Philosophy, et cetera

My latest paper, ' Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk ', has just been accepted for publication in Public Health Ethics . Here'...

Reasonable people may disagree about the justifiability of early-pandemic lockdowns (while awaiting the availability of vaccines), but this ...

The UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recently recommended against vaccinating children under 16  against Covid, des...

The WSJ reports that some parents hope to get their kids (under 12) vaccinated against Covid, as "the FDA’s approval generally means v...

I'm continually appalled by how easily people move from "the consequences of doing X are uncertain" to "X must be banned!...

I'm looking forward to participating in 1DaySooner's Zoom panel discussion on 'What is the Upper Limit of Risk in Clinical Trial...

Back in January, I wrote that there's no such thing as "following the science"  -- that scientists and medical experts "a...

I received my first shot of the Moderna vaccine yesterday -- which naturally got me thinking about how this should've been accessible mu...

As the ongoing pandemic obviously causes immense harms, there are correspondingly immense benefits to vaccinating people sooner. Our actual ...

In a previous post, I argued that "undue inducement" worries are typically deeply misguided , and that banning good compensation i...

Ezra Klein quotes a Harvard epidemiologist's criticism of the FDA for blocking rapid at-home Covid tests: "They are inadvertently ...

In ' Lessons from the Pandemic ', I summarized what I took to be some of the biggest mistakes of the pandemic response, and tried to...

It's generally recognized that our (American) response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous. But I think far fewer appreciate the ful...

People typically treat  having an importantly false belief  as much more problematic than  failing to have an importantly true belief .  The...

One curious feature of some public debate about Covid policy is when people object to a disliked policy proposal by appealing to a considera...

' The Ethics of Deliberate Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 to Induce Immunity ', forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Philosophy , by Rober...

Current estimates suggest that the US will end up with around 500k Covid deaths (itself but a tiny fraction of the total harm done ), with ...

Libertarians like to rail against "Big Government", but that often comes off as needlessly ideological and indiscriminate.  Govern...

There's an interesting piece in the NYT warning against hasty FDA approval of a (potentially) suboptimal covid vaccine.  I'm especi...

We're all familiar with prudishness as it applies to sexual ethics: the prude thinks certain sex acts are immoral, even between happily ...