Gerald Dworkin

• University of California, Davis

In both theoretical and applied contexts, the concept of autonomy has assumed increasing importance in recent normative philosophical discussion. Given various problems to be clarified or resolved, the author characterises the concept by first setting out conditions of adequacy. The author then links the notion of autonomy to the identification and...

This is a review of Conly's book Against Autonomy. The topic of state paternalism has gained increasing attention with the increased efforts by states and municipalities to regulate the consumption of unhealthy foods. The philosophical community owes Mayor Bloomberg a debt for his one-man efforts to regulate the addition of trans-fats in New York C...

This is an essay on the limits of the Criminal Law. In particular, it is about what principles, if any, determine whether it is legitimate for the state to criminalize certain conduct. Joel Feinberg in his great work on the moral limits of the criminal law argues that we need only two principles. One is a principle regulating harm to other people a...

This chapter notes that the criminal law, like other normative systems for the regulation of behavior, has various kinds of limits. Laws might be limited by constitutional provisions. The chapter points out that there are two issues which should be kept distinct. The issue of legitimacy is the issue of what kinds of actions are within the legitimat...

Any definition of a concept is subject to various criteria for a good definition in the context at hand. Unless we are simply stipulating how we shall be using the word – and even then questions will arise about why we picked that word to use for this stipulation – there will be some, usually implicit, ideas of what makes for a good definition. In...

The essential outlines of the debate over voluntary euthanasia have not changed very much since Glanville Williams and Yale Kamisar debated the issues almost fifty years ago. On the one hand, there is an appeal to considerations of autonomy and the relief of suffering: individuals should be able to choose the timing and mode of their dying and they...

Let us assume that we can find a plausible case for the view that it is permissible for medical care givers, under certain conditions, either to provide their patients with the means and/or Information so that they can take their own lives, or to themselves kill their patients. Let us also suppose that, under certain conditions, care givers ought t...

Book reviewed in this article:Down the Slippery Slope: Arguing in Applied Ethics. By David Lamb.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of when, if ever, the state may use coercion to enforce majority views about what types of conduct are right or wrong, noble or base, decent or indecent. Such interest has been generated by both political and philosophibal pressures. In recent political history, controversies over suc...

This paper examines the legitimacy of pro-active law enforcement techniques, i.e. the use of deception to produce the performance of a criminal act in circumstances where it can be observed by law enforcement officials. It argues that law enforcement officials should only be allowed to create the intent to commit a crime in individuals who they hav...

There is no shortage of questions about nuclear weapons and nuclear war-or of responses and answers from strategists, politicians, philosophers, and concerned citizens. There is a noticeable lack of consensus among these groups-especially between strategists and philosophers. This volume furthers a dialogue between the two communities fundamental t...

In the past decade fraud, cheating, forged experiments, and plagiarism have been discovered in fields ranging from biomedical research to psychometrics. Scientists have reacted by attempting to deny and minimize the problem. I believe that we should recognize that the phenomenon is not rare nor to be explained as a result of individual pathology. I...

Book reviewed in this article:Philosophic Explanations. By Robert Nozick.

There is a philosophical view about morality which is shared by moral philosophers as divergent as Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Royce, Hare, Popper, Sartre, and Wolff. It is a view of the moral agent as necessarily autonomous. It is this view that I wish to understand and evaluate in this essay. I speak of a view and not a thesis because the posit...

To a philosopher the only sight less cheering than MacIntyre’s portrait of philosophers attacking the views of other philosophers is that of a philosopher attacking philosophy. I propose to defend moral philosophy against MacIntyre’s critique. I shall focus on the work of John Rawls, both because I believe that MacIntyre’s criticisms are incorrect,...

Presents a synthesis of critical literature (from a variety of disciplines) which address the issue of whether IQ has a substantial genetic component. Part I presents the IQ debate of the 1920s; Part II addresses the controversy over evidence for a genetic component in IQ differences; Part III considers social and educational implications of the co...

G. Dworkin (1974) replies to A. R. Jensen's (1974) response to Dworkin's earlier comment that Jensen shifted his views on the issue of racial and genetic differences in IQ. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Compares the views of "Professor Hyde" (actually, A. Jensen) on the nature of intelligence as presented in a little-known 1967 article (see record 1968-08786-001) in Educational Research with those of Jensen as presented in his well-known Harvard Educational Review article in 1969. The differences in the articles are attributed to changes in the...

Textos que abonan a la polémica sobre la dimensión ética de la eutanasia y el suicidio asistido. Mientras que dos de los autores consideran que en ciertas circunstancias es moralmente válido que el médico auxilie al paciente para quitarse la vida, la otra autora sostiene, en cambio, que legalizar la eutanasia y el suicidio asistido implicaría grave...

IN TInS discussion we wish to examine a commonly held view of moral responsibility which might be called the Punishment Theory? According to the Punishment Theory one is morally responsible for an action if and only if one is modifiable by punishment. A wrongdoer is morally responsible for his action if punishment will influence him to avoid such a...