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64Moral Ecologies and the Harms of Sexual ViolationPhilosophical Topics 46 (2): 247-268. 2018.Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and …Read more
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103Infertility, epistemic risk, and disease definitionsSynthese 196 (11): 4409-4428. 2019.I explore the role that values and interests, especially ideological interests, play in managing and balancing epistemic risks in medicine. I will focus in particular on how diseases are identified and operationalized. Before we can do biomedical research on a condition, it needs to be identified as a medical condition, and it needs to be operationalized in a way that lets us identify sufferers, measure progress, and so forth. I will argue that each time we do this, we engage in epistemic risk b…Read more
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7Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29 (2). 2019.Our lead article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Jonathan Kaplan’s “Self-Care as Self-Blame Redux: Stress as Personal and Political,” opens up an entirely new and clearly important topic for bioethicists: the concept and role of ‘self-care.’ Advice for ‘self-care’ is everywhere, and often this advice takes the form of a kind of moral imperative: we owe ourselves self-care and have a responsibility to care for ourselves. Meanwhile, typical suggested self-care practices f…Read more
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8Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29 (1). 2019.It is the great honor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal to present this special issue celebrating the career and bioethical contributions of LeRoy Walters. Professor Walters is the former Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which he has been affiliated with since its inception in 1971 until his recent retirement from his position as Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics. Trained as a philosopher and a theologist, LeRoy Walters was also a lifelong political activi…Read more
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11Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (4). 2018.This issue's lead article, Alison Reiheld's "Rightly or For Ill: The Ethics of Individual Memory," takes up a topic that is manifestly deserving of philosophical analysis, and routinely important in our private and public interactions, and yet as far as I know it has never before received systematic treatment: the ethics of memory. That is, Reiheld asks, when are we morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for remembering, forgetting, or encoding a memory in a specific way, and what are the ethical p…Read more
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217Slurs, Interpellation, and IdeologySouthern Journal of Philosophy 56 (S1): 7-32. 2018.The goal of this paper is to give an account of the pragmatic and social function of slurs, taken as speech acts. I develop a theory of the distinctive illocutionary force and pragmatic structure of slurs. I argue that slurs help to produce subjects who occupy social identities carved out by pernicious ideologies, and that they do this whether or not anyone involved intends for the slur to work that way or has any particular feelings or conscious thoughts associated with using or being targeted …Read more
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16Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (3). 2018.This quarter’s issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal dives deeply into questions concerning who is the proper target of medical interventions, and under what circumstances. Mary Jean Walker and James Franklin’s article, “An Argument Against Drug Testing Welfare Recipients,” and Maggie Taylor’s “Too Close to the Knives: Children’s Rights, Parental Authority, and Best Interests in the Context of Elective Pediatric Surgeries” both ask hard questions about when medical interventions can b…Read more
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440That’s What She Said: The Language of Sexual NegotiationEthics 129 (1): 70-97. 2018.I explore how we negotiate sexual encounters with one another in language and consider the pragmatic structure of such negotiations. I defend three theses: Discussions of consent have dominated the philosophical and legal discourse around sexual negotiation, and this has distorted our understanding of sexual agency and ethics. Of central importance to good-quality sexual negotiation are sexual invitations and gift offers, as well as speech designed to set up safe frameworks and exit conditions. …Read more
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29Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (2). 2018.This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal contains a couple of papers that may be difficult to read for some: one concerning the sexual violation of young Black boys and one on the Guatemalans who were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases and sexually abused in the hands of the United States government and other US-based institutions. I’m honored and proud to be publishing these papers in the journal; both dive headfirst into formidably painful topics of enormous…Read more
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14Making and Masking Human Nature: Rousseau's Aesthetics of EducationJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 29 (3): 228-251. 1998.
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6Conscientious Autonomy: What Patients Do vs. What Is Done to ThemHastings Center Report 35 (5): 4. 2005.
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520Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive InjusticeHypatia 29 (2): 440-457. 2014.I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in…Read more
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244Myth, memory and misrecognition in Sellars' ``empiricism and the philosophy of mind''Philosophical Studies 101 (2-3): 161-211. 2000.
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Causation as a Natural and as a Philosophical RelationEidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy 10. 1992.
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133Ingrouping, Outgrouping, and the Pragmatics of Peripheral SpeechJournal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (4): 576-596. 2016.
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6Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (1). 2017.How can we conceptualize and promote agential choices in a complicated social world—one in which institutional, cultural, and marketing pressures convey values and norms that may not be in the best interest of individual patients? In this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Eric Racine and his colleagues explore this difficult question in the context of “preclinical” Alzheimer’s disease and complementary and alternative medicines. This is an especially murky and vexed context in wh…Read more
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106Risk and the Pregnant BodyHastings Center Report 39 (6): 34-42. 2009.Reasoning well about risk is most challenging when a woman is pregnant, for patient and doctor alike. During pregnancy, we tend to note the risks of medical interventions without adequately noting those of failing to intervene, yet when it's time to give birth, interventions are seldom questioned, even when they don't work. Meanwhile, outside the clinic, advice given to pregnant women on how to stay healthy in everyday life can seem capricious and overly cautious. This kind of reasoning reflects…Read more
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The coupling of human souls: Rousseau and the problem of gender relationsPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 46 57-92. 1996.
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9Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 25 (3). 2015.This season’s issue includes two articles on a quickly expanding topic in bioethics: the ethics of enhancement. There are many kinds of enhancement both actual and imagined: we can enhance people’s physical, aesthetic, cognitive, or moral capacities, for instance; individuals might choose particular enhancements, parents might choose them for their future children, or states might institute them at the widespread population level; the enhancements might be technologically complex or take the for…Read more
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119Cognitive models and representationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2): 219-32. 1992.Several accounts of representation in cognitive systems have recently been proposed. These look for a theory that will establish how a representation comes to have a certain content, and how these representations are used by cognitive systems. Covariation accounts are unsatisfactory, as they make intelligent reasoning and cognition impossible. Cummins' interpretation-based account cannot explain the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, nor how certain cognitive representation…Read more
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Michael Davis, The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau's Reveries of The Solitary Walker Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 19 (6): 398-401. 1999.
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79“Author TBD”: Radical Collaboration in Contemporary Biomedical ResearchPhilosophy of Science 79 (5): 845-858. 2012.Ghostwriting scandals are pervasive in industry-funded biomedical research, and most responses to them have presumed that they represent a sharp transgression of the norms of scientific authorship. I argue that in fact, ghostwriting represents a continuous extension of current socially accepted authorship practices. I claim that the radically collaborative, decentralized, interdisciplinary research that forms the gold standard in medicine is in an important sense unauthored, and that this poses …Read more
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Routledge Companion to Bioethics (edited book)Routledge. 2015.The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics. The volume orients the reader in a changing landscape shaped by globalization, health disparities, and rapidly advancing technologies. Bioethics has begun a turn toward a systematic concern with social justice, population health, and public policy. While also covering more traditional topics, this volume fully captures this recent shift and foreshadows the resulting deve…Read more
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3Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (1). 2016.Practical ethics is a peculiar field; it has no agreed-upon methods or foundations and takes a wide variety of forms. Its relationship to traditional “pure” philosophical ethics is contested and inconsistent. Since its beginnings, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics has been at the forefront of methodological reflections on the nature, grounding, and appropriate standards for practical ethics. Institute scholars such as Tom Beauchamp, Robert Veatch, and Henry Richardson have been among the most infl…Read more