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13Some Memories You May Have ForgottenIn Kimberly S. Engels (ed.), The Good Place and Philosophy, Wiley. 2020-08-27.Even without Alzheimer's or dementia, most of us are prone to “ordinary forgetting”. The Good Place and careful philosophical reflection can help us think through memory loss, relationships, and making a place for each other as we live through the human condition. Throughout The Good Place, Chidi and Eleanor help each other develop and sustain their moral selves as well as their relationship. Stories are fundamental to our sense of self, right and wrong, and the kind of people we are. To underst…Read more
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37Conscience in Transgender Health Care: Yet Another Area Where We Should Be Prioritizing Patient InterestsInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (2): 144-152. 2022.McLeod focuses her book on what she calls "typical refusals in reproductive healthcare." She defines this at several points, describing these as primarily refusals that "target services that are standard and that the objectors believe will result in the death of a human being that has the moral or religious status of a person ". Abortion is one procedure that is commonly targeted by "typical refusals." McLeod notes that clinicians engaging in such refusals may refuse not only the procedure itsel…Read more
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30Vulnerability in practice: Peeling back the layers, avoiding triggers, and preventing cascading effectsBioethics 36 (5): 587-596. 2022.The concept of vulnerability is widely used in bioethics, particularly in research ethics and public health ethics. The traditional approach construes vulnerability as inherent in individuals or the groups to which they belong and views vulnerability as requiring special protections. Florencia Luna and other bioethicists continue to challenge traditional ways of conceptualizing and applying the term. Luna began proposing a layered approach to this concept and recently extended this proposal to o…Read more
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19Thin or Thick, Real or Ideal: How Thinking Through Fatness Can Help Us See the Dangers of Idealized Conceptions of Patients, Providers, Health, and DiseaseIn Elizabeth Victor & Laura K. Guidry-Grimes (eds.), Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics: Living and Dying in a Nonideal World, Springer. pp. 255-283. 2021.The fundamental standard of health care is health. Theories of health affect how we conceive of good health, ill health, Good patients, and Good providers. They also profoundly affect how we go about attempting to solve health problems once we’ve identified them. In this chapter, I argue that the way health care providers, bioethicists, and public health experts approach health relies on ideal theory despite the heavy knowledge that this world will never be ideal. We need a conception of health …Read more
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245Hungry Because of Change: Food, Vulnerability, and ClimateIn Mary C. Rawlinson & Caleb Ward (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, Routledge. pp. 201-210. 2017.In this book chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, I examine the moral responsibility that agents have for hunger resulting from climate change. I introduce the problem of global changes in food production and distribution due to climate change, explore how philosophical conceptions of vulnerability can help us to make sense of what happens to people who are or will be hungry because of climate change, and establish some obligations regarding vulnerability to hunger.
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190No One Who Loves AnyoneJournal of Medical Humanities 40 (3): 451-453. 2019.In this bioethical poem, the narrator reflects on the experience of their father's degenerative illness, and decisions that must be made about whether to continue life support technologies such as ventilation and nutrition/hydration. What is it that is owed to family and patient at the end of life? What must no one who loves anyone ever do to the one they love?
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21Rightly or for Ill: The Ethics of Individual MemoryKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (4): 377-410. 2018.In this investigation, I focus on individual memory behaviors for which we commonly blame and praise each other. Alas, we too often do so unreflectively. Blame and praise should not be undertaken lightly or without a good grasp on both what we are holding people responsible for, and the conditions under which they can be held responsible. I lay out the constructivist view of memory with consideration for both remembering and forgetting, and special attention to how we remember events as well as …Read more
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295All the Difference in the World: Gender and the 2016 ElectionKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (S2): 107-128. 2017.In this paper, I analyze multiple aspects of how gender norms pervaded the 2016 election, from the way Clinton and Trump announced their presidency to the way masculinity and femininity were policed throughout the election. Examples include Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Gary Johnson. I also consider how some women who support Trump reacted to allegations about sexual harassment. The difference between running for President as a man and running for President as a woman makes al…Read more
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36Just Caring for Caregivers: What Society and the State Owe to Those Who Render CareFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 1 (2): 1-24. 2015.Traditional considerations of justice for those who require caregiving have centered on what is due to the dependent person. However, considerations of justice also bear strongly on what is due to the caregiver. I focus on unpaid dependency work, too long treated as a private matter rather than a public concern. More is owed to those who render care: the division of labor is unjust, the nature of dependency work creates vulnerabilities for caregivers, and unpaid caregivers are disadvantaged in t…Read more
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929Asking Too Much? Civility vs. PluralismPhilosophical Topics 41 (2): 59-78. 2013.In a morally diverse society, moral agents inevitably run up against intractable disagreements. Civility functions as a valuable constraint on the sort of behaviors which moral agents might deploy in defense of their deeply held moral convictions and generally requires tolerance of other views and political liberalism, as does pluralism. However, most visions of civility are exceptionless: they require civil behavior regardless of how strong the disagreement is between two members of the same …Read more
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1081“The Event That Was Nothing”: Miscarriage as a Liminal EventJournal of Social Philosophy 46 (1): 9-26. 2015.I argue that miscarriage, referred to by poet Susan Stewart as “the event that was nothing,” is a liminal event along four distinct and inter-related dimensions: parenthood, procreation, death, and induced abortion. It is because of this liminality that miscarriage has been both poorly addressed in our society, and enrolled in larger debates over women's reproduction and responsibility for reproduction, both conceptually and legally. If miscarriage’s liminality were better understood, if miscarr…Read more
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22Consent by Survey: Losing Autonomy One Percentage Point at a TimeAmerican Journal of Bioethics 7 (12): 53-54. 2007.No abstract
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9386Gender Norms and Food BehaviorsIn Paul B. Thompson & David M. Kaplan (eds.), Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, Springer Verlag. 2012.Food behaviors, both private and public, are deeply affected by gender norms concerning both masculinity and femininity. In some ways, food-centered activities constitute gender relations and identities across cultures. This entry provides a non-exhaustive overview of how gender norms bear on food behaviors broadly construed, focusing on three categories: food production, food preparation, and food consumption.
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845Patient complains of …: How medicalization mediates power and justiceInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 3 (1): 72-98. 2010.The process of medicalization has been analyzed in the medical humanities with disapprobation, with much emphasis placed on its ability to reinforce existing social power structures to ill effect. While true, this is an incomplete picture of medicalization. I argue that medicalization can both reinforce and disrupt existing social hierarchies within the clinic and outside of it, to ill or good effect. We must attend to how this takes place locally and globally lest we misunderstand how medicaliz…Read more
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368An unexpected opening to teach the impact of interactions between healthcare personnelAmerican Journal of Bioethics 6 (4). 2006.Goold and Stern (2006) offer a much needed dose of insight into the weakness of medical education from the perspective of resident and nonresident physicians. One of their findings pertains not to...
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51BOOK REVIEW:The Philosophical Child, by Jana Mohr Lone (review)Teaching Philosophy 36 (4): 435-439. 2013.
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360Erasure of the past: How failure to remember can be a morally blameworthy actAmerican Journal of Bioethics 6 (5). 2006.This Article does not have an abstract
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81With All Due Caution: Global Anti-Obesity Campaigns and the Individualization of ResponsibilityInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8 (2): 226-249. 2015.Obesity is one of several targets of public health efforts related to availability of and access to healthy foods. The tension between individual food decisions and social contexts of food production, preparation, and consumption makes targeting individuals deeply problematic and yet tempting. Such individualization of responsibility for obesity and nutrition is unethical and impractical. This article warns public health campaigns against giving into the temptation to individualize responsibilit…Read more
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255Paying for the Possibility of Disease: How Medicalization of Risk Conditions Affects Health Policy and Why We Must Bear It In MindMedical Humanities Report. 2008.In this paper, I sound a warning note about the medicalization of risk conditions such as high cholesterol, especially in a health care climate of resource scarcity.
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8Brain in the VatQuestions: Philosophy for Young People 8 4-4. 2008.A summary and brief discussion of the pedagogical usefulness of Hilary Putnam’s classic thought experiment from Reason, Truth, and History.
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447With all Due Caution: Global Anti-Obesity Campaigns and the Individualization of ResponsibilityInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8 (2): 226-249. 2015.Obesity is one of several targets of public health efforts related to availability of and access to healthy foods. The tension between individual food decisions and social contexts of food production, preparation, and consumption makes targeting individuals deeply problematic and yet tempting. Such individualization of responsibility for obesity and nutrition is unethical and impractical. This article warns public health campaigns against giving into the temptation to individualize responsibilit…Read more
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856Feminism, Food, and the Politics of Home CookingAmerican Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8 (1): 19-20. 2008.In this paper, I argue the cooking is a fraught issue for women, and especially women who self-identify as feminist, because it is so deeply gendered.
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385Remembering the “pan” in “pandemic”: Considering the impact of global resource disparity on a duty to treatAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (8). 2008.
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415BOOK REVIEW: Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment by Kelly Oliver (review)Environmental Values 23 (2): 236-238. 2014.
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240In Conversation: Ruth Macklin, Alison Reiheld, Robyn Bluhm, Sidney Callahan, and Frances Kissling Discuss the Marlise Munoz Case, Advance Directives, and Pregnant WomenInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8 (1): 156-167. 2015.Feminist bioethicists of a variety of persuasions discuss the 2013 case of Marlise Munoz, a pregnant woman whose medical care was in dispute after she became brain dead.
Edwardsville, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |