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41Hurts, insults and stigmas: a comment on MurphyJournal of Medical Ethics 37 (2): 66-67. 2011.Both of the main points in Professor Murphy's paper seem to me clearly and effectively argued.1 It is incontrovertible that some people find hurtful the use of medical technologies to avoid the birth of children who, in the present order of things, would be disabled. No result from the philosophy of language, or anywhere else for that matter, can plausibly show otherwise. Indeed, even to speak of ‘legitimately interpreting’ events that cause one pain as ‘hurtful’, as Murphy does, seems a shade t…Read more
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15“Yet the Body Is His Book”: Plastinated Bodies and the Book of Common BioethicsHastings Center Report 43 (3): 46-47. 2013.John Donne, poet laureate of the human body, was much troubled by its fate. Scorning Plato's picture of the body as the soul's prison, Donne imagined souls as leaving their bodies reluctantly and as yearning to return to the very one from which they had departed. In poems like “The Ecstasy,” he depicts the union of lovers’ souls, hints at a similar love of souls for bodies, and suggests that it is through the body—“his book”—that the lover comes to know love's spiritual mysteries. John Lantos al…Read more
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22Moral Teachings from Unexpected Quarters: Lessons for Bioethics from the Social Sciences and Managed CareHastings Center Report 30 (1): 12-17. 2000.On the usual account of moral reasoning, social science is often seen as able to provide “just the facts,” while philosophy attends to moral values and conceptual clarity and builds formally valid arguments. Yet disciplines are informed by epistemic values—and bioethics might do well to see social scientific practices and their attendant normative understandings about what is humanly important as a significant part of ethics generally.
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26Bioethics EducationHastings Center Report 23 (1): 25-29. 1993.Bioethics education now takes place outside universities as well as within them. How should clinicians, ethics committee members, and policymakers be taught the ethics they need, and how may their progress best be evaluated?
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30Taking Families SeriouslyHastings Center Report 22 (4): 6-12. 1992.Medical decisionmaking would be a messier but better thing if it honored what is morally valuable about patients' families. The concerns of intimates have a legitimate call upon us even when we are ill.
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15Transplantation through a Glass DarklyHastings Center Report 22 (5): 6-8. 1992.Should baboons become spare parts bins for human beings? Not when their moral nature remains a mystery to us.
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12From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (review)American Journal of Bioethics 1 (2): 70-72. 2001.
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45Still Quiet After All These Years: Revisiting “The Silence of the Bioethicists”Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (3): 249-259. 2012.Some 14 years ago, I published an article in which I identified a prime site for bioethicists to ply their trade: medical responses to requests for hormonal and surgical interventions aimed at facilitating transgendered people’s transition to their desired genders. Deep issues about the impact of biotechnologies and health care practices on central aspects of our conceptual system, I argued, were raised by how doctors understood and responded to people seeking medical assistance in changing thei…Read more
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38Health and Disease as 'Thick' Concepts in Ecosystemic ContextsEnvironmental Values 4 (4). 1995.In this paper, I consider what kind of normative work might be done by speaking of ecosystems utilising a 'medical' vocabulary – drawing, that is, on such notions as 'health', 'disease', and 'illness'. Some writers attracted to this mode of expression have been rather modest about what they think it might purchase. I wish to be bolder. Drawing on the idea of 'thick' evaluative concepts as discussed by McDowell, Williams and Taylor, and resorting to a phenomenological argument for a kind of moral…Read more
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The opacity of consent: Richard Hull on informed consent as patient dutyIn Elizabeth D. Boepple (ed.), Sui generis: essays presented to Richard Thompson Hull on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, Authorhouse. 2005.
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62Internal organs, integral selves, and good communities: opt-out organ procurement policies and the 'separateness of persons'Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (5): 289-300. 2011.Most people accept that if they can save someone from death at very little cost to themselves, they must do so; call this the ‘duty of easy rescue.’ At least for many such people, an instance of this duty is to allow their vital organs to be used for transplantation. Accordingly, ‘opt-out’ organ procurement policies, based on a powerfully motivated responsibility to render costless or very low-cost lifesaving aid, would seem presumptively permissible. Counterarguments abound. Here I consider, in…Read more
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52A Comment on Fry's "The Role of Caring in a Theory of Nursing Ethics"Hypatia 5 (3): 153-158. 1990.Our response to Sara Fry's paper focuses on the difficulty of understanding her insistence on the fundamental character of caring in a theory of nursing ethics. We discuss a number of problems her text throws in the way of making sense of this idea, and outline our own proposal for how caring's role may be reasonably understood: not as an alternative object of value, competing with autonomy or patient good, but rather as an alternative way of responding toward that which is of value
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28Feminism, Social Policy, and Long-Acting ContraceptionHastings Center Report 25 (1): 30-32. 1995.
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30Desire's Desire for Moral Realism: A Phenomenological Objection to Non-CognitivismDialogue 28 (3): 449-. 1989.Roughly thirty years ago, R. M. Hare told an Anglo-French philosophy conference about a young Swiss student who came to stay with his family in Oxford. It seems that the student was doing very nicely, until, in a burst of misguided hospitality, the Hares provided him with one of their few French books, Camus's L'Etranger. Reading Camus had the effect of changing the student from an affable, altogether attractive young man into a chain-smoking recluse for whom “rien, rien n'avait d'importance”.
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48Alzheimer's disease and socially extended mentationMetaphilosophy 40 (3-4): 462-474. 2009.The leading accounts of the ethics of proxy decision making implicitly draw on internalist conceptions of the philosophy of mind, or so this essay tries to demonstrate. Using the views of Ronald Dworkin as its jumping‐off point, the essay argues that accepting the sort of externalism associated with writers such as Putnam and Burge would alter Dworkin's conclusions concerning how we should respond to the current or precedent decisions of people suffering from dementia. Building on the views of A…Read more
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34Hypotheticals, Analogies, Death's Harms, and Organ ProcurementAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (8): 14-16. 2009.No abstract
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9Bioethics As Several Kinds of WritingJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 24 (2): 148-163. 1999.Three different models are described of the relationship of bioethics to the press. The first two are familiar: bioethicists often are interviewed by journalists seeking background and short quotes to insert in a story; alternately, bioethicists sometimes themselves act as journalists of a sort, writing op-eds, articles or even longer works designed for wide readership. These models share the notion that bioethicists can provide information and ideas that increase the quality of people's thinkin…Read more
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15Critical Interests and Sources of Familial Decision-Making Authority for Incapacitated PatientsJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 23 (2): 143-148. 1995.How ought we to understand the sources and limits of the authority of family members to make health care decisions for their decisionally incapacitated relatives? This question is becoming increasingly crucial as the population ages and the power of medical technology waxes. It is also becoming increasingly contested, as faith in advance directives shows signs of waning, and the moral complexities of intimate relationship become more theoretically patent.This last point—the newly visible moral r…Read more
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44Synecdoche and StigmaCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 16 (4): 475. 2007.In the portion of their reply directed to me, Professor Asch and Dr. Wasserman helpfully develop the synecdoche argument by highlighting its connections to stigma. I understand them to distinguish the situation of a woman making a decision concerning her pregnancy informed by prenatal testing from a woman making a similar decision informed by considerations of, for example, poverty, like so: In testing contexts, it will characteristically be the case that the woman's decision will be distorted b…Read more
East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |