Articles and Chapters |
I no longer regularly update this list. See my PhilPapers profile for more current information, along with links to drafts of most of my papers.
Leaving (the Concept of) Deontology Behind. In The Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics (eds. Copp, Rosati, and Rulli), Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
An Ethical Framework for Presenting Scientific Results to Policy-Makers. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, forthcoming 2022.
How to Interpret COVID-19 Predictions: Reassessing IHME's Model. Philosophy of Medicine 2(1), 2021.
How Many Have Died? Issues in Science and Technology, 5 November 2020.
Thinking about Values in Science: Ethical versus Political Approaches. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.
M. Boulicault and S.A. Schroeder. Public Trust in Science:
Exploring the Idiosyncrasy-Free Ideal. Forthcoming in Social Trust, eds. Vallier and Weber, Routledge.
What makes science trustworthy to the public? This chapter examines
one proposed answer: the trustworthiness of science is based at least
in part on its independence from the idiosyncratic values, interests,
and ideas of individual scientists. That is, science is trustworthy to
the extent that following the scientific process would result in the
same conclusions, regardless of the particular scientists involved. We
analyze this "idiosyncrasy-free ideal" for science by looking at
philosophical debates about inductive risk, focusing on two recent
proposals which offer different methods of avoiding idiosyncrasy: the
high epistemic standards proposal and the democratic values proposal.
C.J.L. Murray and S.A. Schroeder. Ethical Dimensions of the Global Burden of Disease.
Forthcoming in Measuring the Global Burden of Disease: Philosophical Dimensions, eds. Eyal, Hurst, Murray, Schroeder, and Wikler, Oxford University Press.
This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the
Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks:
describing individuals' health states over time, assessing their health
states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the
information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. We
show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging
ethical questions. We comment on some of the philosophical issues
involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health
outcomes, choosing the counterfactual against which to assess causes,
aggregating and summarizing complex information across multiple
domains, discounting, age-weighting, handling fetal deaths, measuring
health inequalities, representing uncertainty, and assessing personal
responsibility for health outcomes.
Democratic Values: a Better Foundation for Public Trust in Science.
Forthcoming in the British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
(uncorrected draft).
There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core
parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This
undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In
this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in
value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote
trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second,
trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of
an individual member of the public. I argue that neither of these
proposals work and suggest an alternative that does better. When
scientists must appeal to values in the course of their research, they
should appeal to democratic values: the values of the public or its
representatives.
Which Values Should Be Built Into Economic
Measures? Economics and Philosophy 35(3), 2019.
(uncorrected draft).
Many economic measures are structured to reflect ethical values. I
describe three attitudes towards this: maximalism, according to which
we should aim to build all relevant values into measures; minimalism,
according to which we should aim to keep values out of measures; and
an intermediate view. I argue the intermediate view is likely
correct, but existing versions are inadequate. In particular,
economists have strong reason to structure measures to reflect fixed,
as opposed to user-assessable, values. I conclude by arguing that,
despite disagreement about how to do so, economists should standardly
adjust QALYs and DALYs to reflect egalitarian values.
What is Inductive Risk? Metascience 28(1), 2019.
A review of Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science, eds. Elliott and Richards.
Wellbeing, Opportunity, and Selecting for
Disability. Journal of Ethics and
Social Philosophy 14(1), 2018.
In this paper I look at the much-discussed case of disabled parents
seeking to conceive (or "selecting for") disabled children. I argue
that the permissibility of selecting for disability does not depend
on the precise impact the disability will have on the child's
wellbeing, as most assume, but rather on the impact that disability
will have on the child's future opportunities. Nearly all
bioethicists who have approached the issue in this way have argued
that disabilities like deafness unacceptably constrain a child's
opportunities. I argue, however, that this conclusion is premature
for several reasons. Most importantly, we don't have a good way of
comparing opportunity sets. I conclude by suggesting that
bioethicists and philosophers of disability need to more carefully
consider the relationship between disability and opportunity.
Is consistency
overrated? Journal of Medical Ethics 44(3), 2018.
Solberg, Norheim, and Barra have recently argued that there is a
serious problem with the way disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)
are calculated. Morbidity is measured in YLDs in a way quite unlike
the way mortality is measured in YLLs. This potentially renders them
incommensurable, like apples and oranges, and makes their aggregate
- DALYs - conceptually unsound. I argue, however, that DALYs are
best interpreted as an index (rather than as a measure), and that it
can be perfectly reasonable to add apples to oranges in an index.
That said, there can be instrumental reasons to prefer that an
index/measure stick to commensurable quantities. I conclude by
identifying some of these, and note how tehy have influenced the
construction of the DALY.
Using Democratic Values in Science: an Objection and (Partial)
Response. Philosophy of Science 84(5),
2017. (uncorrected draft).
Many philosophers of science have argued that social and ethical values
have a significant role to play in core parts of the scientific process.
A question that naturally arises is: when such value choices need to be
made, which or whose values should be used? A common
answer to this question turns to political values -- i.e., the values of
the public or its representatives. In this paper, I argue that this
imposes a morally significant burden on some scientists, effectively
requiring them to advocate for policy positions they strongly disagree
with. I conclude by discussing under what conditions this burden might
be justified.
Consequentializing and Its Consequences.
Philosophical Studies 174(6), 2017. (uncorrected draft)
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we can and
should "consequentialize" non-consequentialist moral theories,
putting them into a consequentialist framework. I argue that these
philosophers, often treated as a group, in fact offer three separate
arguments, two of which are incompatible. I show that none
represent significant threats to a committed non-consequentialist,
and that the literature has suffered due to a failure to distinguish
these arguments. I conclude by showing that the failure of the
consequentializers' arguments has implications for disciplines, such
as economics, logic, decision theory, and linguistics, which
sometimes use a consequentialist structure to represent
non-consequentialist ethical theories.
The public vs. private value of health, and their
relationship. Journal of Economic Methodology
24(3), 2017. (uncorrected
draft)
A review of Daniel Hausman's recent book, Valuing Health:
Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering. I outline the book's
content, and then suggest that, if Hausman's argument is correct,
the consequences for work in health measurement are more significant
than the book describes.
Value Choices in Summary
Measures of Population Health. Public Health
Ethics 10(2), 2017. (free access via link)
Summary measures of health, such as the QALY and DALY, have long been
known to incorporate a number of value choices. In this paper, though, I
show that the value choices in the construction of such measures extend
far beyond what is generally recognized. In showing this, I hope both to
improve the understanding of those measures by epidemiologists, health
economists, and policy-makers, and also to contribute to the general
debate about the extent to which such measures should be adjusted to
reflect ethical values.
Health, Disability, and Well-Being.
In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of
Well-Being (ed. Fletcher), 2016. (uncorrected draft)
Much academic work (in philosophy, economics,
law, etc.), as well as common sense, assumes that ill health
reduces well-being. It is bad for a person to become sick,
injured, disabled, etc. Empirical research, however, shows
that people living with health problems report surprisingly
high levels of well-being - in some cases as high as the
self-reported well-being of healthy people. In this chapter,
I explore the relationship between health and well-being. I
argue that although we have good reason to believe that
health problems causing pain and death typically do reduce
well-being, health problems that limit capabilities probably
don't reduce well-being nearly as much as most people
suppose. I then briefly explore the consequences of this
conclusion for political philosophy and ethics. If many
health problems don't significantly reduce well-being, why
should governments go to great expense to prevent or treat
them? Why should parents be obliged to ensure the health of
their children?
Basic Ethical Principles. In Case
Files: Ethics and Professionalism (ed. Cochrane, Toy, and
Raines), McGraw-Hill, 2015.
In this chapter,
the first case in a medical ethics textbook, I introduce a
number of core ethical ideas through a case study.
Imperfect Duties as Group
Obligations. Journal of Moral Philosophy 11(5),
2014. (uncorrected draft)
There is virtually no philosophical consensus on
what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out
three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect
duties should satisfy. Using beneficence as a leading example, I
suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have
trouble meeting those criteria. I then propose a new approach:
thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than
individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that
this proposal can satisfy the three criteria, explaining how
something can both have the necessity characteristic of
duty, while also allowing agents the latitude which seems to
attach to imperfect duties.
Rethinking
Health: Healthy or Healthier Than? British Journal for
Philosophy of Science 64(1), 2013. (uncorrected draft)
Some gradable concepts are more naturally
analyzed in terms of their comparative form. Taller
than, for example, seems more basic than tall, since
we can define the latter in terms of the former: to be tall is
to be taller than a sufficient number of objects in some
comparison class. For other concepts it's the reverse:
straight is plausibly more basic than straighter
than, since we can formulate the idea of perfect
straightness, which is then the basis for assessing relative
straightness. Without argument, theorists of health have
assumed that (or at least acted as if) health should be put in
the latter category. I argue, though, that there is good reason
to think that it should be grouped with the former:
healthier than is more basic than healthy. I show
that this apparently minor shift in focus has important
consequences for debates in the philosophy of medicine,
bioethics, and for the measurement of health.
Incidence, Prevalence, and Hybrid Approaches to Calculating
DALYs. Population Health Metrics 10(19),
2012. (open access)
When disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) are used to
measure the burden of disease on a population in a time
interval, they can be calculated in several different ways:
from an incidence, pure prevalence, or hybrid perspective. I
show that these calculation methods are not equivalent and
discuss some of the formal difficulties each method faces. I
show that if we don't discount the value of future health,
there is a sense in which the choice of calculation method is
a mere question of accounting. Such questions can be
important, but they don't raise deep theoretical concerns. If
we do discount, however, choice of calculation method can
change the relative burden attributed to different conditions
over time. I conclude by recommending that studies involving
disability-adjusted life years be explicit in noting what
calculation method is being employed and in explaining why
that calculation method has been chosen.
You Don't Have to Do What's Best! (A problem
for consequentialists and other teleologists). Oxford Studies
in Normative Ethics, vol. 1, ed. Mark Timmons, Oxford University
Press, 2011. (uncorrected
draft)
Define teleology as the view that requirements hold in virtue of
facts about value or goodness. Teleological views are quite popular,
and in fact some philosophers (e.g. Dreier, Smith) argue that all
(plausible) moral theories can be understood teleologically. I argue,
however, that certain well-known cases show that the teleologist must
at minimum assume that there are certain facts that an agent
ought to know, and that this means that requirements can't, in
general, hold in virtue of facts about value or goodness. I then
show that even if we grant those 'ought's teleology still runs into
problems. A positive justification of teleology looks like it will
require an argument of this form: O(X); if X, then O(Y); therefore
O(Y). But this form of argument isn't in general valid. I conclude by
offering two positive suggestions for those attracted to a
teleological outlook.
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