DEIXIS AND PERSONHOOD: A NEW PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNT

Abortion, Bioethics, and Personhood: A Philosophical Reflection

Abortion is the issue that first brought evangelical Christians and other cultural conservatives into the arena of bioethics. Although today bioethics is dominated by other issues that are perceived as more pressing, the answer to the philosophical question lurking behind abortion--Who and what are we?--turns out to be the key that unlocks the ethical quandaries posed by these other issues. Aft...

A Philosophical Account of Coerced Self-Incrimination

A Philosophical Defense of the Idea that Individuals Can Be Held in Personhood by Others:: Intercorporeal Personhood in Dementia Care

Since John Locke, regnant conceptions of personhood in Western philosophy have focused on individual capabilities for complex forms of consciousness that involve cognition such as the capability to remember past events and one’s own past actions, to think about and identify oneself as oneself, and/or to reason. Conceptions of personhood such as this one qualify as cognition-oriented, and they o...

Towards a Philosophical Account of Crimes Against Humanity

In this article I discuss the nature of crimes against humanity. The various definitions that have been used, or alluded to, in the legal literature are outlined, and it is suggested that they fall neatly into two camps by interpreting ‘humanity’ differently. It is proposed that any theory which adequately captures the nature of this crime must distinguish it qualitatively from other ‘lower’ cr...

Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

Debates on lethal autonomous weapon systems have proliferated in the past 5 years. Ethical concerns have been voiced about a possible raise in the number of wrongs and crimes in military operations and about the creation of a “responsibility gap” for harms caused by these systems. To address these concerns, the principle of “meaningful human control” has been introduced in the legal–political d...