Brian D. Earp

University of Oxford | OX · Faculty of Philosophy

The (latest) crisis in confidence in social psychology has generated much heated discussion about the importance of replication, including how it should be carried out as well as interpreted by scholars in the field. For example, what does it mean if a replication attempt “fails”—does it mean that the original results, or the theory that predicted...

Davis (2014) called for "extreme caution" in the use of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) to treat neurological disorders in children, due to gaps in scientific knowledge. We are sympathetic to his position. However, we must also address the ethical implications of applying this technology to minors. Compensatory trade-offs associated with NIBS...

A growing body of research has focused on so-called 'utilitarian' judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such 'utilitarian' judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear....

Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) reported evidence of a “Macbeth Effect” in social psychology: a threat to people's moral purity leads them to seek, literally, to cleanse themselves. In an attempt to build upon these findings, we conducted a series of direct replications of Study 2 from Z&L's seminal report. We used Z&L's original materials and methods...

Well-functioning romantic relationships are important for long-term health and well being, but they are often difficult to sustain. This difficulty arises (in part) because of an underlying tension between our psychobiological natures, culture/environment, and modern love and relationship goals. One possible solution to this predicament is to inter...

If you believe in the existence of an infinitely good, -knowing, and -powerful deity (“God”), how do you explain the reality of evil—including the inexpressible suffering and death of innocents? Wouldn’t God be forced to vanquish such suffering due to God’s very nature? Alvin Plantinga has argued, convincingly, that if the possibility of ultimate g...

Peterson et al. (2023) present a range of ethical issues that arise when considering the use of psychedelic substances within medicine. But psychedelics are, by their nature, boundary-dissolving, and we suggest that progress in the Ethics of Psychedelic Medicine is best made within a broader-ranging Psychedelic Bioethics, which encompasses not just...

Dear Editor, Kimani et al. (1) oppose medicalisation of non-therapeutic female genital cutting (FGC) in Global-South communities, regardless of consent/voluntariness or cutting severity, including non-tissue-removing forms ("ritual-nicking") and forms anatomically indistinguishable (2) from "cosmetic" FGC, already medicalised in the Global North (3...

This chapter summarizes an emerging sub-discipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi” (Earp, Latham and Tobia, 2020; Earp et al., 2020; Lewis, 2020; Mihailov, Hannikainen and Earp, 2021). Like empi...

Philosophy' and 'sex' are two words that may seem an uncomfortable pair. Philosophy is lofty, abstract, contemplative, concerned with drawing clear distinctions, and often done in the isolation of one's study; at least, common caricatures paint it as such. Sex is tangible, embodied, desire-driven, resistant to categorization, and often best when do...

How shall we decide for others who cannot (currently) decide for themselves? And who—or what, in the case of artificial intelligence—should make the decision? The present issue of the journal tackles several interrelated topics, many of them having to do with surrogate decision making. For example, the feature article by Jardas et al. (1) explores...

Endosex, in contrast to intersex, refers to innate physical sex characteristics judged to fall within the broad range of what is considered “usual for binary female or male bodies by the medical field,” or to persons with such characteristics [1] (p. 437). In this short contribution, we explain the origins and increasing use of this little-known te...

We are proud to introduce this special collection of papers on child genital alteration practices spanning the Global North and South and transcending conventional boundaries of sex and gender. It is increasingly recognized that there is an urgent need to evaluate all forms of genital cutting or surgery, especially those carried out on presumptivel...

Phrases like "true love" and "true happiness" are familiar ones. Yet it's unclear what they mean. Moreover, it seems that only some emotions are normally described as "true." For instance, people don't normally talk about "true grumpiness." This study investigates ordinary intuitions about which emotions can be "true."

How might emerging and future technologies-sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and 'gamify' romantic relationships-change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for "cautious optimism" about thei...

In the present chapter, we seek to better understand how laypeople reason about the “true self" of a person with advancing dementia. We are also interested in how such reasoning bears on laypeople’s views about the validity or invalidity of an advance directive (AD) regarding that person’s treatment. Toward that end, we will report the results of t...

Evidence suggests that psychedelics bring about their therapeutic outcomes in part through the subjective or qualitative effects they engender and how the individual interprets the resulting experiences. However, psychedelics are contraindicated for individuals who have been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses, on the grounds that these subject...

Pickering et al. (2022) argue that patients who refuse doctor-recommended treatments should in some cases be deemed incompetent to decide about their own medical care—in part because of their decision to refuse treatment— even if they would otherwise have been considered competent. This, then, would allow doctors to override the patients’ will and...

In many cultures, children with intersex traits are subjected to medically unnecessary genital operations in an attempt to reshape their sexual anatomy to approximate a more stereotypical male or female appearance. In addition to these surgeries, there are three main patterns of medically unnecessary genital operations performed on non-intersex chi...

Past research has found that people attribute less happiness to morally bad agents than to morally good agents. One proposed explanation for this effect is that attributions of emotions like happiness are influenced by judgments about their fittingness (i.e., whether they are merited). Another is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgment...

There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When a...

Laws on genital mutilation, gender affirmation and cosmetic genital surgery are at odds. The key criteria should be medical necessity and consent.

Introduction To improve the rigor of science, experimental evidence for scientific claims ideally needs to be replicated repeatedly with comparable analyses and new data to increase the collective confidence in the veracity of those claims. Large replication projects in psychology and cancer biology have evaluated the replicability of their fields...

The current legal status and medical ethics of routine or religious penile circumcision of minors is a matter of ongoing controversy in many countries. We focus on the United Kingdom as an illustrative example, giving a detailed analysis of the most recent guidance on the subject, from 2019, from the British Medical Association (BMA). We argue that...

For the use of artificial intelligence in clinical ethics to be ethically justified, it should improve the transparency and accuracy of ethical decision-making beyond that which physicians and ethics committees are currently capable of providing.

The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought...

The World Health Organization (WHO) condemns all medically unnecessary female genital cutting (FGC) that is primarily associated with people of color and the Global South, claiming that such FGC violates the human right to bodily integrity regardless of harm-level, degree of medicalization, or consent. However, the WHO does not condemn medically un...

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), customary female genital modification practices common in parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are inherently patriarchal: They reflect deep-rooted inequality between the sexes characterized by male dominance and constitute an extreme form of discrimination against women. H...

Celebrated as the ideal form of romance, a growing cadre of philosophers argue that monogamy is actually unethical. Note: the print version is titled, "To Have and to Hold."

FGM/C type IIIb in a 16-month old girl from Mali ( a , b ), admitted with acute retention of urine and acute renal failure, Mali.

Femawle Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or injury to the female genital organs that are medically unnecessary (i.e. performed primarily for cultural or religious reasons), especially when done without the consent of the affected person. Such procedure...

This paper argues that there exists a collective epistemic state of 'Broad Medical Uncertainty' (BMU) regarding the effectiveness of many medical interventions. We outline the features of BMU, and describe some of the main contributing factors. These include flaws in medical research methodologies, bias in publication practices, financial and other...

Testimony from hundreds of medical students and numerous physicians and scholars suggests that unconsented intimate exams (UIEs) are unlikely to be rare, isolated incidents. However, much is unknown about the frequency of these exams and the circumstances in which they take place. The Community Bioethics Forum, founded and chaired by one of the aut...

Defenders of male circumcision increasingly argue that female ‘circumcision’ (cutting of the clitoral hood or labia) should be legally allowed in Western liberal democracies even when non-consensual. In his target article, Richard Shweder (2022) gives perhaps the most persuasive articulation of this argument to have so far appeared in the literatur...

Transgender healthcare faces a dilemma. On the one hand, access to certain medical interventions, including hormone treatments or surgeries, where desired, may be beneficial or even vital for some gender dysphoric trans people. But on the other hand, access to medical interventions typically requires a diagnosis, which, in turn, seems to imply the...

Epigenetics – the study of mechanisms that influence and modify gene expression – is providing unique insights into how an individual’s social and physical environment impact the body at a molecular level, particularly in populations that experience stigmatization and trauma. Researchers are employing epigenetic studies to illuminate how epigenetic...

Labial and Clitoral adhesion. Examples of convergence of inner labia under the glans and intersection with clitoral hood.

Pictures without FGM/C and without lesions. This chapter will help the physician:

Informed consent is essential to ensuring a trauma-informed, survivor-centered, ethical process that respects the (developing) autonomy of a patient.

Please note that when WHO refers to labia minora and majora such terms are now replaced by inner and outer labia.

In recent years, the dominant Western discourse on “female genital mutilation” (FGM) has increasingly been challenged by scholars. Numerous researchers contest both the terminology used and the empirical claims made in what has come to be called “the standard tale” of FGM, also termed “female genital cutting” (FGC). The World Health Organization (W...

The WHO, American Academy of Pediatrics and other Western medical bodies currently maintain that all medically unnecessary female genital cutting of minors is categorically a human rights violation, while either tolerating or actively endorsing medically unnecessary male genital cutting of minors, especially in the form of penile circumcision. Give...

When we say that what two people feel for each other is 'true love,' we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use...

For the sake of this chapter, we will assume that sexbots of the future will be non-sentient and lack moral standing: they will be neither moral victims nor moral agents. That is, we will assume that sexbots are 'mere' machines that are reliably identifiable as such, despite their humanlike appearance and behaviour. Under these stipulations, sexbot...

This is an invited commentary on Noorani, T. (2021). Containment matters: set and setting in contemporary psychedelic psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, forthcoming.

In this commentary, we explore some ways in which insights from experimental philosophical bioethics (bioxphi), combined with the use of immersive digital technologies, may yield an even clearer picture of the concepts, intuitions, reasoning, and empirical assumptions commonly implicated in bioethics debates than is currently possible with existing...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00559-0

Campaigns to circumcise millions of boys and men to reduce HIV transmission are being conducted throughout eastern and southern Africa, recommended by the World Health Organization and implemented by the United States government and Western NGOs. In the United States, proposals to mass-circumcise African and African American men are long standing,...

The American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), American Society for Pain Management Nursing (ASPMN), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and other largely U.S.-based medical organizations have argued that at least some forms of non-therapeutic child genital cutting, including routine penile circumcision, are ethically permissible even when perfor...

A brief set of recommendations regarding ethical standards and practice guidelines as a prerequisite to clitoral reconstruction following female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)

A core challenge for contemporary bioethics is how to address the tension between respecting an individual’s autonomy and promoting their wellbeing when these ideals seem to come into conflict.This tension is often reflected in discussions of the ethical status of guardianship and other surrogate decision-making regimes for individuals with differe...

This chapter evaluates the abolition of gender. There is a powerful set of assumptions in Western culture that influences how many of us think about sex and gender, even if we are not always fully aware of it. This set of assumptions can be called the “Dominant Gender Ideology” (DGI). Some people think it would better if sex was not linked to socia...

Conflicting evidence regarding risk compensation following medical male circumcision calls for careful contextual research, not generalized scale up

Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social rel...

The ethics of research into the genetics of sexuality is not straightforward. A new study by Zietsch et al. investigates a hypothesis for the evolutionary basis of same-sex sexual behaviour. This increases our understanding of the genetics of complex behaviour, raising questions about whether and how such knowledge should be used.

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”), which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (“bioxphi”). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and un...

I elaborate on one of the key psychosocial considerations raised by Connor et al. (2019), namely the potentially stigmatizing nature of much current activist, academic, and social-policy discourse surrounding non-Western forms of FGC. I explore how this discourse may, at least along certain dimensions, inadvertently harm the very people it is inten...

In our recent article, together with more than 60 of our colleagues, we outlined a proposal for drug policy reform consisting of four specific yet interrelated strategies: (1) de jure decriminalization of all psychoactive substances currently deemed illicit for personal use or possession (so-called “recreational” drugs), accompanied by harm reducti...

In 2 prior studies, individuals were shown a video fo a 5-year-old child undergoing blood collection. When told the child was a boy, they rated the child as experiencing more severe pain. This study sought to assess the association of perceived child gender with medical students' assessment of the level of pain the child was experiencing.

In this essay I explore the emerging practice of “sharing one’s pronouns,” for example, in one’s email signature or professional website. I explain the reasoning behind this practice, and ask, in particular, whether it is all-things-considered desirable that it should become a widespread social norm. I provide arguments in favour of, as well as aga...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-021-00306-7

I wrote up the following tips a couple of years ago when I was teaching assistant for an introductory philosophy class at Yale led by Daniel Greco called “Problems in Philosophy.” The tips were intended, then, for college students, many of them right out of high school, and most of whom had never written a philosophy paper before. So the focus is o...

Frederick (2021, see the preceding article) offers a critique of my writing tips aimed at undergraduate students coming to philosophy – and in many cases, essay writing – for the first time (Earp, 2021, in this volume) Frederick claims that most of my tips are good tips but characterizes two of them as bad tips, as follows: Bad tip 1 . Be very care...

Introduction: To improve the rigor of science, experimental evidence for scientific claims ideally needs to be replicated repeatedly with sufficiently similar procedures to increase the collective confidence in the veracity of those claims. Large replication projects in psychology, cancer biology and social science have evaluated the replicability...

In fourteen studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize, and thus a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of five studies, n=308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralizati...

We read with interest the recent article by Morris, ostensibly commenting on new research published in this journal showing durable effects of voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in Rakai, Uganda, but also devoting considerable length to critiquing an unrelated paper of ours that was published in Developing World Bioethics...

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 researc...

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

There is an ongoing public debate about sex, gender and identity that is often quite heated. This is an edited transcript of an informal lecture I recorded in 2019 to serve as a friendly guide to these complex issues. It represents my best attempt, not to score political points for any particular side, but to give an introductory map of the territo...

Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in su...

Much of modern ethics is built around the idea that we should respect one another’s autonomy. When deciding about what constitutes ethical sex, for example, our dominant models hold that ethical sex is whatever is consented to, while a lack of consent makes sex wrong. Consent, in turn, is analysed in terms of autonomous decision-making: a “yes” or...

Précis: Some people with dementia are transformed by the disease, to the point that family members may describe them as a "different person." These transformations may be negative or positive. What factors affect the judgements of ordinary people about whether an advance directive (AD) should be followed in such cases? We conducted three studies to...

A précis of our book 'Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships' (Stanford University Press, 2020; published in the UK by Manchester University Press as 'Love Is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships'). For a special symposium on the book in Philosophy and Public Issues.

This is our reply to the commentaries on our recent book, Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. We begin by exploring what love is and whether it can be chemically modified. We then focus on questions about the ethics of attempting such modification, both at the level of the individual or couple and at the level of society. We conclude...

Précis Honesty about the limitations of science and medical research in particular is a prerequisite, we argue, for maintaining a trusting relationship between medical institutions (and practitioners) and the public. This the case both in principle (since to deserve trust, healthcare systems and practitioners must fulfil the requirements of trustwo...

Imagine an article describing “newborn labiaplasty techniques” for girls. Regardless of any statistical health benefits that might follow from this procedure (such as a reduced risk of labial cancer or UTIs) the surgery could not ethically be performed. This is because it removes anatomically normal, non-diseased, functional tissue—from a psychosex...

Purpose of Review To summarize and critically evaluate the moral principles invoked in support of zero tolerance laws and policies for medically unnecessary female genital cutting (FGC). Recent Findings Most of the moral reasons that are typically invoked to justify such laws and policies appear to lead to a dilemma. Either these reasons entail th...

Empirical investigations into ordinary people’s bioethical intuitions have steadily grown throughout the last decades. A new study provides a paradigm example of what has been recently dubbed experimental philosophical bioethics or “bioxphi." A descendant of both experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) and empirical bioethics, bioxphi goes beyond merely...

We discuss the central ethical conundrum for clinicians working with young people like Phoenix: namely, how to respect, value and defer to a person’s own account of their identity and what is needed for their well-being, while staying open to the possibility that such an account may reflect a work in progress. This conundrum thus relates both to wh...

Background Neonatal male circumcision is a painful skin-breaking procedure that may affect infant physiological and behavioral stress responses as well as mother-infant interaction. Due to the plasticity of the developing nociceptive system, neonatal pain might carry long-term consequences on adult behavior. In this study, we examined whether infan...

Penile circumcision is often claimed to be simpler, safer, and more cost-effective when performed in the neonatal period as opposed to later in life, with a greater benefit-to-risk ratio. In the first part of this paper, we critically examine the evidence base for these claims, and find that it is not as robust as is commonly assumed. In the second...

A key source of support for the view that challenging people's beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to repl...