•  797
    It is natural to think that there is a tight connection between whether someone is responsible for some outcome and whether it is appropriate to hold her accountable for that outcome. And this natural thought naturally extends to health: if someone is responsible for her health, then, all else being equal, she is accountable for it. Given this, some have thought that responsibility for health has an important role to play in distributing the benefits and burdens of healthcare. But there is a rea…Read more
  •  527
    Why Decision-making Capacity Matters
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5): 447-473. 2021.
    Decision-making Capacity matters to whether a patient’s decision should determine her treatment. But why it matters in this way isn’t clear. The standard story is that dmc matters because autonomy matters. And this is thought to justify dmc as a gatekeeper for autonomy – whereby autonomy concerns arise if but only if a patient has dmc. But appeals to autonomy invoke two distinct concerns: concern for authenticity – concern that a choice is consistent with an individual’s commitments; and concern…Read more
  •  394
    Egalitarian Machine Learning
    Res Publica 29 (2). 2023.
    Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take ‘fairness’ in this context to be a placeholder for a var…Read more
  •  263
    What ability can do
    Philosophical Studies 175 (3): 703-723. 2018.
    One natural way to argue for the existence of some subjective constraint on agents’ obligations is to maintain that without that particular constraint, agents will sometimes be obligated to do that which they lack the ability to do. In this paper, I maintain that while such a strategy appears promising, it is fraught with pitfalls. Specifically, I argue that because the truth of an ability ascription depends on an (almost always implicit) characterization of the relevant possibility space, diffe…Read more
  •  259
    Ditching Decision-Making Capacity
    Journal of Medical Ethics. forthcoming.
    Decision-making capacity (DMC) plays an important role in clinical practice—determining, on the basis of a patient’s decisional abilities, whether they are entitled to make their own medical decisions or whether a surrogate must be secured to participate in decisions on their behalf. As a result, it’s critical that we get things right—that our conceptual framework be well-suited to the task of helping practitioners systematically sort through the relevant ethical considerations in a way that rel…Read more
  •  176
    Wrongfulness rewarded?: A normative paradox
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 6897-6916. 2021.
    In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and altogether, the reasons deter…Read more
  •  113
    There are cases of ineffable learning — i. e., cases where an agent learns something, but becomes certain of nothing that she can express — where it is rational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. But there are likewise cases of ineffable learning where updating by Jeffrey conditionalization is irrational. In this paper, we first characterize a novel class of cases where it is irrational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. Then we use the d-separation criterion to develop a causal unde…Read more
  •  39
    Authority, Autonomy, and Capacity
    American Journal of Bioethics 22 (11): 97-99. 2022.
    Navin, Brummett, and Wasserman (2022) argue—successfully, we think—that the standard “comparative” account of decision-making capacity (DMC) fails to capture an important range of cases in which a...
  •  24
    Sovereignty, authenticity and the patient preference predictor
    Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (5): 311-312. 2022.
    The question of how to treat an incapacitated patient is vexed, both normatively and practically—normatively, because it is not obvious what the relevant objectives are; practically, because even once the relevant objectives are set, it is often difficult to determine which treatment option is best given those objectives. But despite these complications, here is one consideration that is clearly relevant: what a patient prefers. And so any device that could reliably identify a patient’s preferen…Read more
  •  14
    On the Relationship between Competence and Welfare
    American Journal of Bioethics 22 (10): 73-75. 2022.
    Pickering, Newton-Howes, and Young argue for externalism about competence—the view that “welfare judgments are part of judgments about competence” and posit an “explanatory connection” betwe...
  •  11
    Autonomy concerns with using contracts to enhance patient adherence
    with Camila Losada Strassle and Benjamin E. Berkman
    Bioethics 36 (6): 666-672. 2022.
    The failure of many patients with chronic conditions to correctly follow medical advice that they hope or intend to follow is a major concern, especially as effective long‐term therapies for chronic conditions materialize. Some US healthcare providers have responded with strategies that involve implementing contracts with their patients, including provisions that may deny future treatments after continued nonadherence. This is among the first articles to explicitly discuss the ethics of patient …Read more