Monograph
Harris J. Reframing Autonomy in Bioethics, Bloomsbury Academic (under contract, due Spring 2027).
Articles
Harris, J. (forthcoming). Don’t Lose Yourself: Narrative Ethics and Artificial Intelligence. Synthese.
Harris J., Young J, Dubljević, V., (2025) “Three Moral Fault Lines for Therapeutic Conversational Artificial Intelligence” American Journal of Bioethics (forthcoming; accepted February 2026).
Harris, J. (2026). Autonomy Deadlock and Bioethical Principlism. The American Journal of Bioethics, 26(3), 52–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2026.2623871
Harris, J., & Dubljević, V. (2025). Navigating the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Encyclopedia, 5(4), 201, 1-25 https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia5040201
Harris J., Respess S. (2025) “Ordering Care Principles for Cost-Related Nonadherence” American Journal of Bioethics, 25(8), 134–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2526739
Harris J. (2024)“Challenges for Environmental Justice under Bioethical Principlism” American Journal of Bioethics, 24 (3): 65-67. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2024.2303139
Harris J. (2022) “Moral Wrongs, Epistemic Wrongs, and the FDA” American Journal of Bioethics 22 (10): 34-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2022.2110967
Chapters
Harris J., Dubljević, V. (2025) “Artificial Intelligence: Tools, Peers, or Aspirants” In Barfield and Blitz (Eds.), Law, Ethics, and Superintelligence: After the Singularity. Edward Elgar Publishing 1-30. (forthcoming)
Harris, J., & Dubljević, V. (2026). Contemporary Perspectives on AI and Neurocomputational Ethics. In Flöther, Fay, & Hoffmann (Eds.), Computers with Salaries and Cemeteries: AI Ethics from Industry to Philosophy to Science Fiction (pp. 135–156). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-03169-3_10
Articles
“Rossian Autonomy” (under review)
“Towards Ethical Innovation in AI-Driven Pharmaceutical Research” (under review)
"Disability and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence–Mediated Clinical Documentation" (under review)
“Autonomy vs. Automation” (under review)
“Autonomy in Algorithms? A Case Study in Medical Decision-making”
"Remapping Reasons of Autonomy Under Normative Pluralism"
Summary: My dissertation argues that autonomy does not fit within deontic pluralistic normative frameworks, and that W.D. Ross (1930; 1939) was wise to exclude it from his original pluralistic framework. The project began with a suspicion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, academics, policy makers, and laypeople spoke of the need to balance autonomy against fairness, non-maleficence, and risk, as though autonomy were one conditional duty among others, to be traded off against the rest. This trade-off language is widespread and intuitive, yet I found it undersupported and undertheorized. Ross, who invented the paradigmatic pluralistic framework of competing prima facie duties, omitted autonomy from it. Beauchamp and Childress ([1979] 2019), who built the Principles of Biomedical Ethics on a largely Rossian basis, included it. That asymmetry is the dissertation’s point of departure.
Chapter One, “Mapping Autonomy Within Normative Frameworks,” supplies a novel fourfold system for locating autonomy within any normative framework. Autonomy may be treated as an enabling condition of normative reasoning (a precondition, present or absent, as for Kantians and constitutivists) or as an output state of it (an achievement that admits of degrees, as on Frankfurtian endorsement accounts), and as commensurable or incommensurable with the other normative reasons in play. The map makes visible that bioethics and much of intuitionist ethics have settled, largely without argument, on a single cell: autonomy as a commensurable weight among others on the normative scale.
Chapter Two, “Desiderata for Deontological Pluralism, and Autonomy’s Place Within It,” defends intuitionist deontological pluralism against its standard critiques: epistemic opacity and disagreement (how could intuitive seemings justify, and what makes them reliable?) and action-guidance indeterminacy (how are competing duties weighed?). These critiques can be met. Intuitionist frameworks that operationalize autonomy as a commensurable weight to be traded against the other duties (Audi 2004; Cullity 2018) cannot meet them, since autonomy claims can be raised without limit and rest on grounds private to the claimant. Alternatives remain on offer, among them Ross’s own notion of self-exertion, on which autonomy names a manner of weighing rather than a weight.
Chapter Three, “Reconsidering Autonomy Within Bioethical Principlism,” turns to a case study of autonomy-inclusive pluralism gone wrong: the endoxic four principles of biomedical ethics (Beauchamp and Childress [1979] 2019). I identify three asymmetries between biomedical autonomy and non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. Autonomy is infinitely available, since an autonomy claim can be entered for nearly any course of action; its weight is undifferentiated, since principlism supplies no gradations of autonomy comparable to the magnitudes of harm and benefit; and it is inscrutable, since its grounds lie in the privacy of the claimant. These asymmetries problematize every trade-off between autonomy and the other three principles.
Chapter Four, “Two Routes to Autonomy Fanaticism,” identifies and analyzes the problems that value fanaticism (Katsafanas 2023) presents when the value at issue is autonomy. The first route is transparent: autonomy is openly held sacred and placed beyond trade-off. The second is opaque. I develop an explanatorily powerful account of opaque autonomy fanaticism, which autonomy-inclusive pluralistic frameworks uniquely enable: a framework that admits an infinitely available, undifferentiated, and inscrutable reason into its weighing (without explicitly sacrlizing that value) problematically lets that reason prevail.
On the whole, I find autonomy to be structurally constraining. It shapes our deliberative space; it does not simply constitute a further commensurable weight on our normative scale. Ross was right to leave it off his list of prima facie duties; trade-off-embracing pluralists should remap autonomy, and need not discard it. I close by gesturing toward a “thick” view, under which autonomy governs the scales of normative pluralism rather than resting upon them.
Chapter 1: Mapping Autonomy Within Normative Frameworks
Chapter 2: Desiderata for Deontological Pluralism, and Autonomy's Place Within It
Chapter 3: Reconsidering Autonomy Within Bioethical Principlism
Chapter 4: Two Routes to Autonomy Fanaticism