-
Tenderizing Effects and Acting despite OurselvesIn Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter argues that some disorientations prompt morally beneficial shifts in habits of relating to other people and to unpredictable moral contexts. It investigates disorientations of illness, trauma, queerness, and migration, drawing on first-person, philosophical, and empirical accounts of cancer, chronic illness, fatal disease, sexual violence, coming out, queer activism, migrant life, and “world-travelling”. It shows how, in some cases, these disorientations generate capacities for livi…Read more
-
What Is Disorientation in Thinking?In Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter argues that some disorientations prompt individuals to gain new awareness in politically and morally important ways, even when they do not prompt capacities for decisive moral judgment or confidence. It investigates disorientations of experiencing racism, white privilege, consciousness-raising, and critical education, drawing on first-person, philosophical, and empirical accounts of double consciousness, white anti-racism, moral shock, double ontological shock, gaslighting, outlaw e…Read more
-
Injustice and IrresolutenessIn Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.Many contexts of injustice demand resolute action—action that is purposeful, decisive, confident, and unwavering—but this chapter argues that in some contexts of injustice, irresolute actions can be called for. The chapter begins by identifying what characterizes irresolute action in such contexts. It then introduces three kinds of irresolute action against injustice and defends their effectiveness in some contexts of injustice and activism, taking as examples contexts of heterosexism, mass inca…Read more
-
Moral Motivation beyond Moral ResolveIn Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter introduces the concept of moral resolve: when a person acts on the basis of a moral judgment about what to do and how to do it, and with feelings of confidence about the action, herself as agent, or both, she acts with moral resolve. The assumption that moral resolve is the best or only evidence of successful moral motivation has been dominant in moral psychology and in philosophical and empirical ethics, including in accounts of moral development, dual-systems theories of moral jud…Read more
-
Being DisorientedIn Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter defines disorientations as temporally extended, major life experiences that make it difficult for individuals to know how to go on, often involving feeling out of place, unfamiliar, or not at home. It canvasses how disorientations have been of interest in sub-disciplines of philosophy as well as present in philosophers’ own first-person accounts, and relevant for researchers in clinical psychology. The chapter then defends disorientations as a family resemblance concept, highlightin…Read more
-
Disorientation and HabitabilityIn Disorientation and Moral Life, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This chapter argues that the extent to which disorientations can benefit agency depends in part on the ways disoriented people are responded to in communities. Drawing on feminist philosophy of emotional expression, it defends the view that how individuals experience their own disorientations can depend on what experiences they are enabled to express to others. The possibility that disorientations will benefit individuals depends in part on each individual’s ability to have and express such expe…Read more
-
41Disorientation and the medicalization of struggleInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 7 (1): 99. 2014.As a text in use by mental health practitioners, policy makers, and ordinary individuals, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) categorizes a variety of mental, psychological, and emotional experiences on a wide spectrum of disorders. Many common experiences are described there as symptoms, chiefly for the purposes of identifying, diagnosing, and treating disorders. “Disorientations” are not (yet) categorized as a stand-alone disorder in the DSM, but involve a cluster…Read more
-
13Fearing Together: Ethics for InsecurityOUP Usa. 2023.Fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. By understanding fear as a relational practice, we see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, wha…Read more
-
16Ethics of age de-escalation in pediatric vaccine trialsVaccine. forthcoming.In the development of new vaccines, many trials use age de-escalation: after establishing safety and efficacy in adult populations, progressively younger cohorts are enrolled and studied. Age de-escalation promotes many values. The responsibility to protect children from potential risks of experimental vaccines is significant, not only given increased risks of adverse effects but also because parents and medical professionals have a moral responsibility to protect children from harms associated …Read more
-
Trauma-informed psychiatric researchIn Şerife Tekin & Robyn Bluhm (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, Bloomsbury. 2019.
-
147The relational calibration of fearSynthese 200 (3): 1-28. 2022.In this article, I consider how fear in contexts of crisis shapes and is shaped by agents’ relationships. I survey a number of approaches to understanding fearing at the intersection of empirical psychology and philosophy, highlighting the extent to which interpersonal relationships are positioned as involved in processes of fearing, and establish what I take to insufficient attention paid by these approaches to the ways interpersonal relations shape the emotions we come to have. Contexts of acu…Read more
-
42Feminist relational theoryJournal of Global Ethics 18 (1): 1-14. 2022.Accounts of human beings as essentially social have had a long history in philosophy as reflected in the Ancient Greeks; in African and Asian philosophy; in Modern European thinkers such as Mary Wo...
-
383Waging Love from Detroit to FlintIn Graham Cassano & Terressa Benz (eds.), Geographies of Indifference: At the Intersections of Environmental Racism and Neoliberal Austerity Governance. pp. 241-280. forthcoming.Over the past five years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting emergency management. In this essay, we explore how community groups in Detroit and Flint have advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, offering an account of activism that has directly confronted neoliberalism across the state. We analyze how solidarity has been forged through community organizing, interventions into mainstream media portrayals of the water…Read more
-
581Public Health and PrecarityInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 13 (2): 108-130. 2020.One branch of bioethics assumes that mainly agents of the state are responsible for public health. Following Susan Sherwin’s relational ethics, we suggest moving away from a “state-centered” approach toward a more thoroughly relational approach. Indeed, certain agents must be reconstituted in and through shifting relations with others, complicating discussions of responsibility for public health. Drawing on two case studies—the health politics and activism of the Black Panther Party and the work…Read more
-
26Inducing FearEthical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3-4): 501-513. 2020.This paper offers an ethical consideration of how fear can be a tool of agents, used to deliberately shift people away from existing beliefs, commitments, or habits, or towards new ones. It contends that properly understanding the ethical dimensions of such uses of fear depends in part on a clear understanding of the dynamics of disorientation that can be involved in such uses. Section two begins with a clarification of the connections between fear, orientation, and disorientation. It suggests t…Read more
-
7Prisons and Palliative PoliticsIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 158-173. 2015.
-
38Resilience and Group-Based HarmInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 12 (1): 24-43. 2019.This paper considers an area of research in clinical psychology that focuses on the resilience of members of marginalized groups who have experienced traumas directly related to their social identities. The paper describes these as social group-based traumas and outlines three effects of social group-based traumas that can make the experiences of them, as well as experiences of recovery following them, distinct from those involved in other kinds of traumas. In cases where resilience frameworks a…Read more
-
42Response to commentaries on Disorientation and Moral LifeFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (2). 2018.In Disorientation and Moral Life, I consider disorientations as experiences of not knowing how to go on following serious life events and experiences like those involved in traumas, grief, illness, education, consciousness raising, and migration. I challenge a history of moral philosophy that I claim has been preoccupied by a focus on the best moral agents as those who are most decisive, wholehearted, and clear about how they ought to act. In this piece, I respond to three commentaries on Disori…Read more
-
48When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible by Lisa TessmanKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (1): 15-20. 2018.Lisa Tessman's When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible offers an engaging and accessible exploration of the complex philosophical issues surrounding moral dilemmas and moral failure. Are there genuine moral conflicts? Is it true that in some situations a moral agent cannot help but fail? Tessman offers her own answer–yes, in some situations, moral failure is unavoidable–while guiding readers through the debates surrounding these questions, clarifying the various positions sympathetically and ca…Read more
-
41Safety and SacrificeEthics and Social Welfare 11 (2): 163-176. 2017.This paper critically investigates a possible tension between beliefs about the usefulness of police and prisons and awareness of the harms some communities face at the hands of criminal justice systems. If a person feels well-served by police and prison systems but becomes aware of the ways they are endangering some communities, they may feel they have a responsibility to work to transform or dismantle criminal justice systems, potentially sacrificing the safety they have gained from them. This…Read more
-
19Karen Houle (2014) Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical ThoughtDeleuze and Guatarri Studies 11 (1): 139-147. 2017.
-
54Disorientation and Moral LifeOxford University Press USA. 2016.This book is a philosophical exploration of disorientation and its significance for action. Disorientations are human experiences of losing one's bearings, such that life is disrupted and it is not clear how to go on. In the face of life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented. These and other disorientations are not rare. Although disorientations can be common and powerful parts of indi…Read more
-
1073Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity ForeverCritical Sociology 43. 2017.For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projec…Read more
-
42Prisons and Palliative PoliticsIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 158-173. 2015.This chapter examines the death of prisoners from illness in prison. It brings together first-person accounts and other research on the experiences of aging, being ill, and dying in prison, with and without formal hospice care, and the experiences of those working in hospice, caring for other prisoners at end of life. It considers these accounts, emphasizing Butler's analysis of livability and asking the question: what makes life, death, and grief in prison livable? It argues that adequately con…Read more
-
32Sexual AuthenticityDialogue 50 (1): 77-93. 2011.RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, je m’intéresse à l’éthique de l’agentivité sexuelle courante. Il s’agit, plus particulièrement, des questions morales concernant quand, comment et pourquoi nous nous identifions à un type donné d’agent sexuel. Comme l’auto-identification met en jeux une combinaison complexe de processus individuels et sociaux, un cadre conceptuel qui rend justice à ces processus permettrait une analyse de l’éthique de l’auto-identification sexuelle. Je présente le concept de l’authentic…Read more
-
1Race and BioethicsIn John Arras, Rebecca Kukla & Elizabeth Fenton (eds.), Routledge Companion to Bioethics, Routledge. pp. 543-556. 2015.
-
87Discomfort, Judgment, and Health Care for QueersJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (2): 149-160. 2012.This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort lev…Read more
-
Restorative Justice in Transitions: The Problem of ‘The Community’ and Collective ResponsibilityIn Kerry Clamp (ed.), Restorative Justice in Transitional Settings, Routledge. pp. 133-151. 2016.
-
38The Disorientations of Acting against InjusticeJournal of Social Philosophy 45 (2): 162-181. 2014.