao Hirose (McGill)
Nils Holtug (Copenhagen)
Dennis McKerlie (Calgary)
Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Workshop Description

Egalitarian theories of distributive justice have recently encountered fundamental challenges. Is egalitarianism susceptible to the leveling down objection? Is it less plausible than prioritarianism? Does it support reducing the inequalities resulting from brute luck, but not option luck? Does it aim to equalize the distribution of welfare at each time or over a lifetime? What does egalitarianism make of the strong correlation between inequalities in health and inequalities in socio-economic conditions? In this two-day workshop, we will discuss current theoretical issues and seek common and unified grounds for future research into egalitarian theories of distributive justice.

The NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Environmental Studies Program invite applications for the position of Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, pending administrative and budgetary approval. The initial appointment will be for one year beginning September 1, 2012, renewable annually for a maximum of three years. An applicant should have a keen interest in and preferably have written and taught in areas bioethics and environmental studies. We also welcome candidates who have training in such areas as ethics, political philosophy, social and political theory, public policy, or environmental health, who have strong or emerging teaching and research interests in bioethics and environmental studies. Applicants must expect to receive their Ph.D by Fall 2012 or have completed it no more than three years before the start date. We especially urge minority and female candidates to apply.

I’m honored to be one of the keynote speakers at the 2011 Northeastern Workshop in Philosophy. Here are some details of the workshop.

Topic: “Ethical issues in Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems.”
September 30 to October 2, 2011
Northeastern University, Boston

Biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached from an engineering perspective. In environmental contexts this is exemplified in the discourses around geoengineering, designer ecosystems, and assisted colonization. In human health contexts it is exemplified in the discourses around synthetic biology, bionanotechnology, and human enhancement. This workshop will bring together ethicists, philosophers, and others working on issues related to engineering complex biological and ecological systems. The workshop is designed to provide speakers with constructive feedback from colleagues working on related issues.

2011 Annual Meeting of the International Neuroethics Society
Date: November 10 and 11, 2011
Location: The Carnegie Institution for Science, 1530 P Street, N.W. Washington, D.C.

Confirmed speakers include Helen Mayberg, Michael Chorost, Husseini Manji, Alan Leshner, Pat Churchland, Jonathan Moreno, Steve Greenberg, Jorge Moll, Hank Greely, Martha Farah, and others.

For more details, see here.

The NYU Center for Bioethics invites you to attend a public lecture by Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University; Research Director, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo

Friday, November 5, 2010
4:00-6:00 pm
5 Washington Pl., Room 202
(NE Corner of Washington Place at Mercer Street)
RSVP required-reception to follow.

‘Making Medicines Accessible For All: The Health Impact Fund as a Model of Structural Reform’

The NYU Center for Bioethics, in conjunction with the NYU Environmental Studies Program, will be hosting ‘Valuing Lives: A Conference on Ethics in Health and the Environment’ on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Various policy issues in environmental and health-related matters force policymakers to trade human lives against other values. Original, unpublished papers from philosophers, economists and legal scholars that address whether and how this can be done in a morally acceptable manner are welcomed. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: commensurability of human life and environmental values; compensation for harms to health; polling, public deliberation, and the appeal to expertise in evaluative matters; prioritizing the life and health of the young and the poorly-off; discounting future lives; saving identifiable lives vs. saving statistical lives; the precautionary principle; the human dignity objection to measuring the value of human life.

The NYU Center for Bioethics, in conjunction with the NYU Environmental Studies Program, will be hosting ‘Valuing Lives: A Conference on Ethics in Health and the Environment’ on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Various policy issues in environmental and health-related matters force policymakers to trade human lives against other values. Original, unpublished papers from philosophers, economists and legal scholars that address whether and how this can be done in a morally acceptable manner are welcomed. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: commensurability of human life and environmental values; compensation for harms to health; polling, public deliberation, and the appeal to expertise in evaluative matters; prioritizing the life and health of the young and the poorly-off; discounting future lives; saving identifiable lives vs. saving statistical lives; the precautionary principle; the human dignity objection to measuring the value of human life.

Professor Jeff McMahan at Rutgers University recently gave a talk at the NYU Center for Bioethics and the Department of Philosophy on “Gene Therapy, Cognitive Disability, and Abortion.”

With his permission, a podcast of his talk can be found here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

An abstract of his talk is as follows:

Readers may know that I’ve recently taken up an associate professorship in the Center for Bioethics with an affiliation in the philosophy department at NYU. The Center runs a Master’s Program in Bioethics and is holding an open house on

Thursday, March 4, 2010
5:30-7:30 PM
285 Mercer Street, 9th Floor
(Between Waverly and Washington Pl.)
New York, NY 10003

If you are interested in pursuing graduate studies in Bioethics, this will be a good opportunity to meet with the faculty and students and discuss the range of Program options and career benefits. Food and refreshments will be served.

AHRC workshop on “The Future of Consent”
Date: March 22nd-24th 2010
Location: Chancellor’s Conference Centre, Manchester

There are a limited number of places available for a two day interdisciplinary and international workshop—The Future of Consent—organised by Neil Manson and Dave Archard (Lancaster) and funded by the AHRC with additional support from the Society for Applied Philosophy.

Continuum Ethics
A series of books exploring key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy.

Continuum Ethics presents a series of books that will bridge the gap between new research work and undergraduate textbooks. They will provide close examination of key concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Aimed largely at upper-level undergraduates and research students, they will also appeal to researchers in the field. Authors will be expected to combine philosophical sophistication with an accessible style that can engage the educated reader.

The British Academy, in association with the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal, will be hosting an international conference on the work of Onora O’Neill, entitled “Ethics and Politics Beyond Borders: The Work of Onora O’Neill.

24-26 SEPTEMBER 2009
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
Convenor: Professor David Archard (Lancaster University)

Thursday, 24 September 2009
12.00 Registration

1.30 Session 1: The ethics and politics of global justice
Welcome and opening remarks

The 2nd annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME) will be held in Boulder, Colorado August 6-9 2009. Note that this is a congress, not just a conference. That means it’s more important. There may even be a sexual connotation to “congress” for those whose minds work like that. Who am I to judge?

Some have called the first RoME Congress (August 2008) “the best damn ethics conference or congress ever. Perhaps even the best damn philosophy conference or congress ever”. I am supremely confident that the 2nd RoME Congress will be even better.

At the James Martin Seminar in Oxford this week, Melbourne philosopher Rob Sparrow presented an argument against enhancement and procreative beneficence. His work had raised some interest in the popular media when he presented it a few months ago, and I posted a short potential response to his argument at Practical Ethics News.

In this post, and (if I can find time) subsequent posts I would like to explore the implications and possible responses to Rob’s intriguing reductio argument. First, an outline of the argument. Rob’s presentation was based upon a series of cases. I will reproduce them as faithfully as I can (from memory).

The Stony Brook University Department of Philosophy is hosting a conference on “Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy.” The conference features a fantastic group of speakers and panelists. Those who are interested in this topic should definitely consider attending.

A Special Issue on the Ethics of Enhancement guest-edited by me and two other Contributors of Ethics Etc, Julian Savulescu and David Wasserman, has just come out with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. Here are the links to the papers if you have institutional access:

The Ethics of Enhancement: Guest Editors’ Introduction
S. MATTHEW LIAO, JULIAN SAVULESCU, DAVID WASSERMAN

The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity
INGMAR PERSSON, JULIAN SAVULESCU

Issues in the Pharmacological Induction of Emotions
DAVID WASSERMAN, S. MATTHEW LIAO

Recently, British MP’s voted to allow the creation of hybrid embryos for medical research. These embryos would be 99.9% “human” but 0.1% “cow” or “rabbit” — the animal element is simply the use of animal eggs, from which animal DNA is extracted, human DNA implanted, the “hybrid” embryo is then given an electric shock, and then stem cells harvested for use in research. All matter must be destroyed within 14 days. (Q&A on hybrid embryos can be found here.)

This move has been highly controversial for several reasons. Some of these reasons include the following:

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