ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2995-2067
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Philosophy | Philosophical Psychology (incl. Moral Psychology and Philosophy of Action) | Epistemology | Philosophy of Cognition | History and Philosophy of Science (incl. Non-historical Philosophy of Science) | Ethical Theory | Philosophy Of Language | Metaphysics | Philosophy Not Elsewhere Classified |
Expanding Knowledge in Philosophy and Religious Studies | Other | Behavioural and cognitive sciences | Communication Networks and Services not elsewhere classified | Expanding Knowledge in Economics | The Media | Physical sciences
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Date: 2016
DOI: 10.1002/THT3.188
Abstract: The essentially comparative conception of value entails that the value of a state of affairs does not depend solely upon features intrinsic to the state of affairs, but also upon extrinsic features, such as the set of feasible alternatives. It has been argued that this conception of value gives us reason to abandon the transitivity of the better than relation. This paper shows that the support for intransitivity derived from this conception of value is very limited. On its most plausible interpretations, it merely provides a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for intransitivity. It is further argued that the essentially comparative conception of value appears to support a disjunctive conclusion: there is incommensurability of value or betterness is not transitive. Of these two alternatives, incommensurability is preferable, because it is far less threatening to our other axiological commitments.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-2003
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 05-10-2015
DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199943418.013.7
Abstract: This chapter argues that, because humanitarian intervention typically involves the military of one state attempting to overthrow another state’s government, it gives rise to different moral questions from simple cases of interpersonal defensive violence. State sovereignty not only protects institutions within a society that contribute to the satisfaction of in iduals’ interests and that cannot be easily restored once overthrown it also plays a role in the constitution of those interests, which cannot be assumed to be invariant across different forms of social life. As a result, humanitarian intervention will frequently give rise to incommensurability between the pre-intervention and post-intervention states of affairs. The reasons against violating sovereignty, together with reasons for conservativism in action that arise in circumstances of incommensurable value, mean that the threshold for the moral permissibility of humanitarian intervention is high. The chapter concludes by outlining how humanitarian intervention might be internationalized, making it easier to justify.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 05-10-2015
DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199943418.001.0001
Abstract: Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest-among philosophers, legal scholars, and military experts-in the ethics of war. This resurgence of interest has multiple causes: escalating and persistent conflicts around the globe over the last 20 years the growth of new forms of unconventional and asymmetrical warfare and the appearance of new issues like targeted killings and drones. Much of the most exciting theoretical and applied research over this time has radically called into question traditional modes of just war theory. This Oxford Handbook offers a guide to thinking through the ethics of war. It has two aims: to present chapters that introduce the reader to a broad range of the central topics in just war theory, and to make significant advances in each of those debates. The first section focuses on methodology the second section on historical just war theory in the Western tradition. The remaining sections are structured according to the traditional categories of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum - Resort, Conduct, and Aftermath. The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War aims to set the terms of the debate around this essential topic for the coming decade.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-10-2014
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 02-05-2023
DOI: 10.1017/PSA.2023.81
Abstract: We model the impact of different incentives on journal behavior in undertaking peer review. Under one scheme, the journal aims to publish the highest-quality papers under the second, the journal aims to maintain a high rejection rate. Under both schemes, journals prefer to set very high standards for acceptance despite allowing significant error in peer review. Under the second scheme, however, in order to encourage more submissions of mediocre papers, the journal is incentivized to make its editorial process less accurate. This leads to both worse peer review and lower-quality articles being published.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 29-09-2007
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 03-10-2016
DOI: 10.1136/MEDETHICS-2015-103327
Abstract: Mass vaccination has been a successful public health strategy for many contagious diseases. The immunity of the vaccinated also protects others who cannot be safely or effectively vaccinated—including infants and the immunosuppressed. When vaccination rates fall, diseases like measles can rapidly resurge in a population. Those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons are at the highest risk of severe disease and death. They thus may bear the burden of others' freedom to opt out of vaccination. It is often asked whether it is legitimate for states to adopt and enforce mandatory universal vaccination. Yet this neglects a related question: are those who opt out, where it is permitted, morally responsible when others are harmed or die as a result of their decision? In this article, we argue that in iduals who opt out of vaccination are morally responsible for resultant harms to others. Using measles as our main ex le, we demonstrate the ways in which opting out of vaccination can result in a significant risk of harm and death to others, especially infants and the immunosuppressed. We argue that imposing these risks without good justification is blameworthy and examine ways of reaching a coherent understanding of in idual moral responsibility for harms in the context of the collective action required for disease transmission. Finally, we consider several objections to this view, provide counterarguments and suggest morally permissible alternatives to mandatory universal vaccination including controlled infection, self-imposed social isolation and financial penalties for refusal to vaccinate.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 07-2004
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-2009
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2020
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 07-2021
DOI: 10.1017/S1930297500007993
Abstract: Harmful acts are punished more often and more harshly than harmful omissions. This asymmetry has variously been ascribed to differences in how in iduals perceive the causal responsibility of acts versus omissions and to social norms that tend to proscribe acts more frequently than omissions. This paper examines both of these hypotheses, in conjunction with a new hypothesis: that acts are punished more than omissions because it is usually more efficient to do so. In typical settings, harms occur as a result of relatively few harmful actions, but many in iduals may have had the opportunity to prevent or rectify the harm. Penalising actors therefore requires relatively few punishment events compared to punishing omitters. We employ a novel group paradigm in which harm occurs only if both actors and omitters contribute to the harm. Subjects play a repeated economic game in fixed groups involving a social dilemma (total N = 580): on each round self-interest favours harmful actions (taking from another) and harmful omissions (failing to repair the victim’s loss), but the group payoff is maximized if in iduals refrain from these behaviors. In one treatment harm occurs as a result of one action and two omissions in the other, it is the result of two actions and one omission. In the second treatment, the more efficient strategy to maximize group benefit is to punish omissions. We find that subjects continue to prefer to punish acts rather than omissions, with two important caveats. There is still a substantial level of punishment of omissions, and there is also evidence of some responsiveness to the opportunity to enforce a more efficient rule. Further analysis addresses whether the omission effect is associated with asymmetric norm-based attitudes: a substantial proportion of subjects regard it as equally fair to punish harmful acts and omissions, while another portion endorse an asymmetry and punishment behavior correlates with these attitudes in both groups.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 20-02-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2008
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2018
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X18000080
Abstract: We argue that although objectivist moral attitudes may facilitate cooperation, they are not necessary for the high levels of cooperation in humans. This is implied by evolutionary models that articulate a mechanism underlying Stanford's account, and is also suggested by the ability of merely conventional social norms to explain extreme human behaviors.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 10-2011
DOI: 10.1093/MIND/FZQ082
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 22-08-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2005
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 07-2005
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-2019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 28-06-2013
DOI: 10.1111/PHPR.12050
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 04-09-2014
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 20-09-2017
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-017-00731-0
Abstract: Social norms are an important element in explaining how humans achieve very high levels of cooperative activity. It is widely observed that, when norms can be enforced by peer punishment, groups are able to resolve social dilemmas in prosocial, cooperative ways. Here we show that punishment can also encourage participation in destructive behaviours that are harmful to group welfare, and that this phenomenon is mediated by a social norm. In a variation of a public goods game, in which the return to investment is negative for both group and in idual, we find that the opportunity to punish led to higher levels of contribution, thereby harming collective payoffs. A second experiment confirmed that, independently of whether punishment is available, a majority of subjects regard the efficient behaviour of non-contribution as socially inappropriate. The results show that simply providing a punishment opportunity does not guarantee that punishment will be used for socially beneficial ends, because the social norms that influence punishment behaviour may themselves be destructive.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-2022
DOI: 10.1007/S11229-022-03742-7
Abstract: This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them (especially in systematic comparison) is largely absent. In this paper we seek to address this gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses (especially with signalling), several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable (or reducible to one another), because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 24-01-2007
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 12-2005
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 10-06-2010
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 24-08-2016
DOI: 10.1136/MEDETHICS-2016-103593
Abstract: The human faculty of moral judgement is not well suited to address problems, like climate change, that are global in scope and remote in time. Advocates of 'moral bioenhancement' have proposed that we should investigate the use of medical technologies to make human beings more trusting and altruistic and hence more willing to cooperate in efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change. We survey recent accounts of the proximate and ultimate causes of human cooperation in order to assess the prospects for bioenhancement. We identify a number of issues that are likely to be significant obstacles to effective bioenhancement, as well as areas for future research.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 07-11-2011
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820811000306
Abstract: What difference does it make to matters of value, for a desire-satisfactionist, if a given desire is absent , rather than present ? I argue that it is most plausible to hold that the state in which a given desire is satisfied is, other things being equal, incommensurate with the state in which that desire does not exist at all. In addition to illustrating the internal attractions of the view, I demonstrate that this idea has attractive implications for population ethics. Finally, I show that the view is not subject to John Broome's ‘greedy neutrality’ worry.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 21-09-2007
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 20-10-2007
Start Date: 08-2019
End Date: 06-2025
Amount: $1,039,125.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2006
End Date: 12-2009
Amount: $223,020.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 01-2009
End Date: 12-2013
Amount: $314,500.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 07-2019
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $220,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2015
End Date: 12-2018
Amount: $154,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity