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217Ethics and ideology in breastfeeding advocacy campaignsHypatia 21 (1): 157-181. 2006.: Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsibilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal "choices" as though they were morally and causally self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers' caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural mea…Read more
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240Naturalizing objectivityPerspectives on Science 16 (3). 2008.We can understand objectivity, in the broadest sense of the term, as epistemic accountability to the real. Since at least the 1986 publication of Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, so-called standpoint epistemologists have sought to build an understanding of such objectivity that does not essentially anchor it to a dislocated, ‘view from nowhere’ stance on the part of the judging subject. Instead, these theorists have argued that a proper understanding of objectivity must recogni…Read more
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161Conscientious autonomy: Displacing decisions in health careHastings Center Report 35 (2): 34-44. 2005.: The standard bioethics account is that respecting patient autonomy means ensuring patients make their own decisions. In fact, respecting patient autonomy often has more to do with the overall shape and meaning of patients' health care regimes, and sometimes, at least, patients will very reasonably defer to medical authority
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111Attention and Blindness: Objectivity and Contingency in Moral PerceptionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (sup1): 319-346. 2002.Moral perception, as the term is used in moral theory, is the perception of normatively contoured objects and states of affairs, where that perception enables us to engage in practical reason and judgment concerning these particulars. The idea that our capacity for moral perception is a crucial component of our capacity for moral reasoning and agency finds its most explicit origin in Aristotle, for whom virtue begins with the quality of perception. The focus on moral perception within moral theo…Read more
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73Finding autonomy in birthBioethics 23 (1): 1-8. 2008.Over the last several years, as cesarean deliveries have grown increasingly common, there has been a great deal of public and professional interest in the phenomenon of women 'choosing' to deliver by cesarean section in the absence of any specific medical indication. The issue has sparked intense conversation, as it raises questions about the nature of autonomy in birth. Whereas mainstream bioethical discourse is used to associating autonomy with having a large array of choices, this conception …Read more
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159Accountability and values in radically collaborative researchStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46 16-23. 2014.This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting i…Read more
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16Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 25 (2). 2015.The summer issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal highlights a range of controversial issues that will incite spirited disagreement amongst our readers. These five papers each take up complex contemporary ethical challenges and develop creative strategies to resolve them. Together they represent our continued commitment to publishing theoretically rigorous, empirically informed, and practically relevant work in bioethics.In “HPV and the Ethics of CDC’s Vaccination Requirements for Immi…Read more
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31Review of Slavoj iek, Rex Butler (ed.), Scott Stephens (ed.), Interrogating the Real (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (4). 2006.
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87Contingent Natures and Virtuous KnowersCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 389-418. 2002.When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered Status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror. Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’ they said, she descends ‘the slide to an arational account of science.’ On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding's advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expan…Read more
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76Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' BodiesRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.Mass Hysteria examines the medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. Late eighteenth century transformations in these practices reshaped mothers' bodies, and contemporary norms and routines of prenatal care and early motherhood have inherited the legacy of that era. As a result, mothers are socially positioned in ways that can make it difficult for them to establish and maintain healthy and safe boundaries and appropriate divisions between public a…Read more
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8Book ReviewJoseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 336 pp., $49.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 216-219. 2004.
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29How to get an interpretivist committedProtoSociology 14 180-221. 2000.I argue that interpretivists ought to broaden and enrich the constitutive standards of interpretability and epistemic agency that they have inherited from classic Davidsonian theory. Drawing heavily upon John Haugeland’s recent account of objective truth- telling, I claim that in order to be an interpretable epistemic agent at all, a being must have various kinds of practical commitments that cannot be reduced to combinations of beliefs and desires.On the basis of this claim, I argue that radica…Read more
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237A paramount narrative: Exploring space on the starship enterpriseJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (2): 177-191. 1999.
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172Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli! The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person CallsEthics 123 (3): 456-478. 2013.
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15Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (2). 2016.This quarter’s issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is unusual, because it hosts a symposium focused Brian Earp’s provocative and groundbreaking article, “Between Moral Relativism and Moral Hypocrisy: Reframing the Debate on ‘FGM.’” Along with Earp’s article, we are presenting critical responses by Richard Shweder, Robert Darby, and Jamie Nelson. Earp tackles the ethics of female genital cutting or “mutilation”. This is a difficult topic that brings on board gender inequity, the inte…Read more
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256The Antinomies of Impure Reason: Rousseau and Kant on the Metaphysics of Truth‐TellingInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (3). 2005.Truth-telling is a project that is both gripping and problematic for Rousseau, as he is both captured by an ideal of telling as complete, undistorted discernment, documentation and communication, and also haunted by the fear that telling can never be this innocent. For Rousseau, as for Kant, telling does not leave the told untouched; rather, telling gives us a type of contact with objects that is marked and mediated by the process of telling itself, and hence the possibility of immediately grasp…Read more
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42Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy CampaignsHypatia 21 (1): 157-180. 2006.Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsi-bilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal “choices” as though they were morally and causally Self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers’ caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural mean…Read more
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151Objectivity and perspective in empirical knowledgeEpisteme 3 (1-2): 80-95. 2006.Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a Sellarsia…Read more
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25Joseph Rouse: How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 216-219. 2004.
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98Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2006.This volume explores the relationship between Kant's aesthetic theory and his critical epistemology as articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The essays, written specially for this volume, explore core elements of Kant's epistemology, such as his notions of discursive understanding, experience, and objective judgment. They also demonstrate a rich grasp of Kant's critical epistemology that enables a deeper understanding of his aesthetics. Collectivel…Read more
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50Gender Identity, Gendered Spaces, and Figuring Out What You LoveInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9 (2): 183-189. 2016.Three years ago, as my fortieth birthday disappeared into the far distance in my rearview mirror, driven by a combination of vanity and fear of my own mortality and decrepitude, I committed to getting in shape.I’ve always been fairly active: I have always walked a lot, commuted by bike when that was plausible, avoided driving whenever possible, and just generally been high energy. But a childhood full of failure at team sports and a lack of innate gifts in the coordination department scared me o…Read more
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212The ontology and temporality of conscienceContinental Philosophy Review 35 (1): 1-34. 2002.Philosophers have often posited a foundational calling voice, such that hearing its call constitutes subjects as responsive and responsible negotiators of normative claims. I give the name ldquo;transcendental conscience to that which speaks in this founding, constitutive voice. The role of transcendental conscience is not – or not merely – to normatively bind the subject, but to constitute the possibility of the subject's being bound by any particular, contentful normative claims in the first p…Read more
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27Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 25 (4). 2015.This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal continues two conversations that have been developing in this journal over the last few years, and introduces a new and timely one. Kevin Elliot and Paul Mushak’s paper, “Structured Development and Promotion of a Research Field: Hormesis in Biology, Toxicology, and Environmental Regulatory Science,” continues an ongoing debate in this journal over the role of values in shaping scientific methodology and communication, and how this role should…Read more
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298Resituating the principle of equipoise: Justice and access to care in non-ideal conditionsKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17 (3): 171-202. 2007.: The principle of equipoise traditionally is grounded in the special obligations of physician-investigators to provide research participants with optimal care. This grounding makes the principle hard to apply in contexts with limited health resources, to research that is not directed by physicians, or to non-therapeutic research. I propose a different version of the principle of equipoise that does not depend upon an appeal to the Hippocratic duties of physicians and that is designed to be appl…Read more
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134Measuring motheringInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1 (1): 67-90. 2008.As a culture, we have a tendency to measure motherhood in terms of a set of signal moments that have become the focus of special social attention and anxiety; we interpret these as emblematic summations of women's mothering abilities. Women's performances during these moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering, and mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. "Good" mothers are those who pass a series of tests—they bond properly during their…Read more
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38Book review: Elizabeth rose Wingrove. Rousseau's republican romance. Princeton, N.j.: Princeton university press, 2000 (review)Hypatia 17 (2): 174-183. 2002.