•  581
    Forgiving Grave Wrongs
    In Christopher Allers & Marieke Smit (eds.), Forgiveness In Perspective, Rodopi Press. pp. 66--43. 2010.
    We introduce what we call the Emergent Model of forgiving, which is a process-based relational model conceptualizing forgiving as moral and normative repair in the wake of grave wrongs. In cases of grave wrongs, which shatter the victim’s life, the Classical Model of transactional forgiveness falls short of illuminating how genuine forgiveness can be achieved. In a climate of persistent threat and distrust, expressions of remorse, rituals and gestures of apology, and acts of reparation are unab…Read more
  •  422
    C.M. Concepcion's review of “Pornography: An Uncivil Liberty?” fundamentally misconstrues the position defended in that article. This paper examines possible sources of this misconstrual, focusing critical attention on the narrowly crafted, morally loaded notion of “pornography” that figures centrally in the original argument under review. Pornography is not a category of speech that can be characterized as having one crucial meaning or message, nor is the message of pornography easily identifia…Read more
  •  110
    Pornography: An Uncivil Liberty?
    Hypatia 10 (1). 1995.
    Pornographic speech harms women by playing a key role in sustaining the social conditions through which women's liberty and equality are undercut. Though there is a principled moral and constitutional basis for pursuing a legal strategy in fighting pornography, we should not overestimate the effectiveness of the law or underestimate its potential dangers. The struggle against pornography must be waged through education, expressive exploration, and protest, not through the law.
  •  95
    The Moral Contours of Empathy
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (1-2): 169-195. 2005.
    Morally contoured empathy is a form of reasonable partiality essential to the healthy care of dependents. It is critical as an epistemic aid in determining proper moral responsiveness; it is also, within certain richly normative roles and relationships, itself a crucial constitutive mode of moral connection. Yet the achievement of empathy is no easy feat. Patterns of incuriosity imperil connection, impeding empathic engagement; inappropriate empathic engagement, on the other hand, can result in …Read more
  •  94
    Free Will, Self-Governance and Neuroscience: An Overview
    with Hilary Bok and Debra J. H. Mathews
    Neuroethics 11 (3): 237-244. 2018.
    Given dramatic increases in recent decades in the pace of scientific discovery and understanding of the functional organization of the brain, it is increasingly clear that engagement with the neuroscientific literature and research is central to making progress on philosophical questions regarding the nature and scope of human freedom and responsibility. While patterns of brain activity cannot provide the whole story, developing a deeper and more precise understanding of how brain activity is re…Read more
  •  81
    Rehabilitating Care
    with Hilde Lindemann Nelson
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 6 (1): 19-35. 1996.
    : The feminist ethic of care has often been criticized for its inability to address four problems--the problem of exploitation as it threatens care givers, the problem of sustaining care-giver integrity, the dangers of conceiving the mother-child dyad normatively as a paradigm for human relationships, and the problem of securing social justice on a broad scale among relative strangers. We argue that there are resources within the ethic of care for addressing each of these problems, and we sketch…Read more
  •  78
    The 'voice of care': Implications for bioethical education
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 (1): 5-28. 1991.
    This paper examines the ‘justice’ and ‘care’ orientations in ethical theory as characterized in Carol Gilligan's research on moral development and the philosophical work it has inspired. Focus is placed on challenges to the justice orientation – in particular, to the construal of impartiality as the mark of the moral point of view, to the conception of moral judgment as essentially principle-driven and dispassionate, and to models of moral responsibility emphasizing norms of formal equality and …Read more
  •  36
    This essay critically assesses two strategies of accommodation used by defenders of impartialism in ethics to argue that the care orientation represents no genuine challenge to impartialist theoretical paradigms. One strategy focuses on impartiality as a constraint on moral deliberation, the other as a constraint on moral justification. While highlighting respects in which the commitment to impartiality is more consonant with the care orientation than many advocates of care have acknowledged, th…Read more
  •  22
    The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
    with John D. Arras, Thomas J. Bole, Joseph Boyle, Peter Caws, Robert J. Connelly, John Coverdale, Shi Da Pu, Alan Donagan, and Sara T. Fry
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 695-698. 1991.
  •  22
    Bottom Up Ethics - Neuroenhancement in Education and Employment
    with Debra J. H. Mathews and Hilary Bok
    Neuroethics 11 (3): 309-322. 2018.
    Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette expe…Read more
  •  18
    Moral Distress and Moral Disempowerment
    Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 3 (2): 147-151. 2013.
    Moral distress can consist in anxiety or concern about one’s capacity to meet challenges to one’s integrity; it can also consist in the sense that one has failed to meet these challenges, betraying fundamental moral values or commitments. When the sense of moral failure is compounded by feelings of frustration or impotence, of being constrained or impeded in one’s ability to act as one believes one ought, one experiences moral disempowerment. Drawing on narratives of moral distress emerging from…Read more
  •  12
    Justice within Intimate Spheres
    Journal of Clinical Ethics 4 (1): 68-71. 1993.
  •  4
    Trust as Robustly Moral
    Philosophic Exchange 40 (1). 2010.
    Trust is more than mere reliance on another person. To trust someone is to rely on her goodwill for the care of something valuable. It is to have a confident expectation that the other person will take care of the valuable thing because she recognizes its value to you. It is to expect her to take care of it because she recognizes that she should take care of it. Therefore trust is a robustly moral attitude.
  •  3
    Harnessing the Promise of Moral Distress: A Call for Re-Orientation
    with Cynda Hylton Rushton
    Journal of Clinical Ethics 28 (1): 15-29. 2017.
    Despite over three decades of research into the sources and costs of what has become an “epidemic” of moral distress among healthcare professionals, spanning many clinical disciplines and roles, there has been little significant progress in effectively addressing moral distress. We believe the persistent sense of frustration, helplessness, and despair still dominating the clinical moral distress narrative signals a need for re-orientation in the way moral distress is understood and worked with. …Read more
  •  1
    Towards a New Narrative of Moral Distress: Realizing the Potential of Resilience
    with Cynda Hylton Rushton
    Journal of Clinical Ethics 27 (3): 214-218. 2016.
    Terri Traudt, Joan Liaschenko, and Cynthia Peden-McAlpine’s study contributes to a much-needed reorientation in thinking about and working with the challenges of moral distress. In providing a vital example of nurses able to navigate morally distressing situations in positive and constructive ways, and offering an analysis of the component elements of these nurses’ success, the study helps identify promising directions we might take in addressing the epidemic of moral distress. It also invites i…Read more
  • Moral distress : context, sources, and consequences
    with Cynda Hylton Rushton
    In Cynda H. Rushton (ed.), Moral resilience: transforming moral suffering in health care, Oxford University Press. 2018.
  • Liberalism's False Promise
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1991.
    Liberal thought has been expressed largely in terms of an ethic of justice, emphasizing the sanctity of individual rights and taking justice to be "the first virtue of social institutions" , the one whose demands must be met before other social virtues can make a claim. I examine the ethic of justice and its limitations, revealing the correlative limitations of liberalism. ;Central to the ethic of justice is a commitment to justificational neutrality. I first reconstruct various forms this commi…Read more
  • Contrary to the popular belief that feminism has gained a foothold in the many disciplines of the academy, the essays collected in Theorizing Backlash argue that feminism is still actively resisted in mainstream academia. Contributors to this volume consider the professional, philosophical, and personal backlashes against feminist thought, and reflect upon their ramifications. The conclusion is that the disdain and irrational resentment of feminism, even in higher education, amounts to a backlas…Read more