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31Two essays in public philosophy: Callahan'sthe troubled dream of life and dworkin'slife's DominionTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 16 (1): 115-123. 1995.
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28Feminism, Social Policy, and Long-Acting ContraceptionHastings Center Report 25 (1): 30-32. 1995.
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28Progress in bioethics: Science, policy, and politics, edited by Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam BergerInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (1): 237-241. 2011.Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger, Progress in bioethics: Science, policy, and politics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, reviewed by James Lindemann Nelson
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28Desire'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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28Hypotheticals, Analogies, Death's Harms, and Organ ProcurementAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (8): 14-16. 2009.No abstract
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27Taking 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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24A 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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24Utility, fairness, and what really matters in organ provisionAmerican Journal of Bioethics 4 (4). 2004.This Article does not have an abstract
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24The Surrogate's AuthorityJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (2): 161-168. 2014.The authority of surrogates—often close family members—to make treatment decisions for previously capacitated patients is said to come from their knowledge of the patient, which they are to draw on as they exercise substituted judgment on the patient’s behalf. However, proxy accuracy studies call this authority into question, hence the Patient Preference Predictor (PPP). We identify two problems with contemporary understandings of the surrogate’s role. The first is with the assumption that knowl…Read more
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24Publicity and pricelessness: Grassroots decisionmaking and justice in rationingJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 19 (4): 333-342. 1994.The "grassroots turn" in bioethical discussions about justice in allocation of health care resources has attracted a great deal of support; in the absence of a convincing theory of justice in rationing, democratic decisionmaking concerning priority setting emerges with a kind of inevitability. Yet there remain suspicions about this approach – most importantly, worries about the socially corrosive impact of explicit, public decisionmaking that in effect sets a price on the lives of persons. These…Read more
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23Bioethics 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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23Bioethics Education Expanding the Circle of ParticipantsHastings Center Report 23 (1): 25. 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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21Moral Sensibilities and Moral Standing: Caplan on Xenograft “Donors”Bioethics 7 (4): 315-322. 1993.
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20Making peace in gestational conflictsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 13 (4). 1992.Mary Anne Warren's claim that there is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin ([1], p. 63) calls attention to the vast range of moral conflict engendered by assigning full basic moral rights to fetuses. Thereby, it serves as a goad to thinking about conflicts between pregnant women and their fetuses in a way that emphasizes relationships rather than rights. I sketch out what a care orientation might suggest about resolving gestational conflicts. I also arg…Read more
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19Respecting boundaries, disparaging valuesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (12). 2008.No abstract
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18Relativists and Hypocrites: Earp on Genital CuttingKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (2): 165-172. 2016.Cutting people’s genitals—at least, when thought of as an exotic practice—seems to interest philosophers chiefly as a source of problem cases for moral relativism. A ready-to-hand example is supplied by Simon Blackburn, in the relativism chapter of his charming little introduction to ethics text, Being Good: “If, as in some North African countries, young girls are terrifyingly and painfully mutilated so that thereafter they cannot enjoy natural and pleasurable human sexuality, that is not OK, an…Read more
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18Moral 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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17Animal Models in'Exemplary'Medical Research: Diabetes as a Case StudyBetween the Species 5 (4): 4. 1989.
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16Doubt, Disorientation, and Death in the Plague TimeHastings Center Report 50 (3): 4-4. 2020.An account of an experience with contracting an illness that may well have been Covid‐19 gives rise to reflections on doubt and on the art of dying well. The upshot: our mortality remains a fundamentally disorienting condition of our existence. If there's any wisdom to be had concerning our deaths, it likely lies in the direction of accepting their deranging character, rather than in searching for the philosophical insight that will reconcile us to our fate.
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15Semantic Externalism: A Rough Sketch and a Gesture at Motivation The 1960s and 70s saw the development of a picture of reference in which the link between the speaker and the spoken of was provided not, or not solely, by beliefs entertained by the speaker but by causal, historical, and social relationships extending among the speaker and other members of (review)In Eva Feder Kittay & Licia Carlson (eds.), Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.
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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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15Bioethics 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
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 |